The Dislocations of the Real
5.2 Dealing with lack
To conclude this chapter, I will briefly discuss an article by Florentina Andreescu (2013) in which she proposes four ways to deal with trau- matic social change in its relation to fantasy formations: restoring a narrative thread, giving the enemy the face of one’s lover, emancipation possibilities and death as structure of fantasy invalidation.
As described above, the usual way to deal with trauma involves an attempt to include the traumatic events in a narrative. This applies to both the individual and the collective level. The person or community attempts to deal with the gap that has been revealed by ‘writing it over’, by disciplining it in a linear, chronological account. Andreescu gives the example of how a commercial clip featuring Clint Eastwood, broad- casted during the half-time interval of the 2012 Super Bowl (American football) game, attempted to give meaning to the severe and surprising breakdown of the allegedly secure and stable American capitalist system by use of an American football metaphor:
It’s halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half. It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game. (Chrysler, 2012 in Andreescu, 2013, p. 217)
Andreescu argues that the clip covers over and disciplines the apparent inconsistencies within the symbolic, capitalist order. The metaphor suggests that the cause of the traumatic rupture within economic reality is the nation’s lagging behind in the competition with a non-specified other (ibid., p. 217). This other purportedly intends to take away the enjoyment and security of the American nation: it is an antagonistic other that requires the people to come together and collectively respond to its threat. As such, the narrative of the clip can help to build a strong basis for community, albeit a community marked by sharp binary oppo- sitions. The first strategy thus consists of suturing the ruptured or dislo- cated space. As discussed above, some authors believe that every form of narrativization implies giving up ‘the special truth accessed through the encounter with the real’ (Andreescu, 2013, p. 217). The integration of the traumatic memory into other memories can be seen as a way of forgetting the traumatic episode, rather than remembering it. The moral issue raised by Kansteiner and Weilnböck (2008) is whether or not tales of heroism and sacrifice should be rejected out of hand, even if those affected by the crisis would like to embrace such stories and rebuild their confidence and belief in the ‘fictitious’ social order and its linear time.
A second way to deal with collectively experienced traumatic rupture is to refrain from narratives that offer clear explanations and solutions and to remain ambiguous about these issues. Andreescu recognizes this strategy in certain Bosnian works of fiction dealing with the traumatic
aftermath of the 1990s civil war. 2 Instead of clearly identifying an enemy or a culprit, these films problematize the aberrant logic that assigns people to one side or the other of a conflict. The enemy is shown to be a human being of flesh and blood, rather than a malevolent, inhumane other.
Trauma and conflict are depicted as formative of communities, bringing people closer to each other. In a similar vein, Andreescu heralds Ismel Prcic’s novel Shards as a work that testifies to the estranging temporality of trauma, refusing a return to the chronological time of ordinary narra- tive, associated with ideology and the state. In this second approach, then, ‘dealing with trauma [ ... ] entails refraining from covering over the traumatic wound or disciplining it with linear narratives, but, instead, it encourages marking its presence, lingering over, and encircling it again and again’ (Andreescu, 2013, p. 219). The idea is that we must remain
‘open’ to the impossible character of the traumatic past, to acknowledge it and to ‘allow it’ to return and disrupt linear narratives. In this way, we can attempt to access a knowledge ‘not available in narrative memory’
(ibid., p. 220).
A third way of dealing with traumatic social events is to embrace the invalidation of old identities, desires, dreams and so on. The awareness that the social order is ultimately unfounded and that the big Other does not necessarily hold all the answers can be viewed in a Lacanian light as the aforementioned ‘traversal of the fantasy’ ( la traversée du fantasme ). Because of the discussed central importance of fantasy, which regulates our enjoyment and relation to the Other, Lacan conceived the possibility that this foundational framework is reconfigured at the end of the analysis. This reconfiguration requires a distinct type of subjective activity, which Lacan theorized with his concept of the act. A successful subjective act has the power to change the entire organizing principle of the pre-existent world, as it introduces something formerly unthink- able. The valence and significance of all the terms by which we used to understand the situation is thereby affected: ‘it transforms what counts as significant in the framing of a situation’ (ibid. p. 220). This is the line of thought that I will pursue in the next chapter, as it offers the possibility to tie traumatic rupture to ‘emancipation possibilities’ and sociopolitical innovation, the eclipse of which the construct of PTSD has been repeatedly critiqued for.
