Full-on Fantasy and the Real Ordeal
“Somewhat (Ir)relevant Preamble About Lack”
These are some hypotheses about fantasies and how they shape a reality – I’ll call it bourgeois reality – that some of us would rather do without. I insist on “hypotheses” because this text is not the definitive truth and might, at most, be useful as a stimulus for experimental practices (for the few that engage in such experiments). The text might be approached as a sort of play with uncertain rules.
If one looks more carefully at this character I call the “bourgeois”, they will notice that they tremble constantly, haunted by an unbearable anxiety. The problem is not that they experience anxiety, since that is unavoidable, but that they cannot bear it. This is where fantasy steps in, leading this shaky subject to safety in the bosom of liberal-capitalist governing dispositifs, where most of them enjoy performing mindless, simple tasks and following mass-produced scenarios until they die (working, shopping, marrying, reproducing, having fun, etc.). They struggle hard to “be” the names they’ve been given by various authorities since birth: man, woman, son, French, Catholic, wife, Dupont, etc., wishing to embody those names so intimately that no one can tell the difference between their soul and ideology. By remaining within this asylum of dispositifs, the bourgeois manages to convert some of their anxiety into something more bearable, for example guilt, paranoia, narcissism, violence, hatred, envy, ambition or obsessions. All these are impossible tasks: no matter how hard one tries, there always remains a gap (lack) between “name” (what one is supposed to be, an identity or a coherent, self-transparent, lovable ego) and “being” (one’s experience of the self ). One cannot perfectly “be” a man or woman or French or lovable; a suspicion forever lingers that “you are not it”, that the self is a fictitious unity held together by spit and barbed wire. And alongside this suspicion enters anxiety.
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The bourgeois experiences this anxiety (which signals the lack) whenever they fail to get a clear answer to their demands for love and recognition, to their fundamental question of desire: “What should I be in order to be found desirable? What do they want me to be?” And “whenever” is actually always: there is no straightforward answer to this question. We all want to be forever and unconditionally recognised as desirable by the ones around us and by the various authorities and ideals that populate our imaginary. But we can never figure out with definite certainty what we should be or do in order to obtain their love. Why? Because there is no definitive answer - all the systems, symbols, structures or authorities (mom, dad, the lover, the partner, the teacher, the internet, language, science, art, philosophy, religion, the legal system, the university, the president, society, the Nation, the party) that, in our imagination, may provide an answer don’t know either; these authorities find it impossible to create a tight, closed, objective, true or permanent system of reference. There is nothing inherent in any structure that makes it able to reveal the ultimate truth. « Il n’y a pas de système social qui ne fuit par tous les bouts » (“There is no social system that does not leak from everywhere”) (Deleuze). The only thing that confers authority to symbolic structures is the subject’s desire to believe that these structures have the supernatural ability and prerogative to speak the truth, to regulate or to prohibit.
So, symbolic structures also lack. Or, in theoretical jargon “The Other lacks”. Why does it lack? Because meaning and thus human reality are created in language and without any other external referent, I would say, and I will leave it at that for the time being, since there are more urgent things to write about. |
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Explanatory Note on “The Other”
The Other” is a term invented by Lacan (a terribiliste psychoanalytical theorist) that, for some reason to do with the Father, I continue using (still trying to give the old man an immaculate conception, I suppose). It is not as complex a concept as it seems although, paradoxically, it is not easy to explain intuitively. I make sense of it thus: the Other stands for a generic symbolic authority that has been internalised by the subject that is, has been made an important element of the way in which the subject desires and experiences pleasure; and from this "internal" position, the Other rules the subject’s psychic economy. Ok, I’ll try and unpack that. Through the power relations into which we are introduced since birth, we learn that our being and desirability have to be approved by various authorities: god, mom and dad, relatives, nurses and doctors, the crèche instructor, teachers, coaches and trainers, other kids, literature, TV, internet and comic books and so on. We also learn that our ability to present and express ourselves in a manner that makes us recognisable as a worthy person by the people around us depends on respecting various authoritative systems, codes, rules, discourses, institutions and so on: language, of course; history; “culture”; habitus; education, propriety, property, the law and so on. Finally, we learn that our worth is measured by the position we achieve within the authoritative capitalist system of production and accumulation of commodities and enjoyment. All these constitute for the “modern” subject a complex system of authorities that need to be understood, feared, obeyed, loved and appeased if one is to secure a recognised, desirable identity or being (since, in our fantasy, it is only such authorities that can grant us recognition and desirability). Well then, the Other is this system of authority-figures as it becomes a part of our everyday psychological processes: a disembodied representation of all these authorities amalgamated in the subject’s psyche into a generic “symbolic authority” figure that can grant recognition. We could call the Other by other names, say "the world", "people" or "society", as in the question “What will people think?”
