T
he various television series examined in this book require a rethinking of both narrative structure and the subject as theorized in the space between Lacan and Deleuze. In this chapter, I want to argue for a richer, more nuanced understanding of subjectivity that develops by attending to botha Deleuzian and a Lacanian understanding of the subject. Some broad assumptions are made that claim that there are many transpositional concepts between these two systems of thought that coalesced after the French publication of Anti-Oedipus in 1972, when Lacan placed more and more emphasis on the psychic register of the Real.This took place about the time of S XX (Encore)in 1973, although Slavoj Z∨iz∨ek (1999a, 29–31) sometimes maintains that the break between the “standard” and
“late” Lacan occurs as early as S VII, the Ethicsseminar of 1959–60. Rather than concentrating on the discursive functions as developed in S XVII (Envers), also the year he rejected Freud’s fixation on Oedipus, Lacan begins to further explore the unchained floating signifier outside the Symbolic Order that is charged with jouissance, which he eventually names le sinthome. This is a point at which the fundamental life of an individual’s singularity is constituted. However, it is nei- ther a symptom in the traditional sense as constituting the truth of desire coded within the symbolic order, nor is it a fantasy that fills the gap in the symbolic, generating belief and making it tolerable to live with uncertainty. Neither is this formulation a lackthat is a site of an undecidable and ambiguous location within a system. Rather, this psychic kernel as sinthomeis “life” itself, pure immanence as theorized in Deleuze’s last essay (2001), the ultimate ground of one’s being, a singularitythat is a radical excess, a nomadic virtualdifference that Lacan asks us to identify with and accept. It is thus outside of psychoanalysis proper, heading in the direction of schizophrenia. If Deleuze and Guattari chose Kafka as their Exemplar, Lacan chose James Joyce. As argued earlier, the dividing line between psychotic and schizophrenic remains contestatory. For me, Lacan and Deleuze come together in the virtual Real—the X of self-refleXion, as I hope can be intu- itively shown.
The information society, or designer society as I would prefer to call it, under global capitalism has forced social scientists to rethink the subject—to update the liberal paradigm to its present, neoliberal form. This has generally developed under the umbrella term poststructuralism, often hailed as a radical turn where identity and power grasped through linguistic discourses has produced a decen- tered and cynical subject ripe for multiple modes of niche consumption and ide- ological disavowal (Z∨iz∨ek 1989, 21). Multiculturalism, for example, could be managed through an anthropological discourse that enabled discrete articulations of each culture before “hybridity” proved to ruin its premises. Yet, even the nuances of hybridity could be categorized before too long. DNAPrint Genomics is able to analyze a person’s DNA to determine the exact percentage of the person’s Indo-European, sub-Saharan, East Asian, and Native American heritage and then assign him or her to categories such as white, black, East Asian, Native American, or mixed race, reminiscent of eugenic experiments at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, in an attempt to confuse easy signs of demarcation, the Mongrel Collective (www.mongrelx.org) constructs identities that prove to have no definitive allegiance to race and ethnicity along color lines, trying to confuse any easy signs of demarcation, closer to the D+G’s sense of “becoming-animal” in their orientation where identification plays on a moment of co-recognition at an existential level, thus failing to be considered purebred.
The poststructuralist psyche seems ideally suited to maintaining itself within a capitalist information society (designer society) where flows and the emergence of complex systems such as the stock market require stochastic mathematics to deal with the impending uncertainties. Late postindustrial capital is being slowly left behind. We no longer sell our labor to quasi-paternalistic businesses. The hyper- flexible job market insists that we now sell ourselves as the product to businesses and consumers in a general market through Web pages and designer vitae—as
“immaterial labour” in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) terms. The neoliberalist subject has morphed into complexity, and it is precisely the new sci- ences of complexity and enactivism (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991)—which slide easily into various humanist ecological theories, such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, sustainable economy, social ecology, and so on—that enable a glob- alized vision of capitalism to sustain itself. These developments usher in a new biologism that, at one end of the spectrum, falls dangerously close into to becom- ing a renewed eugenic movement, a neo-Darwinism with no soul where DNA mapping and the new explosion of epigenetic research has skewed the promises of the Human Genome Project. Now it has been discovered that environmental fac- tors can affect genes; while on the other end there is a New Age ecological spiri- tualism, a holism whereby everything is connected to everything through various embedded layers.
