Part Two of the HOS: The Repressive Hypothesis

In the past "one did not speak of sex" and this effect was produced through a prudish series of mutually referential prohibitions. Or at least, this is the conventional account of things according to Foucault. For him it seems the real key is that speaking of sex became somehow a novel and transgressively valenced move. To whisper in the corners about sex could be taken as a form of noble resistance, or at least something which disclosed a particular character of the soul: "Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surfance of the sins, it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh" (20). I really like his prose here--confession is a spelling out of the excess of desire, but very rarely turns into a discussion of the spilling out of this excess on bodily acts.

Endless and extensive discourses manufacturing of "the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex." (20). One can see the workings of the argument here--as a greater and greater number of acts and thoughts became linked to "sex" and this linkage was performed in language, it becomes possible to think of sex as a thing, and not think of each discrete and variable act or thought as something unto itself.

The concern with discussing sex moved into the public under the guise of population discussion Monitoring birth rates, death rates, marital statuses etc. were objects of interest, and as a result sex could be directly articulated to the national interest of a population. Because I am reading this for a Queer Rhetorics class, it seems silly for me to not note that this provides one explanation for homophobia in its early forms- "perverse" sex not aimed at procreation was a direct threat to the health of the nation, because it would not be sex that would increase the size of the population, and thus not make the "body politic" stronger. Certainly this is not limited to what we would call "same-sex" acts: the interesting kernel at the heart of these prohibitions is that way in which it also delimits opportunities for physical activity in the marital bedroom in relation to acts intended for procreation.

I also want to quote at length from Foucault on silence:

"Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. " (27)

Central to understanding this passage is importing Foucault's notion of power as productive, not destructive, as outlined in Discipline and Punish. One would mix this critique thoroughly with his criticism of the repressive hypothesis. Traditional notion of silence: it is demanding and waiting to be filled with something, with something that has been neutralized and driven out of its proper space. Critique of this notion: it assumes that there is something which belongs in that natural space, and moreover, assumes some uniform "thing" existed to be driven from that space, as opposed to opening up to the possibility that that very "thing" was created via discourse. "Visibility is a trap" says the Foucault of the prisoners, and here that is clear: sex, made into an object which circulates and both enforces itself and is enforced upon, is controlled owing to the very visibility of it as a sensible notion.

There is another curious moment, where Foucault posits a structural answer to the "Why" question: that sex is an object of manipulation to serve economic and conservative social interests? He says he does not know, but he does know that if this is the case, production, not repression, is the means.

"Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse." (47). "Aberrant" sexual behaviors are not the result of the failed universalization of a program of Puritan regulation, nor from the repression and reemergence of drives and desires. Rather, the behaviors are produced from the discursive regulation and constitution of a notion of "sex". They are products of "the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures" (48). They are not "results" but rather, they just are.

Close Reading: Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty

On the advice of David Wittenberg, I read this essay, subtitled "A New Sophism".....

Lacan begins his story with a logical puzzle of sorts: three prisoners have had colored dots fastened to themselves, out of their direct line of sight, so they they may only infer what color their dot is from the dots of the other prisoners. In the example, the prison warden only uses white dots, not making any use of the black ones.

The perfect solution, Lacan outlines is one in which all three of the prisoners walk through the door at the same time:

"I am a white, and here is how I know it. Since my companions were whites, I thought that, had I been a black, each of them would have been able to infer the following: "If I too were a black, the other would have necessarily realized stragiht away that he was a white and he would have left immediately; therefore I am not a black. And both would have left together, convinced they were whites. As they did nothing of the kind, I must be a white like them."

Lacan offers this solution as a sort of sophistic provocation He defines sophism as "a significant example for the resolution of the forms of a logical function at the historical moment at which the problems these forms raise presents itself to philosophical examnation". I will attempt to break this down.

"For the resolution of the forms of a logical function". So the problem itself is viewed as a sort of object on which perform logical operations? It is a palette on which we can paint with dialectic. That doesn't really sound like exactly what I mean, because he seems to intimate that applying logic has a certain sort of constraining effect (his consistent swipes at Sartre standing), and painting seems less limited (but it also is, by the size of the palette, the available colors, the sorts of paints and brushes one has). Upshot: the problem is an object to perform a proof upon.

"at the historical moment at the problems these forms raise presents itself to philosophical examination". Well, thats a mouthful. Sophistry of course carries all sorts of negative connotations, recent attempts to save them (ie Poulakos) nonwithstanding. I feel most comfortable forwarding the following generic notion of what "sophistry" tends to be thought of- distracting from the proper with reference to verbal/rhetorical guile and cunning. This at least seems to be the most common pejorative lobbed at the sophists.