So, to sum up and conclude: the Other is a representation of social or symbolic authority and, in each subject's "soul", has the function of recognising the subject as a subject, of validating their being and desirability. Like any fantasy, the Other is both structured by wide social forces and practices and personalised. For example, our identifications – and therefore our sense of identity or self - are shaped by what our fantasy tells us that the Other would find desirable when looking at us. Or, if we agree to call “the gaze” the subject’s own hypothesis about how they are seen by the Other, then the ego represents the internalisation of “the gaze”. And while each subject has a more or less "personal" idea of what their "style of desirability" should consist in, these templates of desirability are strictly governed. It's a bit like personalising your wardrobe or mobile phone, say. Lacan includes the unconscious in the list composing the symbolic Other and maybe he is right, since we self-police in relation with this psycho-symbolic authority even unconsciously.
The Other” is a term invented by Lacan (a terribiliste psychoanalytical theorist) that, for some reason to do with the Father, I continue using (still trying to give the old man an immaculate conception, I suppose). It is not as complex a concept as it seems although, paradoxically, it is not easy to explain intuitively. I make sense of it thus: the Other stands for a generic symbolic authority that has been internalised by the subject that is, has been made an important element of the way in which the subject desires and experiences pleasure; and from this "internal" position, the Other rules the subject’s psychic economy. Ok, I’ll try and unpack that. Through the power relations into which we are introduced since birth, we learn that our being and desirability have to be approved by various authorities: god, mom and dad, relatives, nurses and doctors, the crèche instructor, teachers, coaches and trainers, other kids, literature, TV, internet and comic books and so on. We also learn that our ability to present and express ourselves in a manner that makes us recognisable as a worthy person by the people around us depends on respecting various authoritative systems, codes, rules, discourses, institutions and so on: language, of course; history; “culture”; habitus; education, propriety, property, the law and so on. Finally, we learn that our worth is measured by the position we achieve within the authoritative capitalist system of production and accumulation of commodities and enjoyment. All these constitute for the “modern” subject a complex system of authorities that need to be understood, feared, obeyed, loved and appeased if one is to secure a recognised, desirable identity or being (since, in our fantasy, it is only such authorities that can grant us recognition and desirability). Well then, the Other is this system of authority-figures as it becomes a part of our everyday psychological processes: a disembodied representation of all these authorities amalgamated in the subject’s psyche into a generic “symbolic authority” figure that can grant recognition. We could call the Other by other names, say "the world", "people" or "society", as in the question “What will people think?”
So, to sum up and conclude: the Other is a representation of social or symbolic authority and, in each subject's "soul", has the function of recognising the subject as a subject, of validating their being and desirability. Like any fantasy, the Other is both structured by wide social forces and practices and personalised. For example, our identifications – and therefore our sense of identity or self - are shaped by what our fantasy tells us that the Other would find desirable when looking at us. Or, if we agree to call “the gaze” the subject’s own hypothesis about how they are seen by the Other, then the ego represents the internalisation of “the gaze”. And while each subject has a more or less "personal" idea of what their "style of desirability" should consist in, these templates of desirability are strictly governed. It's a bit like personalising your wardrobe or mobile phone, say. Lacan includes the unconscious in the list composing the symbolic Other and maybe he is right, since we self-police in relation with this psycho-symbolic authority even unconsciously.
Bourgeois anxiety is generated by the fact that we can never know what the Other/other wants from us, what it desires us to be; the Other's desire is unknowable, even to the Other itself. When we emit those sad transmissions towards our desired ones: “What should I be, what should I do for you to desire me?” they actually have no idea what to answer. Their field of desire is partly concealed by the desire of the Other/other as much as ours, their idea of what they find desirable is as uncertain as ours (“What is their desire when they are asking me what they should be? What would the Other want me to answer to this question they ask of me? What kind of people should I desire in order to look desirable?”). This field of desire shows us forever uncertain, forever mutating, blurry shapes of the desire of others and the Other.
Hence, anxiety as the basic bourgeois affect. Lacan calls it “castration anxiety” – the anxiety generated by the fear that we are going to lose the symbols of our being, identity, power and desirability, in Freud’s patriarchal imaginary that we will lose the (symbolic) dick. No doubt, we associate being, power and desirability with the dick because this is how the patriarchal symbolic system is configured - the term "castration anxiety" expresses the specifically masculinist forms that anxiety takes in a patriarchal system. The irony is that the fear of castration is the fear of something that has already happened – we never had that being, identity, power or desirability, we never had that certainty, the dick was from the start a decoy; we have simply been struggling since birth to approximate this identity, being, etc. to approximate a certain ideal of ourselves so as to become desirable to authority. Capitalising on our fears, the bourgeois order, this sad monastery obsessively populated with confessionals, disciplines us into channelling anxiety not into fearless play but into guilt, jealousy, fear and paranoia.
