The Dislocations of the Real
4.4 Productive destruction?
A topic of debate within both philosophy (for example, Andreescu, 2013; Eisenstein & McGowan, 2012; Stavrakakis, 2007) and psycholog- ical literature on ‘post-traumatic growth’ and resilience (for instance, Ayalon, 2005; Christopher, 2004; Joseph & Linley, 2006; Linley & Joseph, 2004; Vellacott, 2007; Reissman, Schreiber, Schultz & Ursano, 2009), is whether or not (traumatic) ruptures should be viewed as something more than exclusively destructive. Although the encounter with rupture necessarily constitutes something disruptive and negative, something that shakes the foundations of both the subject and its reality, a number of Lacan-inspired philosophers have argued that it also has a productive quality (among them Badiou, Johnston, Laclau, Mouffe, Stavrakakis and Žižek). Rupture is seen as opening up a possibility of social and polit- ical creation and re-articulation. In fact, the ‘moment of the political’
is argued to be dependent on such a confrontation with the negativity of the real.
Does trauma have a ‘productive’ dimension? Proponents of theories of ‘post-traumatic growth’, a research domain in itself, certainly seem to think so (Christopher, 2004; Joseph & Linley, 2006). Trauma, in these psychological models, is thought to derive from a tension-generating incongruence between the ‘trauma information’ and the ‘existing models of the world’. Recovery then requires the alleviation of this anti- nomy, which, if the ‘existing models of the world’ are accommodated to fit the ‘new trauma-related information’, purportedly leads to mental schemata that are viewed as more realistic, effective, functional or adap- tive compared to the pre-trauma schemata.
However, in a recent essay on the responses to the Paris Charlie Hebdo killings (for The London Review of Books ), Slavoj Žižek (2015) calls for the abandonment ‘of the idea that there is something emancipatory in
extreme experiences, that they enable us to open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation’. He refers to a memorable passage in the memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered , in which Ruth Klüger (2003) describes a dispute with an advanced PhD candidate in Germany. Klüger’s interlocutor recounts that he once met with a survivor of Auschwitz, who, to his surprise and dismay, cursed the Arabs and held them all in contempt. The PhD candidate could not understand how someone who came from Auschwitz could talk like that. Klüger vigorously responded by asking: ‘What did he expect? Auschwitz was no instructional institu- tion ... You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and toler- ance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps.’
(Klüger, 2003, p. 65)
In line with Žižek’s analysis, I think it is safe to assume that horrific experiences do not necessarily lead to ‘personal growth’, catharsis, or the development of humanitarian values. The fallacy in theories of post-traumatic growth, in my analysis, is the silent assumption that the traumatic event provides ‘corrective information’ to the pre-existent models of the world. This assumption suggests that ‘growth’ is a matter of drawing the right lessons from the trauma. By definition, however, trauma communicates no discursive information whatsoever. The trau- matic event resists recuperation into any type of pre-existent meaning or knowledge. It does not open up a window that provides a more real- istic or adaptive outlook on the self and the world. The reverse is true:
trauma shatters the fantasmatic window through which we ordinarily perceive reality and ourselves. When this frame is shattered, nothing can be perceived. Trauma should not be romanticized with claims that survivors have a direct route to some sort of privileged, intimate knowl- edge or truth that is not accessible nor communicable to others.
Pace Žižek, however, and in line with an emergent field of research (for example, Andreescu, 2013; Badiou, 2009a; Eisenstein & McGowan, 2012; Johnston, 2009; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), I argue that the confron- tation with the lack in the Other can be productive. The invalidation of the previous order, along with the fantasies that sustain it, opens up a zone of indetermination – if only for a brief interregnum. Recall that according to Lacan (1964), real cause as tuche is present only where the ordinary currents of determination (the automaton) are disrupted. It is the dislocation of established representations that stimulates the crea- tive formation of new sociopolitical constructions. In this zone of inde- termination, a subjective, ethical act is possible and even demanded , in that there is no option ‘not to respond’. It is here that the political as such takes form. Different acts with different consequences are possible
at this point. However, there is no way of calculating what the right course of action is, nor what a given course of action will lead to. This is so because calculation necessarily relies on the pre-given, which was rendered invalid by the emergence of the traumatic event (see above).
A successful act is arguably one that changes the coordinates of what was deemed possible, one that changes the world in such a way that a reading of the traumatic event – eventually – becomes possible. This would be an act that differs from any attempt to quickly install a new form of concealment, which would be a reactive attempt to return to the status quo ante . If what appears in trauma is by definition unintel- ligible and formless, in the sense that it cannot be perceived in terms of the interpretative framework that preceded it, then recovery from trauma requires a form of subjective activity that goes beyond a focus on intrapsychic mentalization or verbalization, one that creates a new situation or world that permits a belated access to the event. As I will argue in the next chapter, this is a process that cannot take place entirely intrapsychologically. It necessitates operations in the sociopo- litical reality itself.
The main difference between this view and the one defended in post- traumatic growth rests in the sustained emphasis on indeterminacy. It is precisely the acknowledgement of the insufficiency of all forms of previous knowledge, and all that this entails, that opens up a gap in which the ethical and political can appear. Let us now move on to the definition of the political in relation to the real.
