Fidaner on Zizek

Slavoj Žižek,"The Master's 'arbitrary' declarations"

We must abandon the following view:

The Master always imposes old wisdom and established views with his authority, and so change always comes from those 'below', from those who doubt the master's wisdom.

We theorists need a master because we are hysterical.

Theoretical development is undemocratic: new discoveries do not emerge by improving reasoning; new discoveries arise by desperately trying to discover what it means for the master to make 'arbitrary' statements and their reversal of the common theoretical doctrine.

Such 'arbitrary' statements are not, of course, free from risk; it may not hit, it may miss, it may remain in the middle of irrelevant 'random' claims instead of activating new theoretical discoveries.

Let us not forget that what the Master's claim will lead to depends on us hysterical disciples. The Master is not a 'genius' by himself, but becomes a 'genius' by our diligence. [d.n. Sheikh does not fly, he flies disciples]

Therefore, after the master has finished his work, he must be abandoned, left alone; the impotence of an illusory transfer point will finally be revealed.

But is the work of the master (the so-called one) finished altogether? Yoo...

But if he wants to survive, the only place he can go is to become hysterical once again, to return to analyzation; This is what Lacan was doing all the time in his seminars...

Even if Lacan plays the role of analyst in his seminars, it cannot be said that those who listen to him are a collective analyst; Instead of the singular figure of the analyst, here is the 'enlightened' collective who supposedly share the same desire for psychoanalysis.

From More Than Pleasure

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

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 Işık Barış Fidaner, "Nevermind: Let it go and Let it be"

There are two ways to “nevermind!”:

1) Let it go

2) Let it be

In terms of the metaphor of digestion: “Let it go” is to digest something completely and to discharge it from the system; if you bear some resistance to a certain subject, if you are getting bellyaches when you think about it, if it contains elements you cannot digest, then you fail to discharge it from your system and it gets precipitated somewhere (un/conscious) within your constitution. This is when you cannot “let it go” and instead you cave in to “let it be”ism.

The most visible result of “let it be”ism is how issues you experience in personal relations are first thrown in to be accumulated/contained and then explode in the form of fights. But if you can “let it go”, you don’t throw in and accumulate/contain, instead you throw out and ex-cumulate/ex-contain [1].

Unlike accumulation, ex-cumulation does not “take it personally” but this does not mean that ex-cumulation is indifferent or that it doesn’t care. On the contrary!

Ex-cumulators are even more susceptible than accumulators, for they “take it impersonally”, they take what is said irregardless of their Ego construction, they take it as a generic subject of the symbolic order and digest it completely; whatever they are susceptible to in those words, they take all of them at once, they first infer the necessary consequences, and then discharge those words from their constitution by means of the mechanism of “letting it go”.

But if a word that you “take in” gets stuck at some imaginary obstacle such as an Ego construction, it cannot surpass the level of “taking it personally” and results in “let it be”ism.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “İçe Atılan Birikir, Dışa Atılan Öbürikir”, “Gerçek ve Salbırak”, “Hatice mi Netice mi? Sal gitsin!”, “Hazım İlkesinin Ötesi: Hazım Hazindir” 

Zizek on Hegel's Monarchy

Slavoj Zizek, "In Defense of Hegel's Notion of Monarchy"

As is well known, Hegel advocated constitutional monarchy as the only appropriate form of political order that fits modern society. His numerous critics see this weird advocacy either as a clear sign of Hegel’s immanent philosophical limitation or as a sign of his political conformism, with some more benevolently disposed critics interpreting it as a cunning trick to delude state censorship. The first among the sarcastic critics of Hegel’s notion of monarch is none other than Marx. Klaus Vieweg’s critique of Hegel’s deduction of monarchy is, however, by far the most thoughtful in these series: what he tries to prove is that Hegel’s deduction is wrong in Hegel’s own terms.

Hegel justifies the necessary role of the monarch with reference to the syllogism, to the syllogistic structure of state power, but Vieweg claims that the very form of syllogism to which he refers (disjunctive syllogism) would impose a democratic solution with people as the ultimate source of legitimate power.[1] Can Hegel be fully defended today? Let’s begin with a simple and clear description of Hegel’s point:

“Hegel is not a democrat. He is a monarchist. But he wants monarchy because he does not want strong government. He wants to deemphasize power. He develops an idealist conception of sovereignty that allows for a monarch less powerful than a president,” that is to say, less powerful than a democratically elected president. Here is Mark Tunick’s example of how this works:

“Hegel supposes that the monarch’s counsel, whose members are chosen by objective criteria, can resolve an issue at least to the point where only an arbitrary will can choose among the options. The counsel rules out all the bad alternatives (which democracy doesn’t do), until the remaining options are equally meritorious. Even if the monarch decided every political issue, the issues he’d be deciding would be different than the issues as they first appear, and which a democratic vote would have resolved. The monarch makes a ‘groundless’ decision that still has grounds. Consider a concrete example: Suppose prisons are so overcrowded that there is absolutely no room for newly convicted criminals, and we need to decide what to do with them. One alternative is to kill them all. Another is to build a new prison (which is expensive). Another is to reduce the sentences of some already in prison to make room for the new. Another is to let the new criminals go free. Another is to think up some new punishment. Some of these alternatives won’t be acceptable, and the counsel will eliminate them. The remaining alternatives are grounded (i.e. in the principle that we must not kill, or that we must punish wrongdoers), but suppose it’s arbitrary which of them we choose. The monarch decides this.”

It should be clear from this example what Hegel fears, as well as why his fear is even more actual today: the direct rule of experts who justify their decisions with (pseudo-scientific) reasons incomprehensible to the majority of ordinary citizens. Just recall how today economic decisions are legitimized by economic experts as simple neutral scientific insight, and how in this way the political bias of these decisions disappears from view, is dismissed as “ideological”… Hegel is aware that a Master who is elevated above the system of knowledge (in Lacanian terms, of the “discourse of university”) is needed, so he wants to keep the power that decides outside expert knowledge. However, he is at the same time aware that a return to the premodern master who reigns directly is unacceptable in modern times; his solution is, therefore, a monarch whose function is ultimately just to dot the i’s, to sign his name on decisions prepared and proposed by qualified experts.

Vieweg is right in claiming that the key to the proper understanding of Hegel’s notion of monarch is provided by his notion of disjunctive syllogism (as a further development of the syllogism of necessity); but he accuses Hegel on misreading the political implications of this syllogism. Its structure is that of PUI: the universal dimension (people represented in legislative assembly) mediates between the particular dimension (executive power) and the individual (monarch as the decision-maker). In short, in contrast to premodern monarchy where the king directly rules over its subjects, in a modern state the people in their universal dimension regulate and control both extremes of executive and deciding power:

“The application of the disjunctive syllogism to the structure of the state’s internal constitution leads to a most surprising result in contrast to what the Outlines (of the Philosophy of Right) claims: it effects the theoretical legitimization of a republican, democratic constitution and reveals the fundamental importance of the legislative assembly as an expression of a representative-democratic structure.”[2]

But does Hegel really violate the logic of disjunctive syllogism? It is Vieweg himself who ignores what its name indicates: the dimension of disjunction is located by Hegel in the mediating universality itself. Here is a passage from Hegel’s small logic (Encyclopaedia, par 191) which already points towards the role of the monarch:

“the mediating Universal is explicitly put as a totality of its particular members, and as a single particular, or exclusive individuality — which happens in the Disjunctive syllogism. It is one and the same universal which is in these terms of the Disjunctive syllogism; they are only different forms for expressing it.”

Disjunction thus divides universality itself into the totality of its particular members and the exclusive individuality which directly gives body to the universality. As we say in everyday jargon, the monarch does not represent the people; the monarch IS the people. Only through the monarch is the universality of the people actualized.

In his precise essay “The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch,” Jean-Luc Nancy emphasizes this performative dimension of the monarch (to use today’s parlance) which comes close to what Lacan called the pure signifier (the Master-Signifier, a signifier which falls into the signified and is as such a signifier without signified). And this is how one should read the tautology “Socialism is socialism.” Recall the old Polish anti-Communist joke: “Socialism is the synthesis of the highest achievements of all previous historical epochs: from tribal society, it took barbarism, from antiquity, it took slavery, from feudalism, it took relations of domination, from capitalism, it took exploitation, and from socialism, it took the name.” Does the same not hold for the anti-Semitic image of the Jew? From the rich bankers, it took financial speculation, from capitalists, it took exploitation, from lawyers, it took legal trickery, from corrupt journalists, it took media manipulation, from the poor, it took indifference towards washing one’s body, from sexual libertines it took promiscuity, and from the Jews it took the name… And this is also why a king is a king: he just adds his/her name. But, again, why is a monarch needed? Why can representative democracy (or, even better, some form of direct self-organization of the people) not do the job?

To see this, one should take note of the gap that separates two syllogistic triads: that of the entire society (individual family life, market and production in civil society, state) and that of the state as an institution (legislative power, executive power, decider-monarch: UPI). When Vieweg elevates into the central mediating role the political form of universality (“legislative assembly as an expression of a representative-democratic structure”), he ignores another disjunction: however formed (even in the most open democratic elections with the universal right to vote), legislative power is always by definition at a gap from “actual people.”

In the last decades, a whole series of events made this gap palpable. Remember the protests of yellow vests (gilets jaunes) in France that went on for over twenty weekends from late 2018 to early 2019. They began as a grassroots movement that grew out of widespread discontent with a new eco-tax on petrol and diesel, seen as hitting those living and working outside metropolitan areas where there is no public transport. The movement has grown to include a panoply of demands, including frexit (the exit of France from EU), lower taxes, higher pensions, and an improvement in ordinary French people’s spending power. They offer an exemplary case of Leftist populism, of the explosion of people’s wrath in all its inconsistency: lower taxes and more money for education and health care, cheaper petrol and ecological struggle… Although the new petrol tax was obviously an excuse or, rather, the pretext, and not what the protests are “really about,” it is significant that what triggered the protests was a measure intended to act against global warming. No wonder Trump enthusiastically supported yellow vests (even hallucinating shouts of some of the protesters “We want Trump!”), noting that one among the demands was for France to step out of the Paris agreement. The thing to note here is that when representative of yellow vests met with government representatives, the talks were a total failure – they simply didn’t speak the same language.