So the problem itself is a space for problems embedded within logic itself to come out, to demand their own interrogation. A sort of new form of Zeno's Paradox, perhaps. Zeno's trickery about space served to make the point that one could not actually get anywhere else if they moved in halves. Of course folks could still make it from point x to point y, but the upshot seems to be that sophistry deceives or alters reality, or at least its perception.

The sophism, we should remember, is the solution itself. We should question its "neat cuteness", as a sort of rom com of logic. We will determine its sophistry if its presents itself "as a logical error" (163).

Lacan wants to unseat the clever solution to the problem by acting as "the good logician, odious to the world". He wants to nuke and fracture this particular "meet cute" of problem and solution. His "discussion of the Sophism". He draws out a "hestitation problem", one that the sophistic solution finds difficult. The immediate movement of all three figures towards the door would probably cause them to hesitate, and second guess the motivations of their fellow prisoners.

Essentially the problem is as follows: how does a subject conclude anything when everything is learned/apprehended at the same moment? The answer seems to be something along the lines of: the moment of judging and the moment of acting are inseparable. I will try and clarify this insight.

If the subject may only take into account real behavior, and the subjects all act according to what they observe, then all subjects move at precisely the same moment, eliding the possible moment in time in which one subject could obtain from the actions of others information about their own status as white beaded or black beaded. (Again, Lacan's reference to Sophism is really interesting here- it made me think again of Xeno's paradox, and how the use of rhetorical trickeration in that case made it seem possible that a subject might never be able to reach a destination. Similarly, here we find that a number of destinations are foreclosed a priori by the spatialization of time).

So actions only occur concurrently, owing to the fact that the anticipation of a future anterior blackness/whiteness has encouraged the subjects to act/judge in a particular way in a moment. The moment of contemplation about all of this is present in the logical discussion but seems somewhat fictive- what is important is that in acting in the moment, each subject has made it so they believe themselves to be white beaded. The suspended motions necessary to make the logical outcome of whiteness so never actually occur. But it is the figuration of their possibility that makes the subjects behave in ways so that they believe themselves to be a particular color.

The moment of contemplation of actions and of observing the actions of the other prisoners does not exist temporally, only spatially. Logic, Lacan encourages us, is not to be thought spatially. Logic is capable of finding things within its own terms, quite capably (this is analagous to the first position found in Lacan's Seminar on Poe's Purloined Letter). Logic is able to find its answers, however, by neturalizing and denying its own status as another position in a realm of coordinates. The logical viewpoint is the one from which other subjects and actions and thoughts may be viewed. Thus a spatialized logic is no logic at all, in a sense.

Thinking spatially CANNOT explain why the suspended motions do not occur. It provides only a rather uninteresting answer to the asked question- are the prisoners white, or black? The intial objection (that the subjects will doubt owing to the behavior of others), only makes sense if we conceive of this problem in the essay spatially. The suspended motion would be thought to be information disclosing, that is, revealing something about a world of subjects out there and their views about the world.

It is, however, in this essay that Lacan does some work to point the way for the theory of the "as if" that has become increasingly important, discussing "times of possibility". As a rhetorician, I was immediately drawn to the kairotic possibilities here. The subjects, in behaving "as if" the logic outlined by Lacan was operative, have essentially made themselves into the color predestined by the future anterior which excludes "so there will not be" a subject left behind, without proper knowledge of their color. As Lacan draws explicit parallells in this essay to his essay on the Mirror Stage, I do not feel too far gone in noting that a subject who "does not know his color" so to speak, yet is situated collectively by a drive to "outdo" the other is the paradigmatic case of subjectivity (and Lacan says as much here).

After all, to have an "if...then" statement, the if must proceed the then. But if the if proceeds the then, there must be a moment of time in between the if and then. However Lacan seems to be raising a major problem with this mode of thinking: What if the "if...then" proposition makes itself operative by appearing to be confirmed by behaviors that fall in line within the proposition yet not interrogating the conditions for the possibility of "if...then" to be operative. More concretely, it is misleading to explain the way the prisoners come to their conclusions in the way when it seems to be the case that the prisoners came to this conclusion not through a process of logical testing, but rather making the situation through their judgment of their own status via the act of advancing toward the door. Right or wrong about their own status, they proceed, with the future anterior here posited as that of the situation of not properly knowing ones status- the idea being that gathering information is a sort of zero-sum game, and one is better off making a certainty than being subjected to anothers certainty. This possibility is allowed by lacan, when he argues that a subject who paused after the other two moved would have simply subjected themselves to the world made by the other two subjects.