5 Encountering the real: the moment of the political
Throughout this chapter, the real has been defined in its negativity, as the limit of signification. Our social construction of reality acquires a degree of ontological consistency only in reliance on a specific fantasy frame. A dislocation of this frame occurs when signification breaks down in an encounter with the real. In such a moment, the illusion that closes the gap between the real and the symbolic loses validity. It is the disrup- tion of a discursive field, in a moment of negativity, that stimulates this field’s movements. Social constructionism is structurally dependent on something beyond its field that causes its dynamic: the moment of dislocation or rupture is considered the condition of possibility for social and political creation (Laclau, 1990). At the same time, however, these dislocations are ‘traumatic in the sense that “they threaten identities”’
(Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 75): they impact the social and subjective identi- ties that depend on the pre-existent symbolic order.
The moment of the political is thus intrinsically connected to rupture, crisis or dislocation. It is manifested in the tension between a given sociopolitical reality and an unrepresentable real that dislocates the former. The political arises as a possibility in the face of the failure of a former identity or social construction to fence off the lack at the core of our being. The emergence of this lack, in a moment of crisis, precip- itates a desire to rearticulate the dislocated structure: ‘stimulating, in other words, human creativity, becoming the condition of possibility for human freedom’ (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 54). Social reality, as a sedimenta- tion of meaning, ‘exists in an irreducible dialectic with the moment(s) of its own dislocation’ (Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 67). Take as a starting point of this dialectic the temporary status quo of a (political) reality, always- already affected by antagonisms and zones of uncertainty intrinsic to this particular discursive structure. This more or less stable and seem- ingly unified system is always at risk of being traversed by something
‘internally excluded’. Such an internally excluded event falls beyond the field of meaning established by the parameters of the pre-existent symbolical framework. As such, it dislocates the symbolic-imaginary reality and creates a lack in the discursive order, which in turn stimu- lates the need to ‘suture’ this lack anew. The political , as a concept, desig- nates the transition from the confrontation with negativity and lack in a moment of rupture to the positivization of this real through a subjective act. In the moment of the political, the subject assumes upon itself the responsibility to formulate an answer to the senselessness of the real.
We find ourselves here at the heart of the whole problematic of trauma: how can something that is ‘no-thing’, something that is impos- sible from the standpoint prior to its occurrence, something formless, ungraspable and ephemeral, in short, a void – how can a void be posi- tivized or otherwise worked through? How can the un-symbolizable be symbolized?
There are many different ways of responding to the confrontation with the real. Trauma can be viewed as an inability to formulate an adequate response to the real, for whatever reason, with the result that one remains
‘within the rupture [ ... ] without the security of a place in the world’
(Andreescu, 2013, p. 213). In this light, the completion tendency (or Freud’s death drive) discussed in Chapter 1 becomes a repeatedly failed attempt to return to the status quo ante. However, these attempts structurally fail: the resistance against this assimilation is purely formal. Trauma is what neces- sitates a reconfiguration of the subject in its relation to the Other.
The default answer to a confrontation with the lack in the Other is arguably a call to return to some sort of completion or closure, often
at any price (see Edkins, 2003, p. 14). This requires that we ‘gentrify’ or depoliticize the political by ‘forgetting’ the ‘constituted, provisional and historically contingent nature of every social order, of every ontology’
(ibid.). This position refuses, denies or suppresses the lack which was laid bare in the dislocation by a real event. From a psychoanalytical standpoint, this entails the attempt to return to an imaginary , fantas- matic subject-position to attenuate the traumatic impact of the confron- tation with the real. When the previous defensive fantasy formation has become untenable, it is sometimes possible to arrive at a new form of fantasmatic closure, and this undoubtedly has pacifying and thus therapeutic effects. The price to be paid, however, is the eclipse of the grounding and productive moment of the political itself. Ergo, the ques- tion has been posed whether or not alternative kinds of responses to the real are possible. Is it possible to resist the attempt to gentrify and depo- liticize the moment of the political? Can we move from an attempt at fantasmatic closure and an imaginary subject-position towards lack to a symbolic subject-position that acknowledges and assumes (in the sense of the French word assomption ) the unfound nature of every social order?
Can we, in other words, accept the traumatic lack at the basis of our subjectivity? Can we somehow accept the non-existence of the Other of the Other? This is indeed the gamble of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as we will see in Chapter 6. Lacanian psychoanalysis aims at a confrontation with the real, precisely because it is only at this point that the subject is called forth to respond with an ethical act. However, the outcome of this process can never be forced or predicted. Nevertheless, the idea is that Lacanian psychoanalysis can help in the assumption of symbolic castration: the process by which the lack in the Other is acknowledged and kept open. This entails a separation from the Other – rather than to take refuge in a new alienation. Likewise, academic work on the poli- tics of memory in the wake of large-scale traumatic events sometimes make the case that a re-inscription in linear narratives should be resisted in favor of, for example, strategies of ‘encircling the trauma’ (Edkins, 2003, p. 15). This dovetails with Žižek’s work on ‘traversing the fantasy’, in which he transposes Lacan’s musings on the possible endpoint of a psychoanalytic cure to the level of the collective (for example, see Žižek, 1989).