Hence, anxiety as the basic bourgeois affect. Lacan calls it “castration anxiety” – the anxiety generated by the fear that we are going to lose the symbols of our being, identity, power and desirability, in Freud’s patriarchal imaginary that we will lose the (symbolic) dick. No doubt, we associate being, power and desirability with the dick because this is how the patriarchal symbolic system is configured - the term "castration anxiety" expresses the specifically masculinist forms that anxiety takes in a patriarchal system. The irony is that the fear of castration is the fear of something that has already happened – we never had that being, identity, power or desirability, we never had that certainty, the dick was from the start a decoy; we have simply been struggling since birth to approximate this identity, being, etc. to approximate a certain ideal of ourselves so as to become desirable to authority. Capitalising on our fears, the bourgeois order, this sad monastery obsessively populated with confessionals, disciplines us into channelling anxiety not into fearless play but into guilt, jealousy, fear and paranoia.
Hypothesis 1: “The bourgeois fantasy of missing bits”
a) “The bourgeois hates anxiety” or “Fantasy as fig-leaf covering the Other’s lack”
The function of the fantasy is to alleviate the anxiety produced by the bourgeois subject’s refusal to accept the “lack of the Other”; or, the function of the fantasy is to create a narrative that explains away the undecidable nature of any symbolic system. Since the bourgeois subject abhors uncertainty, it is the anxiety produced by this lack of fixity that the fantasy assuages. Or, in an even more intimate register of selfhood, what the fantasy makes manageable is the forever unpredictable nature of the answers one receives to their demands for love or for recognition.
To “mask the Other’s lack” the fantasy represents it as non-existent (“the world/people/etc. are like that, it’s a [scientific] fact!!”); or as temporary and mendable (“you can create the perfect [life, identity, couple, love, career, health, home, baby, theory, society, humanity etc.] if only you…”. In the second case, the bourgeois fantasy fills in the blanks in specific ways that involve: the destruction of one fantasmatic villain or another (the other); and/or a schema of objects and practices that promise to make decidable the undecidable nature of life, the self, the world, etc. (for example commodities or credentials - I call them “phallic objects”, since they promise to reverse castration). Thus, the fantasmatic scenario makes bourgeois reality seem solid, coherent and operational. But there is a price to pay for this fixing of reality: the desire of the bourgeois is also fixed within the coordinates of the fantasy scenario. If anything goes against the fantasy script – even something as apparently ineffable as desire or enjoyment - then the reality according to the fantasy cannot be all there is, there must be something “beyond it” that invalidates the illusion that the world/self is full, closed, sealed, predictable. That would bring back with a vengeance the entire field of bourgeois anxiety - the awareness of the Other’s lack, castration anxiety, etc., all these psychoanalytical terms that can be simply summed up as “the anxiety caused by uncertainty/the undecidable”. So, we learn how to desire from the fantasy; and we assiduously engage in a process of building a reality that corresponds to the fantasmatic scenario, so as to make sure that we do not let any desire slip “outside” the scenario.
b) “Reality mimics fantasy”
Far from representing an illusory, mental escape from reality, fantasy is very much the foundation of reality. Reality does not test our fantasies against some pre-existing, objective, solid core; reality realizes our fantasies, constructing phallic objects to pursue and ideals to identify with. The “material”, “solid” reality we experience is an attempt to enact fantasies, to create the environment that will allow the illusion that full happiness, fulfillment, perfection are possible.
Isn’t capitalism a perpetual attempt to construct a world in which the various phallic objects that this fantasy-system dangles in front of our eyes – profit, possessions, power, achievements, credentials, titles, careers, commodities, travels, technology, romantic love, etc. – have the ability to grant fulfillment, to rid us of the anxiety created by uncertainty? To the terrifying question “How can I become an ultimate object of desire?” or, even, “Who am I (for the Other)?” the modern fantasy responds: “Buy that green pair of stilettos; Become a volunteer in an Ethiopian orphanage; Learn to play the piano; Enjoy exotic food; Swing; Be informed about electoral politics; Send your child to art school; Participate regularly in a demo for a good cause; Write a book; Charity; Get a promotion; Accumulate Facebook likes; Write a blog/twit/text message/social media comment; or Play this video game!”.
It can get less prosaic: the positivist dream of a theory-free language that is, the absurd fantasy of a language cleansed of the uncertainty of language, and more generally the dream of objective truth, are as much part of the fantasy of fullness (of reversing castration or eliminating uncertainty) as are the fascist or corporatist dreams of an organism-like society. The modern-capitalist fantasy is one of objective and ultimate truth and control, and it refuses to accept uncertainty. Thus, capitalist reality is one based on the obsessive labelling, gridding, classifying, hierarchizing, quantifying and transforming the environment to make it certain, knowable, known, “objective”, to make it conform to our truths. Little wonder that capitalist reality is based on domination, possessing, conquering, subduing, disciplining and domesticating; on colonial conquest; on work camps and concentration camps; on State dominion, surveillance, policing; on mass education, mass entertainment and mass media: on eliminating everything and anything that is not within the dominant fantasy of certainty, be that a person, group, space or alternative fantasy
c) “FOMO, or, The modern subject's fantasy of missing out”
In the case of the modern subject, the fantasmatic narrative of certainty takes the specific form of a story of loss. Simply, the bourgeois fantasy represents uncertainty – for example the fact that we can never know what the Other/other desires us to be - as an “object” that was lost and that, if retrieved, would eliminate anxiety and make the subject complete. Of course, we are not missing and did not lose anything crucial; indeed, one cannot have a spontaneous perception of “what is not there”. To perceive that our reality or our being “misses an object” is possible only if we already have a framework in which that object should have been there: things are missing only in fantasy. On the contrary, we are constituted as desiring beings by the fundamental uncertainty of meaning that we now represent as a loss.