Or recall the UK elections of 2005: in spite of the growing unpopularity of Tony Blair (he was regularly voted the most unpopular person in the UK), he won the general elections. There was no way for this discontent with Blair to find a politically effective expression. Something is obviously very wrong here – it is not that people “do not know what they want,” but, rather, that cynical resignation prevents them from acting upon it, so that the result is the weird gap between what people think and how they act (vote). Such a frustration can foment dangerous extra-parliamentary explosions, especially in the form of rage in today’s populism.

Podemos undoubtedly stands for the populist protests against the state mechanisms at its best: against the arrogant Politically Correct intellectual elites which despise the “narrowness” of the ordinary people who are considered “stupid” for “voting against their interests,” its organizing principle is to listen to and organize those “from below” against those “from above,” beyond all traditional Left and Right models. The idea is that the starting point of emancipatory politics should be the concrete experience of the suffering and injustices of ordinary people in their local life-world (home, workplace, etc.), not abstract visions of a future Communist or whatever other society. (Although the new digital media seem to open up the space for new communities, the difference between these new communities and the old life-world communities is crucial: these old communities are not chosen, I am born into them, they form the very space of my socialization, while the new (digital) communities include me in a specific domain defined by my interests and thus depending on my choice.)

Far from making the old “spontaneous” communities deficient, the fact that they do not rely on my free choice makes them superior with regard to the new digital communities since they compel me to find my way into a pre-existing not-chosen life-world in which I encounter (and have to learn to deal with) real differences, while the new digital communities depending on my choice sustain the ideological myth of the individual who somehow pre-exists a communal life and is free to choose it. While this approach undoubtedly contains a (very big) grain of truth, its problem is that, to put it bluntly, not only, as Laclau liked to emphasize, society doesn’t exist, but “people” also doesn’t exist… However, problems arose when Podemos decided to change into a political party and entered a government: its politics there were indistinguishable from a moderate social-democratic party.

Can this gap be filled by deliberative democracy, reliant on popular assemblies composed of civil experts and individuals chosen by lot to debate a certain topic? Deliberative democracy can help, but it must be sustained by a clear structure of decision – the key point is that the deliberative assemblies don’t decide. This is why, today even, something like monarchy is needed. As the top-decider, the monarch is not qualified by any characteristics; he stands for the people as such, in its universality, which are excluded not only from state institutions but also encompass all inner divisions and factional struggles. This disjunctive unity is best rendered by the fact that the media report on the personal habits and preferences of the monarch and the monarchic family (music, books, gardening, sports…), a thing that is totally uninteresting in an ordinary person. (Who cares what food my neighbor likes?) The king is a common man elevated into the top-decider; more radically, we can even say that he is a member of the rabble, of those with no determinate place in social hierarchy. But one thing is sure: the way to reinvent something-like-a-king today should definitely include a moment of lottery, it should be left to chance.

That’s why Hegel fanatically opposes all reasoning about the justification of a king’s authority: this authority is not a topic of debate, it is unconditional and, as such, empty. The best argument against the monarch’s actual power is the tautology: “The king is a king.”

Notes:

[1] For a very balanced critique of Vieweg, see Sebastian Stein, “Hegel’s Monarch, the Concept and the Limits of Syllogistic Reasoning” (hegels-monarch-the-concept-and-the-limits-of-syllogistic-reasoning.pdf).

[2] Klaus Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2012, p. 429.

Oedipal Ur-dom

Daniel Horowitz, Totem & Taboo Exhibition

Slavoj Žižek, "The myth of Oedipus and the myth of Erbaba" (translated)

The legend of Oedipus and the legend of Erbaba (Totem and Taboo: Urvater ) are generally thought of as two versions of the same legend, as if the legend of Oedipus is the base that expresses the subject's ontogenesis (individuation), and the legend of Erbaba is like the reflection of that base in the prehistoric past as phylogeny.

But if you look closely, it can be seen that there is a deep asymmetry and even contradiction between the two legends.

According to the premise of the Oedipus myth, the father is the forbidding agent and prevents us from attaining arbitrariness (i.e. incest, sexual intercourse with the mother). It is implied that if we kill the father, this obstacle will be lifted and we will finally enjoy the forbidden object.

The legend of Erbaba is almost the opposite of this: If we kill Erbaba, the obstacle will not be lifted, we will not finally reach arbitrariness. On the contrary, we see that the dead father is stronger than the living father. The murdered Erbaba later dominates us in the person of the Name of the Father (Nam-ı Pir, Nah-ı Pir), and he enacts the symbolic law that no longer allows us to reach the forbidden fruit of arbitrariness.

Why is this duplication necessary?

In the Oedipus myth, the prohibition of arbitrariness still functions as an impediment from the outside, thus leaving open the possibility that we could have full enjoyment if there were no obstacles. However, quality is already impossible in itself. One of the clichés of Lacanian theory is that the speaking being is always without access to arbitrariness. The father figure saves us from this dead end by transforming this immanent impossibility into a symbolic prohibition.

The legend of Erbaba in Totem and Taboo, on the other hand, completes the legend of Oedipus by embodying this impossible circumstance in the figure of the shameful Arbitrary-Father, who plays the role of the prohibiting perpetrator, or rather, it is added to the legend of Oedipus. The illusion here is that at least one subject (Erbaba, the owner of all women) can enjoy complete pleasure; whereas this Arbitrary-Father figure is nothing more than a neurotic phantasy, ignoring the fact that the father was dead from the very beginning: the father has never been alive, at best he may not have yet realized that he is already dead.

Notes:
From Trapezoid Bakmak

English: Işık Barış Fidaner

See “Father's Name, Father's Benevolence: Nam-ı Pir, Nah-ı Pir” , “Lion Hunt and the Killing of Erbaba” , “Er eren er: Erbaba” Jacques Lacan

Aisthetikos"

• According to 2 sources

Aesthetics is derived from the Greek word " aisthetikos" defined as a perception of the senses. In aesthetics, there is a process of individual analysis, perception and imagination. Perception is defined as an individual's neurophysiological process of awareness and interpreting external stimuli.

Baudrillard, "The System of Objects"

"Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a 'philosophy' of self-fulfillment. In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, they actualize themselves in consumption."

 - Jean Baudrillard

Link to Jean Baudrillard's "The System of Objects"

Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Objects" (1968)

GARAP

We consume the product through the product itself, but we consume its meaning through advertising. Picture for a moment our modern cities stripped of all signs, their walls blank as an empty consciousness. And imagine that all of a sudden the single word GARAP appears everywhere, written on every wall. A pure signifier, having no referent, signifying only itself, it is read, discussed, interpreted in a vacuum, signified despite itself - in short, consumed qua sign. What indeed can it signify except for the society itself that is capable of generating such a sign? By virtue of its very lack of signification it mobilizes an entire imaginary collectivity. It comes to stand for a whole society. In a way people end up ‘believing’ in GARAP. They consider it the mark of advertising’s omnipotence, and judge that if only GARAP would assume the specificity of a product, then that product would meet with an immediate and sweeping success. Nothing, however, could be less certain, and the cunning of the advertisers lies precisely in the fact that they never reveal this. Were a specific referent to be made explicit, individual resistance would certainly come back into play. But consent (even ironic consent) thus founded on faith in a pure sign is self-creating. Advertising’s true referent is here apparent in its purest form: like GARAP, advertising is mass society itself, using systematic, arbitrary signs to arouse emotions and mobilize consciousness, and reconstituting its collective nature in this very process.

Advertising is a plebiscite whereby mass consumer society wages a perpetual campaign of self-endorsement.

A NEW HUMANISM?

Serial Conditioning

It should now be easier to grasp the nature of the system of conditioning that is at work behind the themes of competition and ‘personalization’. That same ideology of competition which formerly, under the banner of ‘freedom’, constituted the golden rule of production has now been transposed without restrictions into the realm of consumption. Thanks to thousands of marginal distinctions and the often purely formal diffraction of a single product by means of conditioning, competition has become more aggravated on every plane, opening up the immense range of possibilities of a precarious freedom - indeed, of the ultimate freedom, namely the freedom to choose the objects which will distinguish one from other people. In fact the ideology of competition is arguably bound to fall here into the toils of the same process, and hence to meet the same fate, as it did in the realm of production: although consumption may still take itself for a sort of liberal progression in which personal expression has a part to play, whereas production is inescapably governed by planning, this is merely because the techniques of psychological conditioning are far less advanced than those of economic planning.

We in Europe still want what others do not have: in the West, at any rate (the question having been deferred in the Eastern bloc), we are still at the competitive, the heroic stage in the choice and use of objects. The regular replacement and cyclical synchronization of models have not yet established themselves here as they have in the United States. Should we attribute this to psychological resistance, or perhaps to the strength of tradition? Probably the cause is a simpler one: the majority of Western Europe’s population is still a long way from achieving the sort of economic status that makes it fundamentally possible, with all objects of consumption aligned on the same maximal standard, for a single repertoire of models to hold sway, for diversity to become in effect less important than owning the ‘latest’ model, which is the essential stamp of social worth. In the United States 90 per cent of the population aspire solely to the possession of what others possess, and from one year to the next they massively choose the latest model, which is in every single respect the best. A solid class of ‘normal’ consumers has thus been constituted which, for all practical purposes, coincides with the entire population. Although we have not yet reached that stage in Europe, we are already very well able, on account of the irreversible pressure exerted by the American model, to perceive the ambiguity of advertising: it provokes us into competing, but at the same time the imaginary competition thus set in motion already bespeaks a profound monotony, a demand for uniformity, the sinking of the consuming masses into a regressive contentment. It tells us to ‘Buy this, because it is like nothing else’ (‘the meat of the elite’, ‘the cigarette of the happy few’, etc.) - but it also tells us to ‘Buy this because everyone else uses it!’ Nor is there any real contradiction here. It is quite possible for each person to feel unique even though everyone is alike: all that is needed is a pattern of collective and mythological projection - in other words, a model.