In these accounts, cognition triumphs as new forms of rationalization, perhaps best exemplified by the initial philosophical direction marked by Daniel Dennett (1991), come to the fore. How far should Humberto Maturana and Francisco Valera (1980) be followed into updating the paradigm of evolution as an autopo- etic system characterized by “satisficing” (a suboptimal solution that is taken to be satisfactory)? Do their theories apply equally to Homo sapiens? Should culture be
swallowed up by this new biologism of complexity? Is there not something “more”
about our species Being that sets us apart, gives us a specificity in terms of encephalization from other species? Did not the emergence of anthropology, admittedly from racial roots in the nineteenth century, argue that it is not adap- tationbut minimal modificationthat specifically characterizes our species? Our species is an active shaper of its psyche (the flows of desiring production) and environment through language and technology, which includes writing, abstract symbolization, and our relationship to machines. Or, has this now come to be per- ceived as the worst kind of conceit, simply an overbloated misrecognition, for cer- tainly we are not in total control of this modification process, what Norbert Elias once called the “civilizing process”?
Between the biological influences of Nature and the determinisms of Culture lie Freud’s speculations regarding the drives (Tiebe), the primary process of cre- ativity and secondary processes of signification that mediate the two in an uncon- scious complex. This is the realm of theinhuman. It creates monsters and aliens outside our control through both negative and affirmative desire. In this sense I treat psychoanalysis as the complexity theory of philosophical anthropology spe- cific to Homo sapiens. On the one side, the technologies of culture provide inhu- man prosthetic machines. And, on the other side is the inhuman voice with its music. When embodied, the voice is able to coalesce the drives into the human symbolic order. Disembodied, the voice becomes a viral infestation of psychosis, inverting the drives. This space of in-betweenness, as the gap between Nature and Culture, forms the inhumanX in self-refleXivity.
What is needed is a link between metapsychology and social theory to grasp the emancipatory potential of freeing up the internal compulsions of culture, especially when the superego within designer capitalism demands so loudly that we enjoy! Freud’s basic insight that reason must be understood dialectically as repressed desire—as that which emerges in and through the demands of the pri- mary drives (the demands of the id) on the one hand and the demands of the superego (society) on the other—helps overcome a strictly cognitive orientation.
It is a dialectic marked by repression and rebellion, a return of the repressed in various prohibitionary forms of which youth are the primary suspects and bear- ers. Psychoanalysis in its Lacanian and Deleuzian forms provides such a possibil- ity by attempting to “(un)ground” desire at both the molecular and molar levels via the fantasy structures generated by the human ego as the seat of consciousness.
Grasped psychoanalytically, these televised youth narratives offer some insight into what is being desired in the context of the contradictions that have emerged in a designer information and consumerist society such as ours.
From Self-Reflection to Self-Reflexion
In contrast to cognitive approaches, here an effort is made to develop the neces- sity to turn to an unconscious self that is informed by self-refleXion, where the X marks the spot for unconscious molecular subjectivity of the affective inhu- man. Lacan’s unconscious Jebecomes informed by Deleuzian virtuality of time
that impacts the potentialities of actualization. The theoretical shift from self- reflection to self-reflexion is well established in the literature. It is often associ- ated with the sociological writings of Ulrich Beck (1992) and Scott Lash (1990;
Lash and Friedman 1992) as the transition from industrial to informational modernity, from the logic of structures to the logic of flows (Castells 1989), and the indeterminacy of risk and risk-taking concerning those flows, often referred to as the coexistence of “simple (or first) modernity” and “reflexive (or second) modernization.”