The final outcome discussed by Andreescu involves a total eradica- tion of the very ‘structure of phantasy, pattern of thought, or matrix at the base of narratives produced in a social space’ (2013, p. 221). As it is this matrix that creates and sustains the subject, the destruction of this matrix equals nothing less than the death of the subject. An example
of such a ruthless traumatic destruction concerns the Native American community. The program of ethnic cleansing, involving massacres, genocide, pandemics, forced relocation and so on, carried out over multiple decades, has created severe problems for the Native American community to continue ‘life in the Symbolic’. There is no way back:
the destruction of the sociocultural life-world was so complete that it amounts to ‘symbolic death’: the total erasure of one’s identity. This is reminiscent of Zygmunt Bauman’s (1989) and Orlando Patterson’s (1985) work on the concept of ‘social death’ in relation to the Holocaust and slavery respectively.
6 Conclusion
In this chapter, the rupture caused by radical social events was connected to the moment of the political. Although the dislocation of the collec- tive fantasies that underpin sociopolitical reality is potentially trauma- tizing, in that it affects the kernel of our identity, many scholars have argued that it has a productive side as well. Controversial as it may sound, new communities and bonds can be forged in the fires of trauma.
The moment in which the big Other is shown to be lacking opens up a zone in which social and political experimentation becomes possible and desirable. Nevertheless, there is a delicate debate surrounding these theories. The insistence on a sustained ‘openness’ to trauma appears to neglect the therapeutic effects of interventions that re-install the validity and reliability of the symbolic order.
In the next chapter, I intend to show how Lacan’s concept of the act enables us to grasp how clinical, therapeutic work is not incompatible with political agency and novelty. Every Lacanian psychoanalysis inevi- tably leads to a confrontation with the lack in the Other. Perhaps this orientation is what distinguishes it from psychotherapeutic approaches.
Surprisingly, the treatment is explicitly organized to guide the subject to the traumatic point where signification breaks down. This betrays a unique ethical position: only at the point where the crack in the Other appears, is change possible. Only then is subjectivization necessitated and can the relation to the Other be redrawn. In the face of lack, a specific form of act is required. It is here that trauma, the ethical and the political intersect in the real.
131
The previous chapters introduced Lacan’s concept of the real and related it to the fields of trauma, ethics and politics respectively. In Chapter 3, it became clear that the real cannot simply be equated with the external referent of our representations in the sense of the Kantian das Ding . Although the real by definition resists recuperation in the symbolic, it should not be conceived as a natural realm of being before it is contami- nated and disrupted by the intervention of the signifier. Rather, the real is a strange sort of surplus created by our advent as beings of language, a dimension of being that only ever presents itself as a ‘lack’ in the signi- fying chains building up the plane of social reality. In Chapter 4, I drew primarily from Zupančič’s work to argue that Lacan grounded his specific conception of ethics in this lack. The fact that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ (Lacan, 1957–58) (that is, no external guarantee to ground the specific maxim that motivates our actions) necessitates the supplemen- tation of some sort of ‘act’ that compensates for this lack. In what first appears as a paradoxical claim, the subject is considered the after-effect of this ethical act. Subjectivity and ethics are thus intimately connected with the limits of the symbolic-imaginary order; it is where this order
‘lacks’ something that the subject is called into being in a moment of terror. Finally, in Chapter 5, I introduced the idea that the mechanisms of trauma, first described at the level of the individual psyche, equally function on a higher-order, collective level. Cultural trauma theory, as a prime advocate of this idea, is not so much concerned with the clini- cal-psychotherapeutic dimension of trauma: it does not aim at directly alleviating the suffering of populations affected by shared, horrible expe- riences. When the idea of trauma is applied to higher-order levels of anal- ysis, it rather functions as a lens through which the human existential condition and historical movements can be perceived and analyzed. The
6
Act and Event: Ethics and the
Political in Trauma
upshot of such an approach is that it links the moments of severe disrup- tion of the normal state of things (for instance in potentially traumatic situations of radical social change) with ‘creative’ or ‘productive’ destruc- tion (Eisenstein & McGowan, 2012): it is only when an existent frame- work is dislocated that the contingency and insufficiency of this frame is perceived. Moreover, the confrontation with the lack in the Other instills the desire to suture it once again, which requires the creative invention of new sociopolitical representations and structures. In this way, collective trauma models provide an alternative outlook that poten- tially remediates the depoliticizing effects associated with the dominant biomedical trauma approach. However, this focus on the productive and thus ‘positive’ potential of traumatic ruptures is seen by others as morally and practically untenable, as it seems to ‘celebrate’ the most destructive of experiences as opportunities to break free from the representational constraints of our ‘Cartesian prison’; a rare moment to get out of our own heads and to gain direct access to a truth beyond representation. As such, the suffering involved is apparently downplayed or placed on a second level with regard to the value of the ‘truths’ encountered in trauma.