We may well conclude that the destiny of consumer society (thanks not to Machiavellian technocrats but, rather, to the simple structural play of competition) is the functionalization of the consumer himself, the psychological monopolization of all needs - a unanimity in consumption which will at last harmonize with the concentration and unbridled interventionism that govern production.

Freedom by Default

Moreover, the ideology of competition is now giving way everywhere to a ‘philosophy’ of personal accomplishment. Society is better integrated, so instead of vying for possession of things, individuals seek self-fulfilment, independently of one another, through what they consume. The leitmotiv of discriminative competition has been replaced by that of personalization for all. Meanwhile, advertising has transformed itself from a commercial practice into a theory of the praxis of consumption, a theory which now crowns the whole social edifice. Expositions of this theory are to be found in the works of American advertising men (Ernest Dichter, Pierre Martineau, et alii). The thesis is simple: (1) the consumer society (objects, products, advertising) offers the individual the possibility, for the first time in history, of total liberation and self-realization; (2) transcending consumption pure and simple in the direction of individual and collective self- expression, the system of consumption constitutes a true language, a new culture. The ‘nihilism’ of consumption is thus effectively countered by a ‘new humanism’ of consumption.

As to the first point, the question of personal fulfilment, Ernest Dichter, director of the Institute for Motivational Research, does not hesitate to define the problematics of the ‘new man’ as follows:

The problem confronting us now is how to allow the average American to feel moral even when he is flirting, even when he is spending money, even when he is buying a second or third car. One of the most difficult tasks created by our current affluence is sanctioning and justifying people’s enjoyment of it, convincing them that to take pleasure in their lives is moral and not immoral. Permission given the consumer freely to enjoy life, and proof that he has the right to surround himself with products that enrich his existence and give him pleasure - these should be the cardinal themes of all advertising and of all attempts to promote sales.

The manipulating of motivation thus apparently ushers in an era in which advertising will assume moral responsibility for society as a body, replacing puritanical morality with a hedonism founded purely on satisfaction and introducing a new state of nature, so to speak, into the bosom of hypercivilization. There is an ambivalence in Dichter’s last sentence, however: is the goal of advertising to free man from his resistance to happiness, or is it to promote sales? Is society to be reorganized for the sake of satisfaction or for the sake of profits? In his preface to the French edition of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet maintains that ‘motivational research is no threat to individual freedom and in no way prejudices the individual’s right to be rational or irrational’. But this claim is simple-minded, if not disingenuous. Dichter is more frank, and makes it clear that the freedom in question is conceded. He talks of ‘giving consumers permission’ - in other words, people must be allowed to be children without being ashamed of it. ‘Free to be oneself really means free to project one’s desires onto commodities. And Dichter’s ‘free to enjoy life’ means free to be irrational and regressive - and hence adapted to a specific social organization of production. The ‘philosophy’ of selling has little use for such paradoxes, and it appeals to rational goals (enlightening people as to what they want) and to scientific methods as justifications for its attempt to provoke irrational behaviour (i.e. accepting the role of being nothing but a bundle of unmediated drives and being satisfied so long as those drives are satisfied). Even drives can be dangerous, however, and the neo-sorcerers of consumption are very careful indeed not to liberate anybody with a rousing call to happiness. Rather, they offer merely to resolve tensions - that is to say, they offer a freedom merely by default:

… whenever a person in one socioeconomic category aspires to a different category, a ‘tension differential’ is developed within him and this leads to frustration and action. Where a product promises to help a group overcome this tension, achieve its level of aspiration in whatever area it may fall, that product has a chance of success.

The aim is to allow drives hitherto inhibited by psychic agencies (taboos, superego, guilt) to crystallize upon objects, which themselves thus become capable of negating the explosive force of desire and materializing the ritual repressive function of the social order. What is dangerous is freedom of being, for it pits the individual against society. Freedom of ownership, however, is harmless, for it unknowingly serves society’s purposes. Such freedom is highly moral, as Dichter points out; indeed, it is the very acme of morality, because it reconciles the consumer with himself and with the group at one and the same time. It is the perfect form of social being. Traditional morality required merely that the individual conform to the group, whereas the philosophy of advertising requires that he conform to himself, that all his personal conflicts be resolved. This is a morality that invades the individual as never before. Taboos, anxieties and neuroses, which tend to make individuals into outsiders and outlaws, are thus supposed to be removed in favour of a reassuring regression into objects calculated to buttress the images of the Father and the Mother in every possible way. The increasingly ‘free’ irrationality of drives in the depths is to be accompanied by an increasingly strict control as they emerge into the light.

A NEW LANGUAGE?

Let us now consider the second claim mentioned above: does the system of objects-cum-advertising really constitute a language? The whole philosophy of idealized consumption is based on the replacement of live, conflictual human relationships by a ‘personalized’ relationship to objects. ‘Any buying process’, Pierre Martineau tells us, ‘is an interaction between the personality of the individual and the so-called “personality” of the product itself.’ The pretence is that products are now so differentiated and so numerous that they have been transformed into complex beings, and that consequently the relationship involved in buying and consuming is equivalent to any human relationship. But this is the whole point: is there a living syntax here? Do objects inform needs and structure them in a new way? And, reciprocally, do needs inform new social structures through the mediation of objects and their production? If so, then we may speak of language in this connection; if not, then all this is nothing but the self-serving idealizations of managers.

Structure and Demarcation: Brands

Buying today bears no resemblance to a free or living form of exchange. It is a predetermined operation in which two strictly incompatible systems confront one another, one being the mobile, inconsistent individual, with his needs, his conflicts and his negativity; the other being the codified, classified, discontinuous and relatively consistent system of products in all their positivity. There is no interaction between the two, but there is certainly a forced integration of the system of needs into the system of products. Of course, the net result does constitute a system that signifies as well as a system for procuring satisfaction. But for there to be ‘language’ there has to be syntax, and in the case of objects of mass consumption all we have is an inventory.

Let me try to explain in more detail. At the stage of craft production, objects reflected the contingency, the uniqueness, of needs. The two systems were adapted to one another, yet their combination lacked coherence - indeed, the only coherence was the relative one of needs, which were mobile and contingent: objective technological progress did not exist. With the advent of the industrial era, manufactured products acquired a new coherence, one bestowed on them by the organization of technology and economic structures, while the system of needs now became less consistent than the system of objects. The latter, by imposing this new coherence, ‘the machine has replaced an unlimited series of variables’ - i.e. objects ‘made to was able to mould a civilization. At the same time, as Lewis Mumford notes, ‘the machine has replaced an unlimited series of variables’ - i.e. objects ‘made to measure’, adapted to specific needs - ‘with a limited number of constraints’. This development does undoubtedly lay the foundations for a new language: internal structuring, simplification, transitions to the bounded and the discontinuous, the constitution of technemes and their growing convergence. And if craft objects may be said to be on a par with words or speech [parole], it must be acknowledged that industrial technology institutes a linguistic system [langue]. But a linguistic system is not language in the full sense [langage]: it is not the material structure of the motorcar that gives that car its voice, but the form, colour, contours, accessories or ‘social standing’ of the car as an object. And what we have here is a Tower of Babel, for each speaks in its own idiom. Even so, serial production contrives, by means of its calibrated differences and combinatorial variations, to carve out meanings, to generate a repertoire or lexicon of forms and colours via which recurrent modalities of ‘speech’ can be expressed. But does this amount to a language? No, because this vast paradigm lacks any true syntax. It lacks the rigorous syntax of technology and it lacks the loose syntax of needs, and it wafts back and forth between the two, a sort of two-dimensional repertoire which tends to exhaust its possibilities on the day-to-day level in an immense combinatorial grid of types and models where needs, in their incoherence, are effectively assigned places, but no reciprocal structuring occurs as a result; inasmuch as products are better integrated, it is needs that flow towards them and manage - by cutting themselves into pieces, by becoming discontinuous - to insert themselves, with difficulty and in arbitrary fashion, into the grid of objects. The fact is that the system of individual needs swamps the world of objects with its utter contingency, yet this contingency is somehow inventoried, classified and demarcated by objects: it thus becomes possible to control it - and this, from the socio-economic point of view, is the system’s real goal.

If the industrial organization of technology acquires the power to mould our civilization, it does so, then, in a dual and contradictory way: by virtue of its coherence but also by virtue of its incoherence. By virtue, at a ‘high level’, of its structural (technological) coherence, but also, ‘at the base’, by virtue of the astructural (but controlled) incoherence of the mechanics of the commercialization of products and the satisfaction of needs. It is clear, therefore, that whereas language, because it is neither consumed nor owned in any true sense by those who speak it, always retains the possibility of access to the ‘essential’, to a syntax of exchange (structured communication), the system of objects-cum-advertising, for its part, overwhelmed by the inessential, by a destructured universe of needs, can satisfy such needs only in piecemeal fashion and can never found new structures of social exchange.

Here, once again, is Pierre Martineau:

There is no simple relationship between kinds of buyers and kinds of cars, however. Any human is a complex of many motives… [whose] meanings may vary in countless combinations. Nevertheless the different makes and models are seen as helping people give expression to their own personality dimensions.