Think for example of liberalism’s classical story of the birth of the social, initially formulated by Rousseau, Locke or Hobbes and constantly restyled since: this story argues that to enter into social life - which for liberals really means entering a reality ruled by contracts - one needs to, by force or voluntarily, lose something precious, a natural foundation of selfhood or of human interaction: instinct, bodies, sexuality, innocence, enjoyment, harmony, freedom, aggressiveness, violence or evolutionary selfishness. In whatever variant, this founding liberal fantasy stages a “natural thing” that “society” has taken away and explains individual anxiety and dissatisfaction through this loss. Here, “nature” is represented as “lost completeness” to explain the anxiety generated by uncertainty: according to this narrative we are anxious because we have lost our naturalness at all possible levels of social existence; and by retrieving this authenticity we can be full and anxiety-free again. Enter the whole parade of “go back to (your true) nature” solutions, from new age retreats to diets. The popularity of the “repressive hypothesis” among the bourgeoisie, including in fantasies of overturning bourgeois society through sexual liberation, is an offshoot of this fantasy of “lost natural wholeness”. The mystical-psychological fads promising the retrieval of the true self that lies buried under the rubbish of social identity are another. Here I can mention the ever-popular discourses of natural (genetic) gender, sexuality, race, personality; or the similarly popular discourses of therapeutic self-discovery. See for example the promise of Frederick Pearls, inventor of Gestalt therapy, to restore one’s “original, undistorted and natural approach to life” and to allow the individual to heal her dualism and recuperate her wholeness and integrity. Or the similar assurance of Art Janov, creator of “primal therapy”, that his method will help the bourgeois subject achieve a life devoid of tension and characterised by an internal unity that allows one to be “completely his own self”. Janov affirms (comically paraphrasing Bourdieu’s theory of subject institution by authority through the performative order: “Become who you are!”) that his brand of therapy allows people to “become themselves and stay themselves”.
This fantasy of lost fullness that we can recuperate is seductive even for some of those we might consider our companions on experimental journeys:
"We must reclaim the mystery, passion, intensity and depth of feeling which has been alienated from us and enshrined in religion …"
"A feral queerness … may appear as the rediscovery of all the potentials – sexual, animistic, relational, magical – which have been stunted by domestication." (Baedan)
"We must storm the citadel of religion and reclaim the freedom, the creativity, the passion and wonder that religion has stolen from our earth and our lives … I have attempted to express some of my own explorations so that we can carry on the project of creating ourselves as free, wild beings. The project of transforming the world into a realm of sensuous joy and pleasure by destroying the civilization that has stolen the fullness of life from us." (Feral Faun)
"The absence of spiritual awareness … is a tragedy because people so afflicted cannot open up to the world around them and draw from it beneficially when their sensibilities are so shut down and distracted, cannot live full lives but live lesser, half lives … being separated from nature separates us from spiritual awareness and impedes our balance, the totality of our inner self …" (Amazon of Gender Anarky)
I think that all such metaphysics of fullness must be seriously analysed critically if we are to leave behind the paralysing mix that seems to ensnare some of our Euro-American comrades: mystical fantasies of paradise plus narcissistic martyrdom, depression or defeatism when they prove unattainable.
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Hypothesis 2: “All Lacanian notions of the Real are propping up daddy's phallus, except for one”
a) “What In the World Is The Real?” At this point I feel the urge to talk about the Real. This urge is overdetermined, naturally, there must be some of my own narcissism in there; but it is also determined by the interest in affect or enjoyment or the death drive (and, implicitly, the Real) manifested by certain collectives that self-identify as anarchist and insurrectionist, like Crimethinc. and Baedan. So, what’s the deal with the Real? The term is invented by the same Lacan and it changes meaning over the years, as he changes his mind about this and that. In the field of psychoanalytical theory, the flows of ink and sweat produced by the attempts to explain what Lacan really meant by the Real could almost fill the lack (nerdy joke…). I’m not asking you to take my word for it – in fact, you should not – but personally, after spending a bit of time reading this drivel, I reduced all the possible tactical understandings of the Real to one, a somewhat non-orthodox one, I suppose. |
The one understanding of the Lacanian Real that, to my mind, has significance for political practice is that the Real is a retroactive representation of the symbolic field’s failure to ever achieve closure; or, if you prefer, a retroactive representation of the Other’s lack. It is retroactive because we create this representation after we have experienced the lack in the form of anxiety. So far probably not very clear, so I will continue. The Real is a representation of the anxiety generated by the irreducible uncertainty of meaning, world and subjectivity. This might still sound abstract, so I’ll insist for a bit longer: the Real is a representation, after the fact, of the failure of our attempts to create infallible, law-like selves, statements, meanings and realities, of the fact that any system that aspires to truth and control will discover, at some point, a founding error or an opening. In other words, the Real is a post hoc explanation of why this or that system of meaning or of organisation or of identity-production fails; of why accidents and errors happen even in the most carefully constructed order, be that order personal, theoretical, social, technological, military, philosophical, amorous, institutional, legal, scientific, etc. After a system is disturbed or destroyed; after a truth is invalidated; after an identity is threatened or dissolved; whenever we are seriously surprised or exposed, we try to explain away the anxiety we feel: and so, we invent various representations of this uncertainty that make the anxiety somehow bearable, manageable. “God works in mysterious ways” – sure, the ways might be mysterious, unknowable, but even so, once we represent uncertainty as God, we bear anxiety better, no? “Why did we fail? Why did this happen? Why am I anxious?” - well, “It was God’s will, God has a plan”. There’s an agent that knows, even if we don't; we have even managed to found religion, a massive, rigid and very certain carceral dispositif, on the representation of uncertainty as God. Replace God with Nature and you get the dispositif of science.
