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Power Doesn’t Exist, Does It?

On the ‘Feminine’ Character of  Power Relations

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In his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’[1], Gilles Deleuze depicts a rather grim picture of our future, but at the same time he maintains that ‘there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons’ (4). According to him, we happened to witness the end of the societies of discipline. Disciplinary societies are ones organized around the ‘vast spaces of enclosure’. Nowadays we are in ‘a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family’ and – one might add – the State. New forces are knocking at the door. ‘Everyone knows’, - Deleuze writes, - ‘that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods’ (loc. cit.). Disciplinary societies are being replaced by the societies of control. ‘Control’ would be a ‘term for the new monster’. Referring to Paul Virilio, Deleuze speaks of the ‘ultrarapid forms of free-floating control’. He retells Guattari’s vision of ‘a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual [not individual]) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation’ (7, emphasis added).

As a matter of fact, deep in the heart we often tend to believe that the control, however rapid, floats past us, as it were. Most that we are ready to acknowledge is that those in power are capable of disciplining us in some way or another (charging with taxes, for example), but least of all we would be willing to attribute to them the power to control our deepest knowledge and our private opinion. It is in this cynical environment that Slavoj Žižek’s discourse on the power of ideology appears especially pertinent.

At this point, however, I must confess that I have chosen my topic – the topic of the inexistence of power and the feminine character of power relations – for the sake of a masquerade. In his The Indivisible Remainder[2], Žižek cites as an instance of the ultimate imperative the injunction ‘dress up as a woman and commit suicide in public’ (170). I cannot afford such an act this time. In search of a substitute, I decided to take this opportunity to talk on the inexistence of power, because it provided me with a chance to fantasize about and even to stage most likely responses to the thesis on the non-existent power on the part of those to whom such a thesis would presumably appear as hopelessly extravagant. It seemed to me really amusing to imagine, for instance, someone asserting the impossibility to take the proposition at face value. He might concede some plausibility to the thesis, but then qualify this concession by saying that power nevertheless exist, however complex that process of relationship we call power might be – there must be an object worth fighting for in order for the whole mess called politics to take place. Others will maintain that the invisibility or the alleged inexistence of power is an effect of power itself, whose interest is to conceal its operation (by an appeal to the notion of representation as transparency, for example). Finally, for many it would be difficult to concede that power, if genuine, can be feminine at all.

Now, according to Žižek, Power does not exist: attributing this thought to the Foucauldian ‘microphysics of power’, he takes it to mean that there is no Power with capital P, ‘only a dispersed, plural, ‘non-all’ network of local practices lacking reference to a central totalising agency’ (106). The paradox Žižek discerns in Foucault is that Foucault ‘treats power as non-power …’ (106). Žižek proposes that we frame the matter as the alternative between idealism and materialism: ‘is the ‘big Other’ (the ideal symbolic order) always-already here as a kind of insurmountable horizon, or is it possible to deploy its ‘genesis’ out of the dispersed ‘non-all’ network of contingent material singularities?’ (107–8). The question of what Žižek calls ‘the battle for freedom’ (‘Is the battle for freedom worth fighting, then?’ – he asks) is inseparable for him from the question of the possibility of the experience of the non-existence of the big Other. Žižek does assert the possibility of suspending the big Other; he even says: ‘It is easy to suspend the big Other’. How? By means of a certain act Žižek calls ‘the act qua real’. It is an act by means of which you can ‘experience the non-existence of the big Other ‘in a momentary flash’. Two theses, then: the symbolic order is a fiction; an act is possible that suspends this fiction. Let us elaborate on these points.

The suspension of the big Other is possible because ultimately the big Other is just a fiction – you can therefore ‘traverse’ it as fantasy. The big Other is not always-already here. Žižek’s point is that the symbolic order depends on what he calls the act of subjective recognition. This act, since it is constitutive of the symbolic order as synchronous structural order, must not be covered by the big Other’s guarantee: that is why Žižek insists on the precipitate character of the act by means of which ‘the dimension of the big Other becomes operative’. Here we face a sort of paradox: on the one hand, the symbolic order predetermines the subject’s place; on the other hand, the big Other hinges on an act of ‘precipitate recognition’ not ‘covered’ (in the banking-financial meaning of the term) by the big Other (143). In this latter sense the symbolic order is an order of fictions: ‘it is a semblant, a fiction with no guarantee of validity’, - Žižek asserts (136).