And Martineau offers several examples of such ‘personalization’:

The conservative in car choice and behavior wishes to convey such ideas as dignity, reserve, maturity, seriousness… Another definite series of car personalities is selected by the people wanting to make known their middle-of-the-road moderation, their being fashionable… Further along the range of personalities are the innovators and ultramoderns…

No doubt Martineau is right: this is indeed how people define themselves by means of their objects. What is also clear, though, is that those objects do not constitute a real language, but merely a range of distinguishing marks more or less arbitrarily keyed to a range of stereotyped personalities. Everything suggests that the differentiating system of consumption is a powerful tool for demarcating (1) categories of needs within the consumer himself which now have but the remotest of relationships with the person as a living whole; and (2) categories - or ‘status groups’ - within society overall which can be identified by means of some particular set of objects. Hierarchies of products and objects thus come to play precisely the same role as that formerly played by a range of distinct values: they become the basis, in short, of the group’s ethos.

Both the aforementioned functions entail the solicitation, impressment and classification of the personal and social world - a compulsion, exerted through objects, towards integration into a hierarchical repertoire with no syntax, that is to say, into a system of categories that is distinctly not a language. It is as though there were, not a social dialectic, but a social process of demarcation by whose means an order is imposed, an order which in turn dictates a sort of objective fate (materialized in objects) for each subgroup: in short, a set of pigeonholes within which relationships can only become more impoverished. Our enthusiastic and devious philosophers of ‘motivation’ would love to convince themselves, as well as everyone else, that the reign of objects is still the shortest road to freedom. As evidence of this they need this spectacular muddle of needs and satisfactions, this profusion of choices - this whole carnival of supply and demand - whose sheer effervescence creates the illusion of a culture. But let there be no mistake: objects work as categories of objects which, in the most tyrannical fashion, define categories of people - they police social meaning, and the significations they engender are rigidly controlled. In their proliferation, at once arbitrary and coherent, objects are the best possible vector of a social order that is equally arbitrary and equally coherent, and, under the banner of affluence, they indeed become a most effective material expression of that order.

The concept of ‘brand’, which is advertising’s prime concept, sums up the prospects for a ‘language’ of consumption rather well. All products (with the exception of perishable foodstuffs) are now offered under brand names. Every product ‘worthy of the name’ has a brand which may sometimes even become a generic term (e.g. ‘frigidaire’). The brand’s primary function is to designate a product; its secondary function is to mobilize emotional connotations:

Actually, in our highly competitive system, few products are able to maintain any technical superiority for long. They must be invested with overtones to individualize them; they must be endowed with richness of associations and imagery; they must have many levels of meaning, if we expect them to be top sellers, if we hope that they will achieve the emotional attachment which shows up as brand loyalty.

The psychological restructuring of the consumer may thus turn on a single word - PHILIPS, OLIDA or GENERAL MOTORS - capable of connoting at once a diversity of objects and a mass of diffuse meanings: a synthetic word covering a synthesis of emotions. Such is the miracle of Martineau’s ‘psychological label’. And this is the only language, ultimately, in which the object speaks to us - the only language that it has invented. Yet the basic lexicon that covers our walls and haunts our consciousness remains strictly asyntactic: different brands succeed one another, are juxtaposed, or replace one another, without articulation or transition; this is an erratic lexical system in which brands devour one another and the lifeblood of each brand is interminable repetition. There can be no more impoverished language than this one, laden with referents yet empty of meaning as it is. It is a language of mere signals, and ‘brand loyalty’ can never, therefore, be more than a conditioned reflex of manipulated emotions.

The philosophers of advertising will doubtless object that the satisfaction of ‘deep motives’ can only be a good thing (even if these motives are then integrated into an impoverished system of labels). ‘Free yourselves from your inner censor!’, they are liable to cry. ‘Outsmart your superego!’ ‘Have the courage of your desires!’ But the question is: are these deep motives really being called up so that they may be articulated as a language? Can a system of reference such as this really invest hitherto hidden areas of the personality with meaning - and, if so, with what meaning? To quote Martineau one last time:

Naturally it is better to use acceptable, stereotyped terms… This is the very essence of metaphor… If I ask for a ‘mild’ cigarette or a ‘beautiful’ car, while I can’t define these attributes literally, I still know that they indicate something desirable… The average motorist isn’t sure at all what ‘octane’ in gasoline actually is… But he does know vaguely that it is something good. So he orders ‘high-octane’ gasoline, because he desires this essence quality behind the meaningless surface jargon.

In other words, no sooner has the discourse of advertising awakened desire than it subjects it to generalization of the vaguest kind. Reduced to their simplest expression, the deep motives are keyed to a ready-instituted code of connotations, and ‘choice’, fundamentally, can only seal the collusion between this moral order and the individual’s deepest wishes. Such is the alchemy of the ‘psychological label’.

In actuality, this stereotyped calling-forth of deep motives is nothing but a form of censorship. The ideology of personal fulfilment and the triumphant illogicality of drives supposedly freed from guilt are in fact merely a tremendous effort to materialize the superego. What is ‘personalized’ in the object is primarily censorship. No matter how much the philosophers of consumption may revel in the notion of deep motives as potentials for immediate happiness which have merely to be freed, the fact remains that the unconscious is conflicted, and inasmuch as advertising mobilizes it, it mobilizes it as conflict. Advertising does not liberate drives; first and foremost it liberates phantasies that serve to inhibit those drives. Hence the ambiguity of the object, in which the individual finds no route to self-transcendence, but merely an ambiguous retreat simultaneously to his desires and to the forces that censor those desires. We thus once more encounter the overall pattern of gratification/frustration described above: with its purely formal reduction of tensions and its ever-vain regressions, what the object invariably ensures is a perpetual renewal of conflicts. Here, perhaps, is a definition of the form of alienation particular to our time: our internal conflicts or ‘deep tendencies’ are mobilized and alienated in the process of consumption, in exactly the same way as labour-power is alienated in the process of production.

Nothing has really changed - it is just that strictures on self-fulfilment are here no longer imposed by means of oppressive laws or norms of obedience; repression is ensured instead through ‘free’ actions (buying, choosing, consuming), through spontaneous cathexes, through a sort of internalization operating within gratification itself.

A Universal Code: Status

The objects-cum-advertising system therefore constitutes less a language, whose living syntax it lacks, than a set of significations. Impoverished yet efficient, it is basically a code. It does not structure the personality, but designates and classifies it. It does not structure social relationships, but breaks them down into a hierarchical repertoire. In its formal expression it constitutes a universal system for the identification of social rank: the code of ‘status’.

In the context of ‘consumer society’, the notion of rank as a yardstick of social being tends to assume the simplified form of ‘status’. Status in this sense is still measured in terms of power, authority and responsibility, yet fundamentally the message now is ‘There is no responsibility without a Lip watch!’ Advertising always refers explicitly to the object as to the essential criterion: ‘You will be judged by such and such’, ‘The elegant woman is recognizable by such and such’, and so on. No doubt objects have always played an identifying role of this kind, but formerly they did so in parallel - and this often in a purely auxiliary way - with other systems: gestural, ritual or ceremonial systems, language, rank at birth, codes of moral values, etc. The peculiarity of our own society is that all such other means of gauging rank are gradually giving way to the code of ‘status’. Naturally this code applies in varying degrees according to socio-economic level, but the social function of advertising is to bring everyone under its sway. It is a moral code, for it is sanctioned by the group, and any infraction of it entails the apportionment of some measure of guilt. It is a totalitarian code, for no one escapes it; escaping it in a private sense cannot prevent us from participating every day in its collective development. Not believing in it still means believing sufficiently in other people’s belief in it to adopt a sceptical stance. Even actions intended as resistance to it must be defined in terms of a society that conforms to it.

Nor is this code without its positive aspects. In the first place, it is no more arbitrary than any other code. After all, even in our own eyes, value resides in the car that we change every year, in the part of town where we live, and in the multitude of objects with which we surround ourselves and which distinguish us from other people. True, that is not the whole story, but have not codes of value always been partial and arbitrary (and moral codes more than any)?

Secondly, the code of ‘status’ does constitute a socialization, and a total secularization, of distinguishing signs, and consequently contributes to the emancipation - at least in the formal sense - of social relations. Not only do objects make material life more tolerable by proliferating as commodities, they likewise make the relative standing of people more tolerable by gaining general acceptance as identifying signs. One thing may be said in favour of the ‘status’ system: it has the virtue of rendering obsolete all the old rituals of caste or class, along - in a general way - with all preceding (and preclusive) criteria of social discrimination.

Thirdly, this code offers a universal system of decipherable signs for the first time in history. Perhaps it is to be regretted that it is usurping the place of all other codes, but it is arguable, conversely, that the gradual exhaustion of other systems (birth, class, function), the widening of competition, a greater social mobility, the accelerating fissiparity of social groups and the growing instability and proliferation of languages all created the necessity for a code which, by virtue of its straightforward universality, could guarantee clear and unencumbered communication. In a world where millions of men and women pass one another every day without being acquainted, the code of ‘status’ fulfils an essential social function by addressing people’s vital need for knowledge of others. The fact is, however, that this universalization and this effectiveness are achieved only at the cost of a radical simplification, an impoverishment and a well-nigh definitive regression of the ‘language’ of value: ‘Individuals define themselves through their objects.’ Coherence is achieved through the institution of a combinatorial system or repertoire - a language that is functional, certainly, but symbolically and structurally immiserated.