Psychoanalysis, although worshipping its own - white-bearded or beardless – Fathers (and a few patriarchal Mothers), tried to avoid giving a specific face, or identity to this uncertainty and created a meta-term, a generic, faceless representation, like “X” in math, that explains the failure of meaning to close: the Real. Despite its facelesness, however, the Real is not less of a fantasmatic representation than God. It is psychoanalysis’ own attempt to give a name and attributes to uncertainty, to the lack. It is an attempt to explain and mend our anxiety while pretending that we are theorising. And although these academics claim the nature of the Real to be unknowable, they seem to know for sure what it does and how it acts, just like priests do about the “mysterious ways” of their god. Indeed, psychoanalysis seems to speak of the "Lacanian Real" in much the same way that theism preaches of "Paradise Lost," or in the same way that science talked about completing the Standard Model™ with the fucking Higg’s boson (not to mention the latest endeavour of science, which is to account for the missing “dark matter”). The Lacanian sect seems, at the moment, busy building a church of the Real. And let’s not pretend that the similarities end there.
Technical Note for Academic Jargon Fetishists: The Real is produced by a process of figurative substitution that attempts to symbolise that which the symbolic cannot represent that is, “symbolic failure” or the Other’s lack; and projects this threatening failure outside the symbolic field. The Real is, then, a necessity of the symbolic, which cannot account for its lack without representing a radical heterogeneity that is external to it, a field of the un-representable. The Real cannot be meaningfully integrated into the symbolic precisely because it is a representation of its own lack, of its failure to create full meaning. What we repress and exclude as the Real is the encounter with the Other’s lack, with the lack of closure of our reality and of any object within it.
Thus, the Real is the name given to that which impedes the definitive closure of any identity, perpetually disrupting and making unintelligible our systems of difference; and it is in this guise, as that which exposes the lack that the Real is represented as a trauma by the bourgeois subject, whose enjoyment depends on denying lack. I will also use this opportunity to propose a hypothesis of what the death drive is: the death drive is the form of enjoyment that we derive from pushing towards an encounter with the Real. The death drive is destructive, but only if we consider that order, organisations, institutions and certainty are constructive. It is hostile, but only if we find relief in integration, integrity or sovereignty. The death drive is menacing, but only if we crave for “solid”, “natural”, unequivocal identities.
b) “You’re using the Real so as to argue that the binary sex/gender system is impossible to change? Really?”
When most Lacanians discuss “sex difference” they define the Real in exactly the opposite manner from what I have just been doing above: in their hands, the Real becomes some sort of hard – but still impossible to represent, wtf? - kernel that impedes the disruption of the binary symbolic system of differences we know as “sex/gender”. For Lacanians, the subject’s “proper” entry into the symbolic world of meaning, thought, desire, language and sociality depends on the subject’s “correct” assumption of their sex/gender (male-man or female-woman). From this Oedipal moment on, the subject is definitively positioned on one of the mutually exclusive paths of either masculine or feminine desire and jouissance. Even while Lacanians go through great pains to convince everyone that they are not biological determinists because they understand gender/sex as symbolic positions rather than as biological givens, their dogma insists that since that dramatic Oedipal moment, one of these two poles - man or woman - is fixed into the subject’s psyche and reality in manners as inescapable as if they were a biological destiny. “No matter what one does or says, there is a sense in which transcending gender remains impossible’” argues one of them, who also fancies himself as a radical queer theorist. This remains a deterministic and rudimentary scheme, still holding on to the skirts of nineteenth century medical reasoning and to the belt of patriarchy, showing Lacanian psychoanalysis to be not a supersession of biological determinism but on the contrary, a reformulation of determinism in a language more palatable for today’s trendy patriarchal-academic circles (desire, jouissance, blah-blah...).