So it takes a theory of fiction, rather than a theory of reality, to explain social processes. Let us ask, what is meant here by the ‘lack of the ultimate guarantee’? As Žižek explains, ‘I can never be absolutely certain – not only about the rule my partner in communication is following, but even about the rule I myself obey in what I do’ (136). In this sense ‘there is no Other of the Other, no meta-guarantee of the validity of the symbolic order’. This undecidability, this radical uncertainty, this lack of guarantee concerns ‘the meaning of my partner’s words or the rules which regulate his/her use of well-known words’. And it is this radical uncertainty, this lack of guarantee, which is ‘the ultimate proof of my inclusion in the big Other’ (loc. cit.). The big Other can be said to be the substance of our being, but only in so far as its status is irreducibly undecidable, lacking any guarantee; ‘any proof of its validity would presuppose a kind of external distance of the subject towards the symbolic order’. Here the traditional sociological alternative of methodological individualism vs. the Durkheimian presupposition of Society as the substantial Order appears invalid (137).

Now what interests us at this point is this oscillation between fiction and the undecidability. Fiction, according to the dictionaries, has nothing undecidable about it: it is just not true. The social Substance, however, a radically asymmetrical field of the ‘big Other’, ‘objective Spirit’, the impersonal order of Mores, cannot be reduced either to the simple collection of all others or to ‘common knowledge’ (137). It is therefore not just a matter of opinion or doxa. There is something mysterious or enigmatic about the emergence of the big Other, social Substance, because it is simultaneously posited by subjects by means of their social activity, but posited in such a way that it appears as independent foundation of their activity (loc. cit.). A ‘Nation’, for example, ‘is effectively nothing more than the collection of the individuals who form it … .; however, it is part of the very structure of a Nation, of national identification, that each of these individuals experiences it as his spiritual-social Substance which exists independently of him and provides the foundation of his being’ (139). Žižek proposes to treat this dialectically: what if this very impossibility of guarantees as to the Other’s demand is precisely that which links an individual to his spiritual substance? As already emphasized, this impossibility concerns the fact that individuals can never fully coordinate their intentions, i.e. become transparent to each other: so the impossibility concerns the opacity of the other, its impenetrability. ‘If individuals were able to co-ordinate their intentions [i.e. become transparent to each other] … there would be no need for the big Other, for the spiritual Substance as a spectral entity … – the Habermassian intersubjectivity … would suffice’ (138). The Habermassian ‘rational rules’, therefore, are unable to control communication, are insufficient in order for communication to become transparent. For it to become ‘transparent’ we need presuppose ‘the co-ordination-of-intentions as already given in the purely virtual Third Order of impersonal rules’ (140, original emphasis).

Here what seems necessary to add is that the presupposition concerns not only coordination, but the intention itself in the first place: presupposition is already the effect of the imperative of reference inherent in language; so the imperative must precede the impossibility in order for it to appear as impossibility. The uncertainty, however, must be uncertain in order to remain uncertainty; the certain uncertainty is a contradiction in terms. The uncertainty conceived as uncertainty (or as pure fiction) is no longer uncertain – it is just fiction of uncertainty. As Žižek himself puts it at another point, ‘every human community is ‘virtual’: founded upon rules, values, and so on, whose validity is by definition presupposed, never conclusively proven’ (140): so ‘presupposed’ means ‘neither proved nor discarded’.

The big Other therefore is the field of supposed knowledge and power. It functions as the guarantee of the meaning (145). The very failure of symbolization ‘opens up the void within which the process of symbolization takes place’ (loc. cit.). The opacity of language precedes the supposition of an intention or a rule; ‘for Meaning to emerge, it must be presupposed as already given’. It follows that the big Other is ‘a hypothesis which never directly ‘is’, it merely ‘will have been’’ (142).

This is a conception of sociality based on the notion of performativity, which, in my view, is most succinctly rendered in a recent song by pop-icon Madonna. I cannot afford singing at this time, but the song reads:

Tell me, love isn’t true,

it’s just something that we do

In a strict homology, power does not exist out there and in itself; it is just something that we perform.

We might easily imagine an objection to this argument. According to the working definition, which I have failed to mention, the big Other designates the web of unwritten implicit rules that regulate our speech and acts as well as the ‘explicit symbolic rules regulating social interaction’[3]. As far as the unwritten rules are concerned, the argument has great plausibility, and most of readers, I think, would respond to it warmly. But what about written law? How can law be said to be virtual, to consist of ‘fictions’ and even to depend on a certain faculty of fictionalisation? I shall argue that it is not the assertion of the fictional nature of law that is not plausible, but, on the contrary, a certain attempt to reduce this fictionality, which, as I will show, is involved in Žižek’s theorization of what he calls act.

