Templates da Lua

7.10.08

The Lacanian Real
Television
Slavoj Zizek

Lacan: Television -
Let’s proceed like idiots; let’s take this title literally and ask ourselves a question, not the question, “what can we learn about TV from Lacan’s teaching?” which would get us on the wrong path of so-called applied psychoanalysis, but the inverse question, “what can we learn about Lacan’s teaching from the TV phenomenon?” At first sight, this seems as absurd as the well-known Hegelian proposition defining phrenology, “the spirit is the bone”: the equalization of the most sublime, elusive theory with the vulgar mass-cultural phenomenon. But perhaps, as in the Hegelian proposition, there is a “speculative truth” beneath the obvious banality - perhaps certain peculiarities of the American TV program allow us to grasp the fundamental Lacanian proposition that psychoanalysis is not a psychology: the most intimate beliefs - even the most intimate emotions such as compassion, crying, sorrow, laughter - can be transferred, delegated to others without losing their sincerity.

The first TV-lesson: psychoanalysis is not psychology

In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan is speaking of the role of the Chorus in antique tragedy: we, the spectators, came to the theatre worried, full of everyday problems, unable to accustom ourselves without reserve to the problems of the play, i.e. to feel the required fears and compassions. But no problem; there is the Chorus, which is feeling the sorrow and the compassion instead of us, or, more precisely, we are feeling the required emotions through the medium of the Chorus: “You are then relieved of all worries, even if you don’t feel anything; it is the Chorus who will do it in your place.” [1] Even if we, the spectators, are just drowsily watching the show, objectively - to use this good old Stalinist expression - we are doing our duty of feeling compassion for the heroes. In so-called primitive societies, we find the same phenomenon in the form of “weepers,” women hired to cry instead of us. So, through the medium of the other, we accomplish our duty of mourning, while we can spend our time on more profitable exploits, disputing how to divide the inheritance of the deceased, for example.

But to avoid the impression that this exteriorization, this transference of our most intimate feelings, is just a characteristic of the so called primitive stages of development, let’s remind ourselves of a phenomenon quite usual in popular TV shows or serials - canned-laughter. After some supposedly funny or witty remark, you can hear the laughter and the applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself. Here we have die exact counterpart of the Chorus in antique tragedy; it’s here that we have to look for “living Antiquity.” That is to say, why this laughter? The first possible answer - that it serves to remind us when to laugh - is interesting enough because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling. But this answer isn’t sufficient, because usually we don’t laugh. The only correct answer would then be that the other - embodied in the TV-set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh, i.e., is laughing instead of us. So, even if, tired from the hard day’s stupid work, we did nothing all evening but gaze drowsily into the TV-screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through me medium of the other, we had a really good time.

All this is, of course, just to illustrate the alienation of the subject in the signifier as soon as he is caught in the radically exterior signifying network, he is mortified, dismembered, divided. To get an idea of what is meant by the Lacanian division of the subject, one has only to remember the well-known paradox of Lewis Carroll: “I’m so glad I don’t like asparagus,” said the small girl to a sympathetic friend. “Because, if I did, I should have to eat it - and I can’t bear it!” Here you have the whole Lacanian problem of the reflexivity of desire: desire is always a desire of a desire, i.e., the question is not immediately, “what should I desire?” but, “there are a lot of things that I desire; I have a lot of desires - which of them is worth being the object of my desire? Which desire should I desire?” This paradox is literally reproduced in the basic situation of the classic Stalinist political processes where the accused victim is at the same time supposed to confess his love for the asparagus (the bourgeoisie, the counter-revolution) and express an attitude of disgust towards his own activity which goes to the point of demanding the death penalty for himself. That’s why the Stalinist victim is the perfect example of the difference between the sujet d’énoncé (subject of the statement) and the sujet d’énonciation (subject of the enunciating). The demand that the Party addresses to him is: “At this moment, the Party needs the process to consolidate the revolutionary gains, so be a good communist, do a last service to the Party and confess.” Here we have the division of the subject in its purest form: the only way for the accused to confirm himself as a good communist at the level of the sujet d’énonciation, is to confess, i.e., to determine himself, at the level of the sujet d’énoncé, as a traitor. Ernesto Laclau was perhaps right when he once remarked that it isn’t only Stalinism which is a language-phenomenon; it is already language itself which is a Stalinist phenomenon.

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions. In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection. He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on die different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process. For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier. The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

Our predominant idea of the subject is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,” the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject cannot find a signifier which would be “his own,” that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say. The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: “language cannot express fully what I’m trying to say…” The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack. The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition. The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier. To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately.

To make this crucial point clearer, let’s take again the Hegelian proposition on phrenology: “the spirit (the subject) is a bone, a skull (der Geist ist ein Knochen).” If we read this proposition literally, it is vulgar-materialistic nonsense, reducing the subject to his immediate material reality. But where lies, in Hegel’s words, the speculative truth of this proposition? The effect of the phrase, “the spirit is a bone.” On the listener is the feeling of its utter inadequacy, of its absolute contradiction: it is total nonsense - how can we reduce the spirit, its dialectical movement, to an inert presence of a dead object, of a skull? The Hegelian answer me subject is precisely this absolute contradiction, this absolute negativity that we feel when we experience the uttermost inadequacy of the proposition, “the spirit is the bone.” We have here a kind of dialogic economy: we articulate a proposition defining the subject, and our attempt fails; we experience the absolute contradiction, the extreme negative relationship between the subject and the predicate - and it’s precisely this absolute discordance which is the subject as absolute negativity. It is the same as with a well-known joke from the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why; Rabinovitch answers: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union, the communists will lose power, there will be a counter-revolution, and the new power will put all the blame for the communist crimes on us Jews - and there will be again the anti-Jewish pogroms…” “But,” interrupts the bureaucrat, “this is pure nonsense; nothing can change in the Soviet Union - the Soviet power will last eternally!” “Well,” responds Rabinovitch calmly, “that’s my second reason.” The logic is here the same as with the Hegelian proposition, “the spirit is a bone”: the failure itself of a first reading gives us the true meaning.