Jürgen Habermas (1978 chapters 10–12) and Anthony Giddens (1991), who have also used the term self-reflexion, are associated more with postindustrializa- tion or late modernism (especially Giddens) as “reflective modernization” rather than with information (designer) society. Habermasian self-reflexive social the- ory, with its emphasis on hidden self-interests, placed a high value on the struc- ture of agency and emancipatory politics. The starting point of psychoanalysis for Habermas was the experience of resistance that stands in the way of free and pub- lic communication of repressed contents. Self-reflexion leads to understanding these repressed symbolic structures as a form of enlightened cognition or remem- beringwhere psychoanalysis becomes a variant of depth-hermeneutics. Memory and its vicissitudes are more suited to the self-refleXivity of the unconscious where the signifier fails.
Unfortunately, the Habermasian position still maintains that language dis- closeslogosand makes it present. The presumption is that a metalanguage is still possible, which constitutes the Being of all beings. Logocentric metaphysics in this case continues to function positively as presence, disclosure, and understanding.
Derrida’s critique has made such a position untenable. It is not radical enough for Lacan, Guattari, and Z∨iz∨ek, for whom language functions negatively as lack, dis- simulation, and alienation; nor is it tenable for Deleuze for whom minoritarian affirmative language generates forceful performative concepts that are able to intervene empirically to escape institutional molar confinement.
Psychoanalytic knowledge as “truth” is theorized negatively, not positively, for language is the expression and the movement of desire. Desire forms the meta- physics of “nonbeing,” of the drive to “be”—as Freud’s “death drive” that is beyond the “pleasure principle.” It is the will to survive, to live. This is a perpetual alien- ation of the unconscious “I” within the imaginary “me” (ego) so as to be recog- nized by the symbolic order, often referred to as the big Other. Nonbeing is therefore equated with Freud’s death drive. It is a “positive transformative princi- ple,” a form of becoming for both Deleuze and Lacan. One need only look at the paradoxes that surround G. W. Bush’s disavowal of the tragedy that has unfolded in Iraq to confirm such a proposition. He believes that history will vindicate him no matter what happens, no matter what the “will” of the American people might be. He seems oblivious to the possibility that his administration may well be approaching the oxymoronic line of “democratic dictatorship.” Bush’s jouissance now supplants that of the nation, forming a growing disconnect between them.
Such a fantasy is riddled with Oedipal transferences in his refusal (one imagines) to listen to and receive advice from the one person closest to him who has had firsthand experience of a Gulf war—his father. In every respect he is a “lame duck”
president, no longer responsive to the electorate, yet in terms of his “death drive,”
he continues on. There is no turning back.
It becomes a moot point as to whether desire as lack should be naïvely inter- preted as desiring something because one does not have it. This is certainly Imaginary desire, but Real desire in the Lacanian sense is every bit as productive as desire theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. Daniel W. Smith (2004, 641) pin- points this when he quotes Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus(1983) text: “The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself ” (A-O, 27).1Smith makes the point that Anti-Oedipusis a theory of the Real and that Anti-Oedipuscontains no negative comments about Lacan. “The true difference in nature is not between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but between the Real machinic element, which con- stitutes desiring-production, and the structural whole of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which merely forms a myth and its variants” (A-O, 83). There is agree- ment that Lacan oscillated between two poles of desire: the first, as it related to objet a as a productive desiring machine; the second, as it related to the big Other—a signifier introducing a certain notion of lack as fantasy (A-O, 27n).
Deleuze and Guattari chose to explore the machinic notion of desire, but isn’t this very oscillation between these two poles that they identify, which Smith points out (642), the way desire is mobilized in post-Oedipal society? Caught, as it were, between rejecting the transcendence of the phallic signifier as Queer theorizing has shown (especially Grist, 2003), and moving toward a posthuman paradigm (e.g., Rosi Braidotti 2002). I take this to be also the description of the superego of enjoyment in its contradictory demands of permissiveness and abstinence.