What is more, the fact that a system of identification is now in place which is clearly legible to all, that the signs of value are entirely socialized and objectivized, by no means implies any true ‘democratization’. On the contrary, it would appear that the insistence on univocal reference merely exacerbates the desire to discriminate: within the very framework of this homogeneous system, a perpetually renewed obsession with hierarchies and distinctions is to be observed. Even though barriers of morality, social convention and language have been overturned, new barriers and exclusions have arisen in the realm of objects: a new class or caste morality is thus enabled to colonize the most material and hitherto unchallengeable of spheres.

So, while the code of ‘status’ is at present coming to constitute a universal apparatus of signification that is immediately readable, facilitating the free flow of social representations from one end of society to the other, this does not mean that society is becoming more transparent. The code produces an illusion of transparency, an illusion of readable social relations, behind which the real structure of production and real social relationships remain illegible. A society would be transparent only if knowledge of the apparatus of signification was simultaneously knowledge of social structures and social realities. This is not so in the case of the objects-cum-advertising system, which offers nothing but a code of meaning that is always complicitous and always opaque. What is more, though it may provide a formal security thanks to its coherence, this code is also the best means for the global social order to extend its immanent and permanent rule to all individuals.

Do Your Duty, Narcissists!... and Rebel Against Our Society's "Binding" Unwritten Rules

Excerpts from video above:

What we ended last episode on, it seems pretty uncontroversial. To start this episode by saying that what happens when you give people this message, that they're a project to be optimized, that they're a commodity that needs to improve their market value by constantly learning and growing, that they are the sole person that should be determining who they are, and that if anybody ever tries to tell them who or what they should be, to not listen to that person.

When you divvy out that message to people in Mass, Byung-Chul Han would say it should not be surprising to you if what emerges from that is a society where people generally just consider the existence and opinions of other people less. Because they're focused on themselves and are more skeptical towards Community bonds that try to tell them what to do. Because they should decide what to do.

And if these inwardly focused people are more skeptical of things that Bond communities together, then one of the common things in the world this type of person is naturally going to be antagonistic towards are the very rituals and traditions that communities often participate in.

Put another way, to Byung-Chul Han, a trap that's common for a narcissistic person to fall into is that they will reject social norms, mores, customs, and politeness. And they will reject these things simply on the basis of, "Who are any of these people to tell me how I should be acting anyway?"

If you want a good example the kind of thing he's talking about, think of something like "not using swear words in public". All right, on the one hand, not swearing in public at bottom is a completely arbitrary thing to just impose upon people from the outside. "Oh what, what you got your little list of forbidden words I'm not supposed to say? What, do they make the old people around you uncomfortable? Tell Grandma to go eat her lemon drops and do a crossword puzzle over there, and let the adults talk the way we're gonna talk. I'm not just gonna grovel at your feet because you have certain sounds your parents told you were bad, and it makes you feel uncomfortable, that's nonsense!"

But on the other hand, Byung-Chul Han might say, "Arbitrary as it may seem, not using swear words in public is actually a token of respect to a collective social agreement we all have that binds us all together in some way."

I mean what are we really doing when we have an Unwritten agreement that we're not going to do something anything? In part, what we're saying is, "Look, we're all out here okay? We're all still alive! We're all waking up every day taking a shower, going to work, trying to make this whole thing operate."

This whole thing by the way that we all recognize when it comes down to it, is a pretty fragile experiment. We're running on a Razor's Edge that in many ways relies on the cooperation of everyone continuing to play along. Not using swear words in public, in some societies, this is an example of one small thing we all do that's part of the glue that holds that Society together. In other words the function of the ritual in this case, is that it binds and connects people together in some way.

Now from the perspective of the narcissist, they don't see it that way or at least it's hard for them to. From their perspective, this is just something that's being imposed upon them from the outside. This is people telling me what I can, and cannot do. Nobody should be doing that, and because they see everything only in terms of that immediate transactable value to them, it's harder for them to see the value this has to the group more broadly. And obviously this extends far beyond the use of swear words in public.

Take another example of something in the realm of being polite to each other. You're walking through the grocery store a little too fast with your cart. You come to an intersection, someone from another aisle comes to that exact same intersection, you almost hit each other, but you don't. You guys both give the wave, "pardon me, sorry about that," the smile, and then you move on. Why do we do that? Why waste your time doing that? From a narcissistic point of view, "that person doesn't own the grocery aisle. I have every right to be there just as much as them. Why should I pay deference to any other person on this planet. I didn't ask them to be in the store. Who are they to have a problem with me? If they have a problem with me then they never have to see me again!"

This inward Obsession, right? You could certainly see it this way, but rituals, Customs, Norms, to Byung-Chul Han, these are things that have served an absolutely crucial social function all throughout human history. And again, the prevalence of this sort of narcissistic rejection of them, amplified by technology, is leading to their disappearance.

So let's get down to it. What is a ritual to Han? Because the examples I've given so far have just been in the domain of politeness. But as you can imagine, rituals fall under a much broader class of definition. In his book called "The Disappearance of Rituals" Han says he thinks a good way to describe the function of a ritual is to call it a "temporal technology for housing oneself".

Now on the surface, to some, that can sound overly philosophical. Like, "cringe" levels of effort are going on here to try to sound smart. Job interview level "cringe". But it actually makes a lot of sense, if you take a second to break it down. If a technology is something we often make that provides some sort of use for us as people, then a temporal technology, temporal meaning related to time, a temporal technology a ritual is something that does something useful for us when it comes to the progression of time. To get closer to what he means, Han says, "Rituals are in time, as things are in space."

Let's think about what he means by that. Imagine being in physical space, with no physical things around you. What would that be like? Well it'd be like being in parts of outer space. You'd just be floating in whatever Direction you were. There'd be nothing to walk on, there'd be nothing to reach towards, there'd be no structure to any of it at all. Well, so too with rituals when it comes to the passage of time. For Han, a society without rituals, or an individual life without rituals, is one where every single moment blurs into the next. There's nothing to Mark the end of one activity or period in life, and the beginning of another. There's no closure for Han. Think of the common complaint you'll hear in modern society of people that say, "There's no such thing as a rite of passage anymore." They'll say, "There's no ritual, or no specific moment, that graduates someone from being a child into an adult, for example." But when that's a possibility for someone, the result of this is sometimes that it becomes possible to just sort of sit in adolescence for a decade of your life, until you become so embarrassed by your life that you finally move on to the next stage. It's a bad look. But more importantly to Han, it's a tragic look. Because this is just one example of hundreds in the modern world, where people don't ever get closure on one period of their life so that they can be fully immersed and present in the next period of their life. They just get stuck in purgatory in a lot of ways.

Now the reason these transitions between different moments in life and moments in our day are important is because at a deep, deep, level, we are narrative creatures, to Han. We make sense of Our Lives, we get meaning, from the things that are going on in the world around us when they fit into some larger structured story that we have. To Byung-Chul Han, rituals provide that structure. They are the things that give meaning to time, and turn time into anything "other" than just an endless succession of separate moments that are all unrelated to each other. I mean, how does any one moment come together into a meaningful plot point in the story of your life? When Han says that a ritual is a temporal technology for housing oneself, this is what he means by it. Which is also to say in more philosophical terms, that they provide a certain amount of what Han calls "constructive negativity". They slow time down in a way to Han. Things that bind or connect communities together, things like trust, Integrity, commitment, faithfulness, these are not instantaneous things. These are things that take time to develop, which then allows deeper connections within the group as a whole to develop.

To Han, life loses all stability when everything in it, is short-term. Rituals provide that more long-term structure. So again, from a narcissistic perspective, when you're just wrapped up in your own life, it's so easy to be a Critic of a ritual that's not immediately benefiting you in a transactional way. It's so easy to make fun of these morons doing a flash mob, "Really, did that make you feel special? Waving your hands around messing with people's day?" Or, how about the morons doing the 10 millionth gender reveal party, "This year? Oh, I wonder if it's gonna be blue?" On one hand it's so easy to make fun of them, but on the other hand if you're somebody whose life is practically devoid of rituals, go do a flash mob tell me how you feel afterwards. You know, laugh at the sheep that are all going off to University, for example. But on the other hand, go to a university, immerse yourself in that ritual completely, and tell me how you feel afterwards. To Byung-Chul Han, we need daily and lifelong rituals to help bring that narrative structure into our lives in a world that's making it increasingly hard to be able to get those things by default.

Now since we're at this point in the discussion, I want to Pivot to another one of these things Han thinks is disappearing from society, something else that historically has provided narrative structure and bound and unified people in the process. What I'm talking about is, truth. The ability for people to arrive at truth, or knowledge, is starting to disappear as well. He writes about it in his book called "The Information Society".

First of all, it should be said truth and knowledge, these are also not things to beyond that can get instantly injected into your head with a tick tock or a YouTube video. You know in the same way that when it comes to rituals where life would otherwise be a sea of moments that are all unrelated to each other if rituals didn't give them that context as part of The Narrative of your life. When it comes to developing knowledge, or truth, or a cohesive narrative about how reality works, looking down at your phone and being fed an endless stream of these fragmented bits of information, news stories, social media posts, videos, none of this stuff is being presented to you in a way that even attempts to link it to any context that makes it enduring. That's a problem, to Byung-Chul Han.

You know, in former societies, you'd get a piece of information about reality, and then you'd have a while to sit with it. You would contemplate it. You'd consider what it means within a larger narrative framework. You'd weigh those ideas up against the narrative framework of other people, and come out the other side of that whole process with something that was actually illuminating about reality. But in today's world, he says, with this constant stream of information, the stream of information rushes past the truth. There's no time anymore for anyone to truly think. There's no "constructive negativity". Because by the time someone gets done reading one of these self-referential news stories, it's now time to read the next news story so they can stay up to date. Your life really does become kind of like a Mr Beast video, or you know, three seconds can't go by without explosions going off. "And oh, look now, there's a treasure chest full of money on the screen. Oh, now they're they're shooting at each other in an Apache helicopter." Byung-Chul Han would say, "You know, just try to appreciate how truly different that is from the way almost every other human being has ever lived."