Is there a way to think how psychotherapeutic change can be compat- ible with political agency, rather than obfuscating it? Can we draw from the accumulated knowledge and exciting ideas in philosophical and sociological theories on ‘evental’ change, that is, change through some kind of rupture with ‘what is’, so that the political dimension of trauma recovery can be accounted for? What stands in the way of appropriating these theories to remediate the shortcomings of the PTSD approach to trauma? In this chapter, I will argue that Lacan’s notion of the act plays a pivotal role as a mediating concept between real lack and symbolic-imag- inary reality. Because of its particular characteristics, this concept throws a different light on the problems discussed throughout this book. The chapter starts off with an introduction to the act as described by Lacan.
Next, I will follow Žižek’s elaboration and systematization of this rather underdeveloped Lacanian notion. We will find that Žižek himself, finally, turns to Alain Badiou’s theory of the event to think through the conse- quences of the act. These three authors will provide me with the concep- tual resources needed to spell out the subtleties of what is involved in traumatic recovery, and how this relates to both ethics and politics.
1 The origins of the act
The act is one of the key terms resurfacing through the entirety of Lacan’s teachings. Adrian Johnston (2009) observes that it functions as
a nodal signifier in Lacanian discourse. However, its consistent reitera- tion in an array of theoretical and clinical contexts ‘risks concealing an unstable, less than fully consistent set of shifting significations assigned to it’ (Johnston, 2009, p. 144). In this section, I will provide a brief over- view of the different usages of the term throughout Lacan’s work and discuss its primary characteristics.
The first manner in which the act appears, as early as Lacan’s first seminar in 1953–54, is via the notion of ‘full speech’ (p. 50). In the context of an analysis, Lacan contends that the analysand’s discourse continuously shifts between empty speech ( parole vide ), a type of ‘chatter’
which remains within the imaginary realm of everyday signification, and full speech ( parole pleine ), which reflects the symbolic dimension of language ripe with surprising aspects of meaning ( sens ). Full speech is marked by the occurrence of important, Hegelian-style, performative
‘ speech acts ’ whereby the act of saying (the enunciation) corresponds with what is spoken (the enunciated) (Lacan, 1953–54). Importantly, such acts transform the subjectivity of the speaker: he or she becomes what he or she says in the very act of saying it. As the analysand attempts to formulate the truth of his or her desire (which, incidentally, is struc- turally impossible given ‘desire’s incompatibility with speech’ (Lacan, 1961b, p. 535), he or she inaugurates out of nowhere a new dimension of subjectivity (Johnston, 2009, p. 144).
During the following early seminars, Lacan often equated the act with what is known as ‘acting-out’ in a clinical context. Acting-out denotes a transferential reaction of the analysand in which an unconscious message-to-be-deciphered is ‘played out’ in real life (in the sense of being staged) in what constitutes a call for interpretation (Lacan, 1962–63).
The acting-out is a subjectively inaccessible solicitation of a response by the analyst, who is the addressee of this message. It is transferential in that it often surfaces in the wake of something missed by the analyst:
what the analyst’s interpretation missed in the words of the analysand presents itself anew and on a different plane (that is, in actions), in an attempt to be ‘heard’ after all. Acting-out is thus primarily demonstra- tive, oriented toward the Other (Lacan, 1962–63, p. 145). Moreover, the significance of this type of act is determined by the pre-existing context in which it takes place. As such, acting-out does not break with the symbolic-imaginary framework already in place. It stages ‘a fantasy-like scenario transpiring within the already-there presence of socio-symbolic mediums of meaning’ (Johnston, 2009, p. 146).