How can Lacanians argue that, while the Other lacks and therefore there is no certainty, fixity or extra-linguistic determination to reality and to the psyche, the feminine and masculine psychic positions are fixed, rigid and can never merge, hybridize, vary or transform? By positing that sex difference is Real and by defining the Real as an ontological form external to the symbolic and the imaginary. Et voila: the fantasy of the Real returns with a vengeance to eliminate for these valiant theorists the uncertainty of sex/gender and fix it in impossible to break moulds. In this fantasy, the Real stops being a threatening (non)representation of the Other’s lack and becomes its opposite, that which secures the stability of the symbolic system of differences, making them as immutable as nature. The effects of this soothing fantasy of the Real-as-anchor-of-binary-difference is Lacan followers’ almost religious insistence on heterosexual difference as inescapable and foundational of all meaning because it is Real.
[In jargon: the Real mutates from a negative limit with no ontic content to a transcendental limit with an ontic determination of its own].
Once reassured by this fantasy that the sex/gender dichotomy is certain and is indispensable to “normal” (i.e. bourgeois) life, Lacanians can start making fascist claims in the name of public good: for example the concerted campaign of French Lacanians like Sylviane Agacinski, Irene Thery, Francoise Héritier and Jacques-Alain Miller against the extension of legally sanctioned alliances to non-hetero people, which successfully promoted legislation denying a gay couple’s right to adopt (not that I think that legal rights, marriage or adoption are a tool of freedom or anything worth fighting for, I think they are the opposite of that; but the “progressive” bourgeoisie sure does believe in them). Their justification is the mantra that Lacanians wheel out whenever they feel daddy is under threat: without a strong father that can block the mother’s unbound desires to devour her child, psychosis threatens the latter (that is: without a strong hetero daddy, the Oedipus phase cannot be “correctly” concluded). Of course, the Lacanian scarecrow of an assured disaster following the Father’s decapitation (‘père ou pire’) is nothing but a paranoid patriarchal fantasy, not different from the nineteenth century myths that education will make women sterile.
To prevent any heretic attempt at describing sex/gender as a fundamental governing dispositif and at encouraging its destruction, which would live psychoanalysis without its only explanatory framework, the Oedipus, and without clients, the Lacanian believers make any such gender-assassination attempt equivalent with psychosis. In their circles, any attempt to transcend the sex/gender difference signals a desire to abolish the Real that is, to transcend castration and enjoy fully; and for the believers, such desire diagnoses a psychotic psychic structure. It seems bizarre to argue, as these followers of Lacan do, that the bourgeois experiences gender difference as a barrier to their enjoyment and tries to eliminate uncertainty by transcending gender (if only…): isn’t it rather that, in “modernity”, the bourgeois experiences castration as the impossibility to be a “real man” or a “real woman”? Aren’t we experiencing the obsessive activity of dispositifs that promise full enjoyment once the subject has fully and unambiguously assumed their gender as inexorable “natural difference”? Aren’t bourgeois cultural productions flashing in front of our eyes endless figures of the exceptional Father or Mother that experience no sex/gender anxiety? I would think that in the gendered and gendering modern fantasy, the subject will try to become complete, certain, non-castrated by identifying with these phallic figures of the Mother and Father, be they Marilyn Monroe or Elvis, and not with a bigendered or ungendered phallic figure as the Lacanian believers argue. And if, as I believe, the systematic violence of modernity is an attempt to cover its castration anxiety with phallic objects (gold, profit, capital, victory, sovereignty) or with metaphysical essences (real masculinity/femininity, racial purity, ethnicity, blood, science), then this modern mass violence is an always gendered and predominantly heterosexual attempt to transcend uncertainty (Sarah Kane’s play “Blasted” harrowingly exposes the always-intimate connections between gender violence and militaristic atrocities, check it out).
If sex difference is instituted by the patriarchal law’s injunction to make a piece of flesh into the symbol of one’s being, then what precisely in this process escapes language and the social; what is this non-symbolic remainder, the Real in sex difference? This ridiculous dogma of sex/gender as being Real places sex/gender difference beyond critical analysis, making it into “a truly felicitous instrument of power” (Butler). And if some Lacanians assume that it is impossible, at the risk of losing one’s mind, to move away from our binary gendered and heterosexist order, are we to understand that the Real would block any change in the current dichotomous symbolic order? Are, then, any attempts to dismantle the State, capitalism, colonialism, racism, homophobia and so on plagued by the same predicament of either representing psychotic delusions or opening the gates for something much worse than the dispositifs we are attacking? Maybe this aggressive conservatism is how Lacanian believers fantasize that they can get rid of uncertainty; but calming their panic comes at the price of normalising atrocity.