First, however, I would like to point out that the logic of the lure we have been observing fits perfectly the dialectics of the feminine as conceptualised by Žižek. The dialectics of the feminine is the dialectics of spectacle or masquerade. What makes the notion of the feminine masquerade highly appealing in the matters we are considering is that it offers a special sort of logic of lure and deception. According to standard notion of woman, she is ‘simultaneously a representation, a spectacle par excellence, an image intended to fascinate, to attract the gaze, and an enigma, the unrepresentable, that which a priori eludes the gaze’ ( The Indivisible Remainder, 159). Juxtaposing woman and man, Žižek observes that ‘behind the macho image of a man there is no ‘secret’, just a weak ordinary person who can never live up to his ideal, whereas the ‘trick’ of the feminine masquerade is to present itself as a mask that conceals the ‘feminine secret’. …[W]oman deceives by means of deception itself; she offers the mask as mask, as false pretence, in order to provoke the search for the secret behind the mask… [W]hat the mask of femininity conceals, therefore, is … the fact that there is nothing behind the mask’ (162).

Now, in exactly the same manner, ‘Power does not exist’ means that whereas we think that power effectively exist and exploit and manipulate us, poor people, proletariat, by imposing on us taxes and so on, in the actual fact power has its hold on us by pretending to exist, by hiding its nullity behind the mask of a ruse. Therefore, in presupposing a mask, we are in fact collaborating in a net of power. Furthermore, this epistemology of the power of ruse, in its turn, can be said to suppose a ruse in the place of nothing: it unmasks the ruse of the ruse, revealing the secret of nothingness – however, is there the secret? At first sight, there seems to be no ground to draw equivalence between the feminine power and the critique of ideology: a woman pretends to hide something, whereas ideology critique pretends to reveal something (in this case, this something is precisely nothing as something). But on the further examination we see that in a way those two are homologous: they posit a mask that is presupposition of their persuasiveness; woman needs mask in order to appear secretive, ideology critique needs a mask in order to appear demystifying.

I turn now to Žižek’s theory of the act. It is quite ‘romantic’: Žižek speaks of a genuine act, ‘a truly new content that effectively breaks up the frame of formalism (of formal legal norms)’[4]. It proposes to put it in the terms of law and its transgression, and then it reads as follows: ‘the ethical act proper is a transgression of the legal norm – a transgression that, in contrast to a simple criminal violation, does not simply violate the legal norm, but redefines what is a legal norm. The moral law doesn’t follow the good – it generates a new shape of what counts as good’[5]. This ‘romantic’ theory, however, is disturbed by a series of rather nervous questions, such as ‘Why is an ethical act not possible that simply realizes an already existing ethical norm …?’[6]. Žižek calls this ‘a naive question’; he is famous for his naive questions; he can be said to be a master of naive questions. In his The Sublime Object of Ideology he has defined naive question as a technique of subverting paternal authority. ‘Why is the sky blue’ – the child asks, and the Father gets embarrassed[7]. (I must explain here, by way of a parenthesis, that the title of my text is designed to allude to precisely this dimension of a ‘radical’ questioning, to dramatize, to stage a sort of Plato’s dialogue which goes awry because of a pupil’s naiveté or his somewhat psychotic attitude towards teacher’s words which are taken by him as a material to learn by heart: instead of inquiring into the essence of things, the student is just saying: tell me, power doesn’t exist, does it? It’s just something that we do, isn’t it? Is that what I must learn to repeat? I need your warranty.)

Why, then, is an ethical act not possible that simply realizes an already existing ethical norm? There is a possibility to approach this problem from the opposite end, as Žižek does, when he asks: how does a new ethical norm emerge? ‘It is not that when the situation gets too complex or changes radically, so that it can no longer be covered adequately by the old norms, we have to invent new norms’. He gives this example: ‘… as is the case with cloning or organ transplant, where the straight application of old norms leads to a deadlock’[8]. Such an accommodation of morals to new times would be a mere opportunism, and this is why the Pope is exemplary figure for Žižek: the Pope refuses any concession to the opportunism, for instance, to ‘realistically’ accommodate morals to new times and ‘allow for contraception, if it takes place within marital intercourse’[9]. The pope embodies the real ethical stance, unconditional demand. But now it is our turn to raise a naive question: what is a straight application? Is it opposed to something like ‘queer application’? And what are we to make of the claim that what Kant calls ‘radical evil is, at its most extreme, not some barbaric violation of the norm but the very obedience to the norm for wrong reasons (for example, when I obey the law because it profits me)’[10]. Such a transgressive obedience is said to be much worse than a simple transgression of the law. This is ‘no longer an external transgression of the law, but its self-destruction, its suicide’[11]. The question that insinuates itself here is, of course, why ‘the very obedience of law’ can be/coincide with ‘radical evil’? (It was Nietzsche, by the way, who observed that suicide is the very principle, the very condition of the will and of the law of the will).