From the fourteenth seminar onwards, Lacan started to explicitly distinguish acting-out from the act proper, although this evolution was
anticipated in the previous seminars (Johnston, 2009). I will attempt to characterize Lacan’s notion of the act through a series of interre- lated defining traits. First, unlike acting-out, the act is not the manifest expression of an underlying, already established subjective intention or state. Whereas acting-out expresses a previously present form of subjec- tivity, which failed to be picked up in spoken discourse, the act should be viewed as something that precipitates subjectivity rather than being its product. More precisely, the subject, for Lacan, is defined by its desire, and it is only in the wake of an act that desire comes into existence. In this manner, a true act ‘transforms’ the subject, in that the subject that arises from the act cannot be identified with the subjective forms prior to its occurrence. In line with the description of the performative speech act, the more general notion of the act entails that the actor is trans- formed at the level of his or her subjective structure and/or desire.
Second, the act is inherently linked to the register of the symbolic, albeit in a double-edged way. Importantly, it brings ‘something new’
into the world: the act calls into existence a new signifying structure.
However, it does so by forcing a radical shift of the symbolic prior to its occurrence. The act positively performs what was previously consid- ered to be ‘impossible’; it presents or demonstrates something uncanny that disrupts and destabilizes the existent signifying structure. Because it undermines the pre-existent socio-symbolic Other, it always has a ‘trans- gressive’ dimension to it. To clarify this point, Lacan distinguishes the act from mere ‘action’, which is always readily inscribable in the pre- established framework, in the normal run of things. The act’s disrup- tion signals its real aspect: although it is tied up with the inauguration of a new symbolic order, the act necessarily passes through a moment of (real) negativity with regard to the prior socio-symbolic reality. The transformation of the symbolic can therefore be said to rest upon a transitory suspension of the organizing principles of extant configura- tions of reality: the act performs a destabilizing break with this previous structure. Nevertheless, it also has a productive, symbolic side to it, as it introduces a previously unthinkable element into the symbolic field that, if properly worked out, will modify the organizing principle of a given reality and thereby generate a new signifying structure. This relates to the first defining trait discussed above: it is this shift in the symbolic that effectuates the mutation of the subject. In the changed symbolic structure, a new desire can be inscribed, if only ever after the (f)act (Johnston, 2009).
Third, the act takes place precisely at the point where one is confronted with the real, more precisely, the aspect of the real captured in the idea of
‘the missing Other of the Other’ (Lacan, 1957–58, pp. 474–75, 1967–68).
It transpires in complete solitude: there is no Other to guarantee its being appropriate, correct, just, successful, and so on. The act always involves a gamble, a risk, precisely because it cannot found itself on extant systems of knowledge or justification. Viewed from the standpoint of the pre-existent situation, the act appears as nonsensical at the time of its occurrence – because its sense cannot be grasped within the limits of the situation’s signifying capacities. Furthermore, Lacan (1966–67, p. 67) contends that the act is opaque to the one who carries it out as well. The act is not the result of calm, dispassionate deliberation; it is not a decision made consciously after the pros and cons have been care- fully weighed. This means that the act can only be ‘subjectivized’ after the fact. Only then is it possible to, in a retroactive movement, reflect on and take responsibility for what transpired. Surprisingly, however, in Lacan’s account, the act is often if not always accompanied by an ‘effect of disavowal’ in its wake, an inability on the part of the newly emerged subject to acknowledge the gesture that founded its existence (Johnston, 2009). As we will see, it is on this point that both Žižek and Badiou, in their attempts to systematize and elaborate the underdeveloped notion of the act, differ from Lacan, in the sense that both philosophers empha- size the subjective figures that arise in response to the act, along with the sustained forms of activity accompanying them. This activity following in the wake of the act, however, depends on the acknowledgement and denomination of the evanescent break with what was (as opposed to its disavowal).
The act has been primarily worked out as it functions in the context of psychoanalysis, that is, as the act of the analyst (Lacan, 1967–68). The latter is considered of prime importance to momentarily and repeatedly break up the analysand’s interpretative fantasmatic framework, along with the grip of the debilitating jouissance tied up with it. In other words, the act of the psychoanalyst suspends the frame that produces satisfac- tory meaning-effects during the process of free association, in order to separate the analysand from the enjoyment inherent to signification as such ( joui-sens ) (Lacan, 1990, p. 16). Such interventions serve to disrupt the satisfaction obtained in the psychoanalytic experience itself, which is deemed necessary to avoid the pitfall of ‘endless analysis’ (Verhaeghe
& Declercq, 2002). In this move, however, the analyst simultaneously dissolves the very structure that supports his or her position as a trans- ferential object, as a sujet- supposé-savoir . The act of the analyst thus effaces the actor, who is said to be reduced to nothing more than a ‘waste product’ ( déchet ) of this process (Lacan, 1967–68, lesson on January 10).