Statement: “Psychoanalysis is domestication-imposing bullshit; but we can pirate interesting things from its well-endowed coffers”
The psychoanalytical fantasies of the Real as a lost realm of fullness; or as an unmediated bond with nature severed by the entry into the symbolic world of intersubjectivity, language, desire, etc.; or as a realm of extra-discursive negativity, a dark entity lurking outside the symbolic and attacking it regularly; or as an extra-symbolic “traumatic kernel” that does not allow the sex/gender dichotomy to be challenged; all these are nothing but the bourgeois fantasies of twitchy academics. It is their typical fear of uncertainty that Lacanian believers channel into the fantasy of an (unknowable) monster lying under the bed of the symbolic order or of a trauma that anchors the dichotomies of the Leviathan. Leaving these bureaucrats to their quivering shenanigans, here is the important question: “Can we use some of this stuff as a starting point for experimenting with fantasising and desiring otherwise, for inventing our own flying-machines that can take us as far as we can possibly get from the bourgeois dispositifs of enjoyment?”
Psychoanalysis, although worshipping its own - white-bearded or beardless – Fathers (and a few patriarchal Mothers), tried to avoid giving a specific face, or identity to this uncertainty and created a meta-term, a generic, faceless representation, like “X” in math, that explains the failure of meaning to close: the Real. Despite its facelesness, however, the Real is not less of a fantasmatic representation than God. It is psychoanalysis’ own attempt to give a name and attributes to uncertainty, to the lack. It is an attempt to explain and mend our anxiety while pretending that we are theorising. And although these academics claim the nature of the Real to be unknowable, they seem to know for sure what it does and how it acts, just like priests do about the “mysterious ways” of their god. Indeed, psychoanalysis seems to speak of the "Lacanian Real" in much the same way that theism preaches of "Paradise Lost," or in the same way that science talked about completing the Standard Model™ with the fucking Higg’s boson (not to mention the latest endeavour of science, which is to account for the missing “dark matter”). The Lacanian sect seems, at the moment, busy building a church of the Real. And let’s not pretend that the similarities end there.
Technical Note for Academic Jargon Fetishists: The Real is produced by a process of figurative substitution that attempts to symbolise that which the symbolic cannot represent that is, “symbolic failure” or the Other’s lack; and projects this threatening failure outside the symbolic field. The Real is, then, a necessity of the symbolic, which cannot account for its lack without representing a radical heterogeneity that is external to it, a field of the un-representable. The Real cannot be meaningfully integrated into the symbolic precisely because it is a representation of its own lack, of its failure to create full meaning. What we repress and exclude as the Real is the encounter with the Other’s lack, with the lack of closure of our reality and of any object within it.
Thus, the Real is the name given to that which impedes the definitive closure of any identity, perpetually disrupting and making unintelligible our systems of difference; and it is in this guise, as that which exposes the lack that the Real is represented as a trauma by the bourgeois subject, whose enjoyment depends on denying lack. I will also use this opportunity to propose a hypothesis of what the death drive is: the death drive is the form of enjoyment that we derive from pushing towards an encounter with the Real. The death drive is destructive, but only if we consider that order, organisations, institutions and certainty are constructive. It is hostile, but only if we find relief in integration, integrity or sovereignty. The death drive is menacing, but only if we crave for “solid”, “natural”, unequivocal identities.
b) “You’re using the Real so as to argue that the binary sex/gender system is impossible to change? Really?”
When most Lacanians discuss “sex difference” they define the Real in exactly the opposite manner from what I have just been doing above: in their hands, the Real becomes some sort of hard – but still impossible to represent, wtf? - kernel that impedes the disruption of the binary symbolic system of differences we know as “sex/gender”. For Lacanians, the subject’s “proper” entry into the symbolic world of meaning, thought, desire, language and sociality depends on the subject’s “correct” assumption of their sex/gender (male-man or female-woman). From this Oedipal moment on, the subject is definitively positioned on one of the mutually exclusive paths of either masculine or feminine desire and jouissance. Even while Lacanians go through great pains to convince everyone that they are not biological determinists because they understand gender/sex as symbolic positions rather than as biological givens, their dogma insists that since that dramatic Oedipal moment, one of these two poles - man or woman - is fixed into the subject’s psyche and reality in manners as inescapable as if they were a biological destiny. “No matter what one does or says, there is a sense in which transcending gender remains impossible’” argues one of them, who also fancies himself as a radical queer theorist. This remains a deterministic and rudimentary scheme, still holding on to the skirts of nineteenth century medical reasoning and to the belt of patriarchy, showing Lacanian psychoanalysis to be not a supersession of biological determinism but on the contrary, a reformulation of determinism in a language more palatable for today’s trendy patriarchal-academic circles (desire, jouissance, blah-blah...).
How can Lacanians argue that, while the Other lacks and therefore there is no certainty, fixity or extra-linguistic determination to reality and to the psyche, the feminine and masculine psychic positions are fixed, rigid and can never merge, hybridize, vary or transform? By positing that sex difference is Real and by defining the Real as an ontological form external to the symbolic and the imaginary. Et voila: the fantasy of the Real returns with a vengeance to eliminate for these valiant theorists the uncertainty of sex/gender and fix it in impossible to break moulds. In this fantasy, the Real stops being a threatening (non)representation of the Other’s lack and becomes its opposite, that which secures the stability of the symbolic system of differences, making them as immutable as nature. The effects of this soothing fantasy of the Real-as-anchor-of-binary-difference is Lacan followers’ almost religious insistence on heterosexual difference as inescapable and foundational of all meaning because it is Real.