It is possible to argue, as does, for example, Giorgio Agamben, that the structure of the juridical relation is not that of application (be it ‘straight’ or ‘queer’), but that of the relation of exception[12]. Every act of the ‘application’ is preceded by the sovereign decision on the exception. In so far as the rule must be valid independently of the individual case, the validity of a juridical rule does not coincide with its application to the individual case: ‘[T]he rule can refer to the individual case only because it is in force, in the sovereign exception, as pure potentiality in the suspension of every actual reference….’[13]. In this sense transgression precedes and determines the lawful case. As Agamben observes, the figure (or the fiction – as in fictor legum) of exception entails the radical crisis of the inside/outside distinctions; exception and rule appear to be indistinguishable.

So there is no ‘beyond’ to the law – rather, the law itself is beyond itself. Every law and the law in general is split, redoubled like a spectre: the law just demands the law. The commanding law is never ‘out there’, it eludes presentation, since the imposing reality of a demand is not a positive reality. The law is the law of the law, and hence the law that ‘is not yet the law commanded in this law, a law that is not yet, and never will be, the law itself … ’[14]. As Werner Hamacher puts it apropos of Kantian imperative, ‘‘the law demands the law’ thus means: the law demands itself as another law. … [I]t is the law of the otherness of the law’, the law of the non-fulfilment of the law[15]. So there is nothing to transgress in law because the law itself is ‘in transgression’. The Žižekean figure of the transgressible, on the other hand, posits a ‘beyond’, and this is a ‘feminine’ ruse, a lure of the feminine power of Law. That is the nostalgia for transgression, which is the nostalgia for a ‘beyond’.

One might put it in quasi-psychoanalytical terms. (I say ‘quasi-’ in order to assure an alibi for myself, so that in case someone reproached me of using those terms incorrectly, I would answer ‘I’m just masquerading’…) Hysteria, as the attempt to meet the demand of the Other[16], presupposes psychosis – a hysteric is capable of excepting herself from the power of her hysteria, as it were, of acquiring a distance toward it: in every application of conventions or ‘mores’ there is a moment of psychotic alienation, of a certain ‘This is not true, this is just a spectacle’[17]. But the logic of psychosis itself leads to paranoia, which can be said to be the extreme form of psychosis, in which a psychotic acquires distance toward her psychosis and all of a sudden the texture of reality becomes all too meaningful… ‘Social reality may appear confused and chaotic, but if we look at it from the standpoint of anti-Semitism, for example, everything becomes clear and acquires straight contours – the Jewish plot is responsible for all our woes’[18]. The triad H-P-P, Hysteria-Psychosis-Paranoia, is, I think, a good instrument to approach the problematic of the feminine character of power relations.

The alternative, i.e. not straight, definition of the ‘act’ would be this: the act is that by means of which you perform something in defiance of your explicitly stated/intended normative maxim, or indeed the act that defies your maxim by the very act of its enunciation (I am lying; you must not trust me; do not obey me! Believe me: power is just a fiction …). To conclude, I would like to indicate the possibility of taking Žižek’s theory of the act as a melancholic theory: referring to Agamben, he defines melancholy as follows: ‘Therein resides the melancholic’s stratagem: the only way to possess an object that we never had is to treat an object that we still fully posses as if this object is already lost’[19]. Melancholy is ‘a faked spectacle of the excessive, superfluous mourning for an object even before this object is lost’[20]. This is exactly what happens to the transgression of law: we cannot have transgression; it is impossible; therefore we treat what we still ‘fully posses’, the law-in-transgression, as if it is lost…

What enables this process of the disjunction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated? There is no secret here: it is the same power that enables us to tell stories, to create fictions, to demand and to command.

I always perceived Žižek’s writings as something like entertaining literature we read before bedtime. As such, this reading is also quite risky, because you can fall asleep at the most interesting point, failing to resist the irresistible power.