Embedded within the decision to move towards the door is a conclusion and thus an act of judgment about ones status, much as the act of becoming a subject is itself a decision which guarantees the reaffirmation of the simultaneous fiction and possibility of being a whole subject measured against the Other. The possibility for truth lies in the existence of others, who may confirm or deny, giving rise to rightness and error, each of which is already predestined. Entering into the symbolic is an already chosen departure towards a door with a conclusion in hand about one's "color", and it occurs regardless of what one's "actual color" is.

I might write more on this essay but man, its rugged. Anyone with an angle on spatialization vs. temporalization in this thing, I am all ears.

Essay on the Mirror Stage- A Reading

A Disclaimer:

One thing I will do a lot on this blog is to do close readings of essays or book sections. I do not anticipate ANY of this readings will prove authoritative, or even good. One thing that I am continually reminded of is that this academic business is very, very hard work, and so a lot of what I post here I hope I a sort of first draft of a thought. A major reason I have decided to blog is because of the “iceberg theorem” that I think governs academic writing. As in the case of the iceberg, whose heft is generally hidden under the sea, so too do good essays have beneath them months and months of difficult, hard work found in close reading and developing ideas. These ideas may not explicitly show up in the essay and yet do so much work for the writer that they seem to me to be invaluable.

So to contextualize this reading a little bit: I have turned to this essay of Lacan’s in the process of developing further an essay I wrote on Vladimir Putin in the spring semester last year. I need to understand better the functions of the Ideal/Ego and Ego/Ideal so I can more competently reflect on the relationship between Time magazine’s Person of the Year feature and the national consciousness.

Lacan begins by examining the ego, and states outright that “this experience sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito.” So, “I think, therefore I am” is to be problematized. Mimesis is here privileged as the primary mover in the development of subjectivity. Lacan’s exemplary child recognizes his own image owing to the ability to manipulate it in the mirror, where he “playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment” (75).

Lacan is after insights about an “ontological structure” of the human world. This is a question of Being, not a question of knowledge. The mirror stage kickstarts an imaginary identification. The dependent infant, seeing a specular image is “manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordrial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as a subject” (76). This is the Ideal-Ego, which remains fictional and “will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming”. I understand this image to be the ideal to which the subject will always move itself to become a fully formed subject. It is purely an ideal—a necessary fiction. We might think of this image as an always receding horizon—the subject seeks constantly to reach this horizon, to fill out this empty profile, yet is prohibited from doing so.

More fascinating still are the passages on 78, where Lacan speaks of the internal pressure of the mirror stage and how the subject is pushed from insufficiency to anticipation. If all the subject experienced was insufficiency, subjectivity’s drive towards completion might stop out of despair. If all the subject experienced was a pleasurable anticipation, movement would also stop—the subject would wish to sustain in that very moment. Lacan calls the resulting development “orthopedic”. Doing some etymological work, the result is “the straight rearing of children” as the definition of the two roots that play into orthopedics. Here we can read the “straight” part to mean properly or orderly—the fragmented body of the child is made whole/orderly by the fictive projection of a complete image. Thus the fictive whole is adopted as a goal towards which a subject is always moving and straining, and believing in the achievement of this totality enables subjectivity.

All this business about the fragmented body I find fascinating, in light of all I have read lately about partial objects, fractured drives, and the multiple different ways of centering pleasure around various body parts. And of course here Lacan seems clearly to be making the “not-all of being” argument that Joan Copjec so aggressively makes in Imagine There’s No Woman.

So when does “the specular I turn into the social I? It is when the mirror stages ends, and the previously imagined image of I becomes “linked to socially elaborated situations” (79). Lacan says this is the point where “the whole of human knowledge mediated by the others desire”. The self image of “I” becomes threatened. The self defines the self against the other to ensure that the self remains independent—throughout the essay Lacan speaks of “armor” and “defenses”, indicating that the projection of the ego into the social is an identity risking enterprise, one that helps to ensure that the sense of the self is strengthened, even as the desire for the desire of the Other is strengthened.

The ego is about misrecoginition. The ego cannot be about recognition, because if this is the case, Lacan argues, the result of the consciousness of the Other is “Hegelian murder”—the inevitable conquest involved in the Master-Slave dialectic. Self-realization obtained only in suicide—the annihilation of the self is taken as the only evidence that the self could ever have existed in the first place. For Lacan, the fictive existence of the self as a whole in the first place better explains what is going on, and provides a safer theory of subjectivity. For the existentialist self is one given to inevitable conflict owing to the inevitable failing of identification. But the psychoanalytic self possesses narcissism as a limit to the faith in the self existing. All subjectivity is misrecognition, not non-recognition.