[In jargon: the Real mutates from a negative limit with no ontic content to a transcendental limit with an ontic determination of its own].
Once reassured by this fantasy that the sex/gender dichotomy is certain and is indispensable to “normal” (i.e. bourgeois) life, Lacanians can start making fascist claims in the name of public good: for example the concerted campaign of French Lacanians like Sylviane Agacinski, Irene Thery, Francoise Héritier and Jacques-Alain Miller against the extension of legally sanctioned alliances to non-hetero people, which successfully promoted legislation denying a gay couple’s right to adopt (not that I think that legal rights, marriage or adoption are a tool of freedom or anything worth fighting for, I think they are the opposite of that; but the “progressive” bourgeoisie sure does believe in them). Their justification is the mantra that Lacanians wheel out whenever they feel daddy is under threat: without a strong father that can block the mother’s unbound desires to devour her child, psychosis threatens the latter (that is: without a strong hetero daddy, the Oedipus phase cannot be “correctly” concluded). Of course, the Lacanian scarecrow of an assured disaster following the Father’s decapitation (‘père ou pire’) is nothing but a paranoid patriarchal fantasy, not different from the nineteenth century myths that education will make women sterile.
To prevent any heretic attempt at describing sex/gender as a fundamental governing dispositif and at encouraging its destruction, which would live psychoanalysis without its only explanatory framework, the Oedipus, and without clients, the Lacanian believers make any such gender-assassination attempt equivalent with psychosis. In their circles, any attempt to transcend the sex/gender difference signals a desire to abolish the Real that is, to transcend castration and enjoy fully; and for the believers, such desire diagnoses a psychotic psychic structure. It seems bizarre to argue, as these followers of Lacan do, that the bourgeois experiences gender difference as a barrier to their enjoyment and tries to eliminate uncertainty by transcending gender (if only…): isn’t it rather that, in “modernity”, the bourgeois experiences castration as the impossibility to be a “real man” or a “real woman”? Aren’t we experiencing the obsessive activity of dispositifs that promise full enjoyment once the subject has fully and unambiguously assumed their gender as inexorable “natural difference”? Aren’t bourgeois cultural productions flashing in front of our eyes endless figures of the exceptional Father or Mother that experience no sex/gender anxiety? I would think that in the gendered and gendering modern fantasy, the subject will try to become complete, certain, non-castrated by identifying with these phallic figures of the Mother and Father, be they Marilyn Monroe or Elvis, and not with a bigendered or ungendered phallic figure as the Lacanian believers argue. And if, as I believe, the systematic violence of modernity is an attempt to cover its castration anxiety with phallic objects (gold, profit, capital, victory, sovereignty) or with metaphysical essences (real masculinity/femininity, racial purity, ethnicity, blood, science), then this modern mass violence is an always gendered and predominantly heterosexual attempt to transcend uncertainty (Sarah Kane’s play “Blasted” harrowingly exposes the always-intimate connections between gender violence and militaristic atrocities, check it out).
If sex difference is instituted by the patriarchal law’s injunction to make a piece of flesh into the symbol of one’s being, then what precisely in this process escapes language and the social; what is this non-symbolic remainder, the Real in sex difference? This ridiculous dogma of sex/gender as being Real places sex/gender difference beyond critical analysis, making it into “a truly felicitous instrument of power” (Butler). And if some Lacanians assume that it is impossible, at the risk of losing one’s mind, to move away from our binary gendered and heterosexist order, are we to understand that the Real would block any change in the current dichotomous symbolic order? Are, then, any attempts to dismantle the State, capitalism, colonialism, racism, homophobia and so on plagued by the same predicament of either representing psychotic delusions or opening the gates for something much worse than the dispositifs we are attacking? Maybe this aggressive conservatism is how Lacanian believers fantasize that they can get rid of uncertainty; but calming their panic comes at the price of normalising atrocity.
Statement: “Psychoanalysis is domestication-imposing bullshit; but we can pirate interesting things from its well-endowed coffers”
The psychoanalytical fantasies of the Real as a lost realm of fullness; or as an unmediated bond with nature severed by the entry into the symbolic world of intersubjectivity, language, desire, etc.; or as a realm of extra-discursive negativity, a dark entity lurking outside the symbolic and attacking it regularly; or as an extra-symbolic “traumatic kernel” that does not allow the sex/gender dichotomy to be challenged; all these are nothing but the bourgeois fantasies of twitchy academics. It is their typical fear of uncertainty that Lacanian believers channel into the fantasy of an (unknowable) monster lying under the bed of the symbolic order or of a trauma that anchors the dichotomies of the Leviathan. Leaving these bureaucrats to their quivering shenanigans, here is the important question: “Can we use some of this stuff as a starting point for experimenting with fantasising and desiring otherwise, for inventing our own flying-machines that can take us as far as we can possibly get from the bourgeois dispositifs of enjoyment?”