If you were a peasant living during the Middle Ages, for example, the content that you consumed, if you had any, the external information that you consumed that was potentially going to influence you, you literally thought it was the word of God, like your news anchor was the creator of the universe in your eyes.

But now, now that we live in the age of information. Now we just have CNN and Fox. Now we have fake news. Now all we have is an endless stream of unverified contingent surface level information that doesn't really illuminate anything about reality. In fact, it does the opposite, to Han. It further disorients people. It just produces anxiety. It fragments perception. Every piece of information relies on surprising people. Like, if you're the weirdo that reads a new story in today's day and age, and you sat on it for a week contemplating it, deliberating, by the time you got back to the news cycle, you'd be so far behind, the story wouldn't even matter anymore. And what you'd realize in that moment is, that these stories are not some hard-hitting journalism that people have put a lot of effort into. They really are just surface level informations that the news outlet could have something to put up there on the screen to surprise people, and get them clicking. And it's because of this reality in this "age of information rather than knowledge", that people are just more susceptible to things like fake news than they've ever been before. 200 years ago fake news could have never been this effective. But because people don't even have time to verify the last story and connect it to a larger narrative before they have to get back to their news app to be informed about the next story, that speed, that access, that excess positivity, to Han, creates an environment where fake news is not only possible, but it's proliferating. This also creates the environment, he thinks, where the rise in conspiracy theories in recent years starts to make a lot more sense. Because people are lacking that binding, connecting Narrative of truth that's always existed before this. Now people become so desperate to actually have a narrative, that they even start creating their own narratives, or latching onto others that aren't necessarily very sound, but their followers will never realize it anyway as long as we keep feeding them so much information that they stay in a frenzy of whatever's being talked about right this second. If rituals are the constructive negativity that slows down time enough to create trust and integrity and other necessary social bonds, then in this world where we're just fed cursory raw information, contemplation is going to be the thing that slows things down enough to allow for truth and knowledge to be possible once again.

For Han, what's disappearing from society is, at bottom, this constructive negativity. He says, "Not all negativity is destructive. not infrequently, forms of negativity, such as hesitation, pausing, boredom, waiting, or rage prove constructive, though they're threatened with disappearance in the course of society's increasing positivization."

So to move on to another area of life that Han thinks is being disintegrated, the removal of this negativity, he thinks, has actually started to undermine culture at a fundamental level, and all the places where people in the past have gotten their sense of identity altogether. So, if anyone in recent years has made the claim that we're in a period where people feel like they're in a "crisis of meaning" and "a crisis of identity" all at the same time, if that's said to be a "Hallmark of our Age", here's where Byung-Chul Han's work can start to explain why he thinks that's occurring. Because when this neoliberal ethos of questioning outside rituals and Norms, when that gets applied at the level of culture, what you get, to Han, is what we commonly call in normal, everyday conversation, "globalization". You get an attitude by people of, "Hey man, hey. What's with all these arbitrary lines in the sand, man? What's with all these borders between people? We got to open these up! We got to stop pretending like these "races" and "nationalities" mean anything. We're all one thing. We're all the same."

Now it seems like a very inclusive sentiment there, but the subtext of saying that "none of these boundaries between people are real" is that you're also saying that your perceived individual culture, the kind of thing historically, people have used for thousands of years to get big pieces of their sense of identity and meaning. The subtext is that, "Yeah, that isn't real, either. You just got to get over all these arbitrary differences you're focusing on."

And notice the connection to last episode when Han was talking about the "terror of the same" and how this whole attitude eventually smooths everything out, and takes away the rough edges so that nobody's disagreeing anymore, and everything can keep on being economically productive and efficient. The end game of a neoliberal "ethos of authenticity", to Han, is not a bunch of different groups that are all coexisting, but seven and a half billion narcissists, all with their own World Views, competing with each other in complete peace. But one thing should be clear, this is not uniting everyone. To Byung-Chul Han, this is homogenizing everyone. When you push for globalization by turning everything into the same thing, you're not dealing with the actual differences between you and the other. You're just making it so that you never have to encounter the other ever again, because now, everybody's the same. But to Han, this is a bad move. Because there's such a thing, he says, as healthy boundaries between truly different cultures. That's what we should be aiming for. What we need, Han says, is more of what he calls "Eros".

Now Eros is a term that's been used at several points throughout human history. First introduced in ancient Greek mythology, Eros represented the forces of Love and Desire, at that time I believe. It was used by Freud. Jung, we talked about it in our Frankfurt School series. The important Point here, so we don't get too far off track, is that it represents another one of these things that bind and connect us together in human relationships that's disappearing to Byung-Chul Han. Han doesn't Define eros as Love and Desire, he writes about it in his book called "The Agony of Eros", and he calls it, at one point, "the relation to the holy other".

Not holy like like in a biblical sense, but holy like "the entirely other" is what he means. We've obviously touched on this piece of his work last episode, and we talked about trying to listen to someone as they are, not just in terms of how they transactionally benefit you, or compare to you. But in their total difference from you, feeling, sitting with how uncomfortable that may make you feel, and not trying to get away from it. Eros is the formal name that he gives to it, and notice how easily something that historically embodied love, quickly turns into something that truly acknowledges real differences in other groups, as they are. If you're a poetic sort of person, you can really start to see how the two terms overlap with each other. Differences, to Han, are absolutely crucial for any kind of healthy human relationship that you're ever going to try to have. On a personal level, if you're hanging out with a bunch of people that you have zero real differences with, that's probably not a good thing. Well, in the same way, when a society doesn't have this "Eros", a society without these counterweighting voices that truly questions itself, a society that has nothing to shake it out of its narcissistic inwardness, that is an unhealthy society as well.

It is a horrible thing for the immune system of a society for everything to be exactly the same. He says we need that immunological response. We need uncomfortable differences to exist between groups if we want things to remain balanced. Again, what we don't want is just seven and a half billion narcissists all screaming their own personal religions at each other.

So another more political part of the reason it's important to preserve the differences that make communities possible to Han, it's because just from a historical perspective, if there was ever a group that was being treated badly throughout history, and the people in those groups wanted to do something to try to change their situation, in the past it was possible for them to organize, band together, and then rise up to try to make their circumstances better. But as he says, "if we get to a place in the world where there is no we to be able to rise up. In a world, where people feel like all they do is play, and if anything seems wrong in their life it's their individual fault for it being that way, that is a form of positive power where it becomes confusing as to how to even get out of it. We need communities for people to be able to have that leverage point. And to combine this idea with what we were just talking about with the rise of information and the decline of Truth and knowledge, these are going to be two cornerstones of what's absolutely necessary if we ever want to have a functioning democracy. So if we're experiencing anything in today's world that anybody out there may refer to as a "crisis of democracy", Byung-Chul Han is going to point to this as part of the reason why. Because the possibility of a democracy ever working presupposes the idea that people can be reasonably informed about the world, and then can have reasonable amounts of intelligent conversation with other citizens so that the people can decide where Society goes next. But that's practically impossible anymore to Byung-Chul Han.

We already talked about the absolute dumpster fire of a situation when it comes to staying informed. Well, most of our communication with each other within modern democracies these days goes on over the bandwidth of social media. In other words, they go on in a place where nobody really even tries to communicate effectively, ever. Social media certainly doesn't incentivize real conversation. There certainly are no real communities being developed on there. He says it's interesting, communities of people used to exist historically, and the very thing that bonded them together were things that nobody in the community really needed to speak about because everybody knew what connected them, it went unsaid. He says, "we used to have communities without communication, nowadays we have communication without community."

Once again, it's also overly positive in today's climate. It's all just talking, and ranting, and access to information, and none of the constructive negativity that slows things down and leads to productive discussion or actual consensus.

As you're no doubt seeing by this point, to Byung-Chul Han, there are just areas of human life that are different when the world is dominated by positive power and the shallow kind of technology. And the effects of this spread into practically every corner of society that you can possibly imagine.

So in his book "The Transparency Society", he talks about how Society sees transparency as this "undeniable good". How everyone should have no secrets. If they do, then they must be hiding something. How access to information should be ubiquitous. And how could anybody really argue against that otherwise? Again, there's this obvious excess of positivity that he thinks symbolizes this age we're living in, but to Han, he's always trying to ask the question, "what is taken away from a human life when we value these positive virtues so much more today"? When it comes to transparency in particular, what's taken away there? How about the very need to trust another person. Does that become obsolete in a society of total transparency?

To give an example along the lines of our digital panopticon, let's say you're going to parent your kids. And the way you decided to do it was, you're just going to put up a security camera in their playroom and make them know that they're being watched all the time. You know, giant poster on the wall like you're the fuehrer of the house, got it on Etsy. Well, that solves the problem, right? They're behaving now, but does it solve the problem? Are you really being a parent there? Or does the security camera destroy something that's more vital to that whole process of becoming a young adult? This excessively positive attitude, as Han would call it, that everything is supposed to be available to everyone all the time, and how that scene is an undeniable good that there can be no downside to. Some of my favorite parts of Han's work is when he talks about how there's just something deeper that's going missing when that world view actually becomes a reality. Public spaces are starting to disappear, he says. You know, when in former societies there were physical places where you had to go if there were particular things that you wanted to get done? For example, if you want to get a rare piece of information, you had to go to the library, or to the school, or to the bookstore. These were places that embodied that learning Spirit. But in a world where every piece of information in the history of humankind is available to you all the time on your phone, that's wonderful and all, but there's something different about your experience of the world. When there's some sort of negative friction worked into the equation of getting a piece of knowledge. For example, where you're looking for a book thst has this piece of information you want? You go down to the library, but they don't have the book. Oh, but a branch 20 miles away has it, so you take three buses. You go down there only to find out they just rented out the last copy five minutes before you got there. Then, on your way home you stop at a random bookstore and you find the book there? There's something to that loss of negativity, that loss of friction, that changes the subjective experience of being a person in the modern digital world.