In his theory of structuration (1984), Giddens, like Habermas, stressed agency as self-identity in its “capacity to keep a particular narrative going” (1991, 54, orig- inal emphasis) through lifestyle choices that “concern[s] the very core of self- identity, its making and remaking” (81). The self is parceled out into so many
“lifestyle sectors,” while the body becomes “reflexively mobilized” (82). This is the apotheosis of the poststructuralist subject. “Institutional reflexivity” has become the norm as each institution is forced to examine its own grounds, just like the self-help industry that focused on individual therapy as reflexive “methodology of life-planning” (180).2Both Habermas and Giddens, as sociologists, had affinities with Marxism’s questioning of capitalism and its consumerism. However, Giddens has been severely criticized for his overemphasis on rationalism (Mestrovic 1998), while Habermas’s theory of “communicative action” (1984)—the core of which was an “ideal speech situation” where an equal playing field among actors was to be maintained through speech acts undistorted by ideology or misrecognition—
was equally criticized for its naïve rationalist emphasis (a representative array can be found in Thompson and Held 1982; Johnson 1991).
Reflection, the older term that both Habermas and Giddens attempted to problematize, continues to maintain a subject-object dichotomy, assuming apodictic knowledge and certainty. As Bruno Latour (1993) pointed out, the
“modern constitution” was bequeathed to us in the seventeenth century by Robert Boyle, according to whom nature was independent of the speaker, while Thomas Hobbes theorized the social and political order that was independent of material circumstances. Although this naïve self-reflective view has been questioned in
posthumanist circles that recognize the extension of “mind” into the environ- ment, what remains missing is, yet again, the endogenous problem of inner con- flict that psychoanalysis recognizes as being fundamental to the human condition. Our species is doomed to the metaphysics of desire. We exist between nature and culture. From the side of nature, we seem to be the most advanced encephalized animal, capable of language and technologies that can change our physiological nature. From the side of culture, we are overdetermined beings, caught by our own follies, which we (must) believe in.
Be that as it may, Beck and Lash’s use of self-reflexion is claimed to be a step beyond the naïvety of self-reflection. Structure and agency are once again rethought in an information age by maintaining their demise, which is comple- mentary to a systems theory of complex networks like that of Niklas Luhmann, according to whom agency seems to disappear entirely, his antihumanism being in direct opposition to the humanism of Habermas. Rather than a dualistic reflectiv- ity of agency and structure, reflexivity in the formulations of Beck and Lash now becomes monistic or immanent—the subject is placed “in” the world, recognizing its multiple interconnections. This is not some revelatory tenet, yet—in the sci- ences at least—it comes as a late arrival. As in Latour’s claim (1993), “we have never been modern.” The human and nonhuman are intertwined; the more-than-human world of the environment informs humanity. A nonlinear notion of reflexivity takes precedence where a system’s disequilibrium and destabilization are produced through open system feedback loops. Complex systems change rather than repro- duce as a result of noise or “chaos.” The self-reflexive subject is said to be devoid of any stable subject position, but must continually weigh the uncertainty of knowl- edge in “possibilistic” terms. With a New Age twist to it, self-reflexion can be skewed toward neoliberalist market exploitations as described in The Secret(Byrne, 2006), whereby an individual learns to harness the cosmic energy that surrounds it. The illusion of complete agency is restored.
Such a position is contrary to a Deleuzian stance whereby (drawing from Henri Bergson) the ontological couplings of the actual and the virtual are opposed to those of the real and the possible. “The possible has no reality (although it may have an actuality); conversely, the virtual is not actual, but as such possesses a reality. . . . On the other hand, or from another point of view, the possible is that which is ‘realized’ (or not realized)” (1988, 96–97). For Deleuze, the possible, which lies at the core of Beck and Lash’s theory of the sub- ject, is realized through resemblance and limitation. The virtual, in contrast, is actualized through difference and creation. Thus, the possible is that which is
“retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it” (DR,212), meaning that the possible is always already some kind of representation of the real that appears to preexist it. It appears that the possible is offered as a “real” alternative when it signals an ideal fulfillment of an already given reality. This is basically how The Secretis sold to the masses of believers. One need only project what one desires and it will come true. If it doesn’t, then the failure rests within oneself for having failed to adequately harness the cosmic energy of the outside.
Beck (Beck and Willms 2004, 63) uses the term disembedded individuation to suggest the idea that individual actionhas become the basic unit of social