But anyway, one of my favorite things that Han says about any of this stuff is what he thinks you should do about it personally if you recognize that it's going on and you don't want to participate in it. Part of his advice to you would be to be an idiot. Be an idiot though, he doesn't mean it like you should just be stupid. In fact, the pejorative use of the word "idiot" is actually a fairly new thing. In human history, back in ancient Greece for example, the equivalent to the word we now use as idiot really just meant "someone who was a common person, who didn't really participate in public affairs or ever aspire to hold public office". It didn't mean they were stupid. But nonetheless more recently, being called an idiot means that you're seen as dumb by the conventional wisdom of the society that you're living in. But for Han, if the wisdom of the society you're living in is one where people are these self-obsessed Achievement Hunters that get fed an endless stream of surface level information and then instantly swap over to social media to scream their half-baked narcissistic take on it at other people that are all doing the same thing, if that's the conventional wisdom of the world we're living in, be an idiot in that Society. Be the one that's going to slow down and truly contemplate things and how they connect to a larger world picture. Be the idiot who's okay with not being entirely sure about how you feel about an issue, even if it's an issue that's super important to you. Be the idiot that's okay with being bored sometimes for a while, instead of just being entertained all the time. In a society that tells you that you constantly need to be optimizing and improving your mind, be the idiot that's okay with accepting your own mental limitations sometimes. Be okay with not being the smartest person who's ever lived. Be the idiot that can allow yourself to feel negative emotions sometimes, like sadness, or rage, or fear. In a society that tells you that all those things somehow need to be fixed, be the idiot that can experience real struggle and uncomfortable moments in life without having to always run from them so you can be at one with the Society of comfort and instant gratification. Because if that's what an idiot is in this Society, then maybe someone calling you an idiot is actually a pretty big compliment.

...and Don't  Forget, that to be Truly Free, You Need to Choose from Our Menu of Available Options, Mr Consumer:

Le passage a l'acte

 

Amal Hachet, "The Passage à l’acte in Adolescence: A Failed Attempt to Produce a Subject"

Psychoanalysis offers a complex and dynamic conception of the psychical organization, which is linked to desire and the law, in reference to the unconscious. Much more than a reservoir of drives, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other (Lacan, 1957). In this capacity it constitutes a production of society. Whereas the “modern” subject placed at the intersection between the healthcare and legals domain finds him- or herself increasingly cut off from any responsibility, psychoanalytical theory assigns the subject the locus of his or her subjective division by repatriating him within the meaning of his or her act, this “perfect alibi”. [1] Due to this fact, while psychoanalysis de-realizes the crime, it does not for all that de-humanize the criminal (Lacan 1950).

Problematic

The Freudian conception of crime postulates that the kernel of the criminal act resides in the Oedipus complex (Freud 1931), even if this is not its cause: the Oedipus complex does not kill! Based on a dialectical relationship between the (criminal) act and guilt, this act is seen as the expression of guilt and sometimes as its consequence (Freud, 1916-1917).

From the outset, this cluster of images integrates the (criminal) individual into a social and dynamic dimension, since the reference to the law of the fundamental and cultural prohibition against incest necessitates an identification with the Other.

Based on his re-reading of the oeuvre of Freud, and starting from a phenomenological approach, in particular on the subject of the unconscious and of aggressiveness, Lacan re-inscribed and confirmed once more this “social” dimension of the unconscious in a dialectic conception, and even an inter-subjective conception, which is linked to the act. The act that Lacan highlights is neither an action nor a behavior, but a locus of saying, and at the same time a locus of transgression of a symbolic law. As we go into greater detail, it is essential to recall the Lacanian distinction between the act (acting out) and the passage à l’acte (Lacan, 1963).

-The subject who acts out puts his or her body on the stage under the gaze of the other and asks the other to decipher this behavior; a behavior which is, all in all, fantasmatic.

-On the other hand, the subject of the passage à l’acte escapes, leaving the stage of his or her fantasy. In response to his or her impossibility of sustaining a subjective position faced with the weight of the demand that emanates from this other, the subject tips over into an integral break from the relationship with the other (Canonge & Pedinielli, 2014).

From this perspective, the drive, which is an integral part of human nature, does not suffice in and of itself to produce anything criminal. It is within the alienation from the desire of the other – where “I is an other” due to the fact of a fundamental dependence that binds the subject to his or her neighbor – that aggressiveness finds its point of origin.

Correlative with a mode of narcissistic identification “which determines the formal structure of man’s ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world,” [2] aggressiveness is a tendency that “manifests itself in an experience that is subjective in its very constitution.” [3] This experience of structural ambivalence in which the self and the other are undifferentiated corresponds to the moment of the formation of the Ego thanks to the narcissistic identification with the other, which is realized during the mirror stage. The infant subject’s “identification with his specular image” represents the “most significant model, as well as the earliest moment, of the fundamentally alienating relationship in which man’s being is dialectically constituted.” [4]

If, as Lacan posits, “the unconscious is the social” [5] in the sense that the organization of our subjectivity would be not only the fact of the Oedipus complex but also the fact of the relation to the Other, the act, just like the symptom, is to be understood as a production of the social dimension, which is inter-subjective.

In his seminar of May 10th 1967 devoted to the logic of the fantasy, Lacan envisaged the Other as a reservoir of material for the act: “it is also the unconscious, that is to say, the symptom without its meaning, deprived of its truth.” [6]

By conferring upon the unconscious a structural dimension that belongs to the order of discourse, Lacan goes beyond the subjective. He integrates it into a collective scene that is linked to social reality, which is structured on the basis of the name of the father: “the unconscious would be the plane from which the individual and the social dimensions meet in so far as one duplicates the other, and so on, in an infinite fashion.” [7]

Neither the crime nor the criminal can, therefore, be conceived beyond their sociological reference (Assoun, 2004). On the basis of this postulate, the subject’s transgressive acts (as a fact of discourse) are to be understood as:

– on the one hand, as an attempt to produce meaning;

– on the other hand, as a modality by which the subject is produced, and even a modality of subjectification, through a repetition compulsion (Birman, 2007), to the extent that each phenomenon that possesses a meaning is the fact of a subject.

Accomplishing this psychical operation necessitates constructive labor in which the act is then examined as, at the same time, a repetition, a staging, and an attempt to give meaning that does not aim at the production of an already constituted meaning, even one that is inscribed in the psyche, but aims rather at producing meaning where previously there was none (Birman, 2007). As in psychosis, where acts “are absolutely deprived of any intentionality – in other words, they are purely automatic, and they leave the subject perplexed, or even radically ejected from his act.” [8] This ejection of the subject outside the coordinates of his or her act, which is structural in psychosis whereas it is fleeting in neurosis, does not cancel out the subject’s responsibility and duty to answer for it. It requires that the legal institution, and then, if this is possible, the analyst, enable the subject, with the specific “symboligenic” tools, to inscribe, little by little, the subject’s passage à l’acte – however bare of meaning it might seem to be at first – into his or her history, and to subjectify it.

There is neither synthesis nor resolution in the passage à l’acte. It is a modality of response that surges up where one was not expecting it. As a language reduced to its most straightforward structure, the passage à l’acte always responds to the Other: “as soon as there is speaking, there is a response.” [9] In other words, the passage à l’acte is an invasion that arises in response to another invasion, an automatic response to that which is dysfunctional in the social bond: the abdication [démission] or challenging [récusation] of important symbolic functions. The subject then takes “the place of the all-powerful primordial father, to the extent that the symbolic father has not been able to maintain this place, nor to keep his promise to be the mediator of the social bonds.” [10] In a correlative fashion, the non-recognition of the symbolic authority encountered in “psychopathic” adolescents is to be referred to a difficulty when it comes to mourning – a mourning triggered by the real father – the ideal father and his all powerfulness (Hoffmann, 2001).

A Clinical Observation

The observation of Eric (Hachet, 2009) allows for an illustration of these considerations. We met Eric for a psychological assessment when he was seventeen years old. He had been held in custody for an attempted homicide that he committed on a homeless person, Mr. D, using a bladed weapon – a kitchen knife with a 5 inch blade. The victim, a man who was fifty years old, was found lying in the street. Having been stopped on the site of the attack, Eric declared that he had acted without reason. On seeing a homeless person who was sleeping under a cover, he took out the knife and stabbed him in the lower belly area. Mr. D was hospitalized immediately, and nearly lost his life.

Eric’s passage à l’acte is all the more disturbing given that the adolescent had never been violent and had no history of run ins with the law. On the contrary, Eric was considered to be a mentally fragile boy due to the fact of his sometimes disruptive attitude at school and his tendency to play truant and wander the streets. Due to this, and due to its paroxysmal character, the homicide attempt perpetrated by Eric cannot be attributed to the ordinary paranoia of the adolescent that characterizes the normal entry into the Oedipus complex of puberty (Marty, 2009). At the level of psychical economy, this detour via the criminal act (Blanchard, 2010) aims more to cancel out of a tension that is experienced as something unsustainable and uncontrollable (Declercq & Maleval, 2012) which drives one to run the alienating risk of being assigned, by the Other, to a permanent position of object (Vodovosoff, 2008).

The state of Eric’s mental health – which was initially declared by the legal medical emergency services (UMJ) at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital to present a danger for others and for himself, and was therefore, from a psychiatric point of view, judged as being with being remanded in custody – led to his placement under observation at the Psychiatric Infirmary close to the Paris Police Headquarters, and then to a compulsory hospitalization on the psychiatric wing of a general hospital in the Paris suburbs. In the course of this hospitalization, Eric confided in his doctor that he had attacked several homeless people under the same conditions, which the investigators were unable to confirm. After two weeks, this measure of compulsory hospitalization was lifted. Eric was allowed to leave the hospital on the grounds that his behavior in the psychiatric wing was appropriate, that the delusional elements had disappeared, and that there was no potential danger. Although he was unable to understand or to explain the reasons behind his gesture, Eric did nevertheless manage to explain during his first appearance before the judges that he had acted through a kind of anger, because he had just been robbed by a homeless person.

Eric’s sometimes agitated behavior in the classroom had led his mother to send him to a psychologist in a Psychological Medical Center, whom he had been seeing on a regular basis. Five days prior to his passage à l’acte, the adolescent had spoken of his desire to achieve some independence from his family, and had then gone roaming the streets immediately after his session. On the evening of the attack, he had wanted to take refuge in the hallway of a building in order to protect himself from the cold. He was then assailed by the watchman, who threw him out with brutality.

This violent encounter between Eric and an individual who is the agent of a concrete authority is thus the context in which the meaning of his passage à l’acte has to be inscribed. Indeed, this man’s intervention, which set out a brutal and non-negotiable limit, did not leave any room for Eric as a subject. For Eric, his gesture is a reproduction of an act of needless violence: “The watchman really laid into me. I did not know why. So, I did the same thing to the homeless man as the watchman did to me. I lost my temper. My intention was to take his knife (?). I stabbed him in the belly, but I was still angry.”

Our hypothesis is that, if the abusive and arbitrary character of the authority of this substitute for the real “father” was destabilizing to such an extent for Eric, it was because the signifier of the Name of the Father was foreclosed in the psyche of this adolescent.

The watchman in the building is a concrete actor of the application of a rule that is articulated with public order and extends it into a private space. Eric was thus chased out by a man who had been invested with an authority. Now, Lacan notes that the:

[…] devastating effects of the paternal figure are found with particular frequency in cases where the father really functions as a legislator or boasts that he does – whether he is, in fact, one of the people who makes the laws or presents himself as a pillar of faith, as a paragon of integrity […] these are all ideals that provide him with all too many opportunities to seem to be at fault, to fall short, and even to be fraudulent – in short, to exclude the Name of the Father from its position in the signifier. [11]

When the watchman of the building physically assailed Eric instead of leading him out in a non-violent manner, he truly and verily proved to be unworthy of his professional role: he committed an abuse of power.

Whether it is inscribed in or foreclosed from the psyche of a subject, the signifier of the Name of the Father is called upon by “a real father”, which is “not at all necessarily by the subject’s own father.” [12] Lacan names this person “One father”. This “One father” has to “situate himself in a tertiary position in any relationship that has as its base the imaginary couple a – a’, that is, ego object or ideal reality.” [13] Here, the violence performed by the watchman of the building shattered the adolescent’s hopes for some form of hospitality. While this One father is truly and verily situated as a third party who possesses a legal power, he used it in an arbitrary manner.

To shore up our analysis, we need to expose a number of elements from Eric’s family history. His parents divorced when he was six years old. Eric’s mother was behind the initiative of this break, which was prompted by her husband’s aberrant behavior: he was violent towards her (the child witnessed numerous “bloody” conjugal arguments), and unfaithful. Furthermore, his father had committed incest with his half-sister when she was aged fourteen. Of foreign origin, Eric’s father then left France for the country of his birth. He later came back from time to time, at irregular intervals, in order to see his children. Eric’s mother describes this father in an entirely negative way. Indeed, she mentions a man who is violent, impulsive, with a walkaway attitude, who does not contribute financially to the upbringing of his children and who manipulates them by displaying a “prestigious” attitude when he is in contact with them. Now, Lacan insists on the fact that the inscription of the Name of the Father does not concern “only […] the way the mother accommodates the father as a person, but also […] the importance she attributes to his speech – in a word, to his authority – in other words, with the place she reserves for the Name of the Father in the promotion of the law.” [14] Eric’s mother truly and verily excludes the father of their son from her discourse as a subject capable of bearing a pacifying law and authority.

Thus, very early on, Eric was placed in a paradoxical and ambiguous bond with the paternal object, whose instability and unpredictable character made it ungraspable as much through its absence as through its presence. In this capacity, Eric’s episodes of absence and roaming the streets (without there being any clear neurological dysfunction) set the stage for and re-actualized (in order to try to elaborate) the ambiguity of the paternal object – which is present through its absence and absent in its presence – in which it was enclosed. Within this context, Eric’s displays of absence from school and roaming the streets did not only constitute a way of identifying with his doubly absent father – really, in his relational landscape, and symbolically, in the discourse of his mother – but also allowed him to escape from an incestuous proximity that was exacerbated by the mother’s rejection of the paternal figure.

Along with the father’s failure to constitute a third party, there is also the fall of the ideal image (Houssier, 2012) that this man tried to develop for his children and which Eric sought desperately to cling to, before being forced – under the dual influence of the radical discourse of his mother and of the insistence of the facts – to accept its inescapable falsity. The fall of the paternal image was equivalent to the pedestal onto which he had mendaciously hauled himself in order to impose upon his children a representation of himself that was faultless.

Eric’s extreme difficulty when it comes to shoring himself up with the paternal image had more recently led him to carry over to religion his need for attachment and to develop rituals of cleanliness, which in all likelihood were defenses against a psychotic collapse. Indeed, Eric had wanted to become a priest, until the day when a teacher (a substitute for the father) insisted that “there is no place for priests in the Bible”, and therefore there is no place for an “ideal father”.

Eric was then placed in a situation of impasse in which giving up on the ideal of the father was equivalent to having to suppress it in reality, since he was unable to do so on the symbolic plane (Houssier, 2010) by means of wishes of parricide. The authoritarian and non-negotiable intervention of the watchman in the building (“You have no business being here” = there is no place for you) made Eric slip into this equivalence of parricide in the guise of an attempt to extract himself from this dead end. On the day of his father’s fiftieth birthday, Eric attacked the image of a “downfallen father” – Mr. D, of no fixed abode – whom he was to stab in the lower torso (was this an attempt at emasculation?). What is surprising is that Mr. D is himself the father of a son in his twenties, whom he had lost the right to see following his divorce from the boy’s mother (which had pushed him into social decline and serious marginality!) In the background, Mr. D’s situation is also the product of a parricidal society that, under the cover of economic liberalism, does not leave any place for the father, who is seen as something interchangeable (Legendre, 1989). If he is not suitable, the father now runs the risk of being deposed from his place of subject and of being relegated to the place of “trash”.

By attacking an unknown marginal figure who is liable to represent an image of the “downfallen father” for Eric, he was attacking the at once pitiful and hated figure of his failing father.

Through his passage à l’acte, and via his identification with the attacker, he also reproduced the authoritarian law of the “real father” who cancels out the place of the other as a “subject”. In effect, in conformity with the example of Eric when he came up against the hostility without concession from the watchman in the building, the victim of the adolescent was an inoffensive and vulnerable person to whom a place in the quality of a social bond had been refused.

Made from a discourse that is attached to desire, the passage à l’acte of this adolescent – a demand for recognition against the backdrop of despair issued by a subject who sees himself as a trash object to be evacuated (Hoffman & al., 2000) – is to be understood as an attempt to produce the subject. This attempt fails to the extent that it is an echo of what forms a symptom in the social dimension: neoliberal arbitrariness, which tends to identify each subject with a trash object. Against this arbitrary and the nonsensical logic of dehumanization, Eric opposes an act that is just as arbitrary and senseless.

In effect, his violence was not directed towards his attacker (the watchman in the building), but his fellow man (the homeless man), an emblematic figure of the downfallen subject (and, as an echo, Eric’s father).

Conclusion

The observation of Eric reminds us that confronting the adolescent’s passage à l’acte with judicial law, the collective embodiment of the symbolic law, is destined as much to defuse the load of violence that is inherent to a passage à l’acte such as this (Morhain, Chouvier, 2008) as to prime its re-inscription in the subject.

Notes

[1] Assoun, P.-L. (2004). L’inconscient du crime. La « criminologie freudienne ». Recherches en Psychanalyse, 2, 2, p. 38.

[2] Lacan, J. (2006). Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis (1948). Translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Lacan, J., Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: Norton & Co, p. 89.

[3] Ibid., p. 83.

[4] Lacan, J. & Cénac, M. (2006). A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Crimonology (1950). Translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Lacan, J., Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: Norton & Co, p. 115.

[5] Lacan, J. (2006). The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” (1957). Translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Lacan, J., Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: Norton & Co, p. 6-48.

[6] Lacan, J. (1966-1967). Séminaire XIV, La logique du fantasme. Unpublished text (mimeograph).

[7] Scudéri, C. (2008). Entre social et individuel : l’inconscient lacanien d’après ‘Le séminaire sur la lettre volée’ (1957). In La philosophie au sens large. CNRS - UMR 8163 Université de Lille 3 and Université de Lille 1: text presented in a study group led by Pierre Macherey.

[8] Thibierge, S. (2007). Remarques sur l’abord contemporain des passages à l’acte. In Actes de Colloque International de Médecine, Psychanalyse et Droit “Passages à l’acte”. Poitiers, p. 313-320.

[9] Lacan, J., (1948). Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, op. cit..

[10] Birman, J. (2007). Généalogie du passage à l’acte. In Actes de Colloque International de Médecine, Psychanalyse et Droit “Passages à l’acte”. Poitiers, p. 344.

[11] Lacan, J. (2006). On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (1958). Translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Lacan, J., Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: Norton & Co, p. 482-483.

[12] Ibid., p. 481.

[13] Ibid., p. 481.

[14] Ibid., p. 482.