pranešimai

presented papers

The Trauma of Postmodernism and its Symptoms

_{abstracts (in English)>>}

I. Plan of Evacuation

Plan of evacuation is a scheme which should have been found in every room. Besides its direct function – to visualize the danger and to give the instruction to escape from it, plan of evacuation produces two different effects of meaning: it looks so naïve (what is the use to know the order one should leave the building, if the building doesn’t survive?) and so divine (someone is presumed to know not only ‘the order of things’, but also the ‘order of catastrophes’). This constant reminder of danger seems so obscene, as miraculous is the promise of rational survival. A good example of obscene miracle.

When I have found such plan of evacuation in S. Žižek’s earlier works, I can not resist not to follow its instruction. In Sublime Object and elsewhere S. Žižek declares ‘the radical break with post-structuralism’ and makes a lot of efforts to displace post-structuralism from the place it presupposed to take. In order to hold the instruction, I presuppose the chain of equivalences between so called ‘post-structuralism’, deconstruction and ‘postmodernism’, having in mind that there is at least one name, which can cover all these phenomena. “The fundamental gesture of post-structuralism, - in Žižek’s words, - is to deconstruct every substantial identity, to denounce behind its solid consistency an interplay of symbolic overdetermination – briefly, to dissolve the substantial identity into a network of non-substantial, differential relations”.[1] The stress should be made not on the point that ‘post-structuralism’ dissolves the substantial identity, - because psychoanalysis dissolves any identity as well, - but that this ‘signifying interplay’ has no references to extra-discursive reality, no external point, which could limit or interrupt the incessant flow of signifying chain. Speaking about deconstruction, Žižek insists that deconstruction “excludes the truth-dimension”, that is, it “does not affect the place from which it speak”.[2] Deconstruction is so immersed into discursive ideology, that it doesn’t acknowledge its status as an ideology: “the position from which deconstructivist can always make sure of the fact that ‘there is no metalanguage’; that no utterance can say precisely what it intended to say; that the process of enunciation always subverts the utterance; is the position of metalanguage in its purest, most radical form.”[3]

Žižek’s counterpoint to this discourse-ideology position is the notion of symptom, incarnating the real kernel, resisting symbolization and signification. Symptom as the real is supposed to reestablish the truth-dimension which is lacking, and to reveal some enigmatic place, which provides ‘pathological’ motivations for our discourse. The Lacanian concept of the Real becomes a real argument to displace ‘post-structuralism’ and deconstruction from its place and to consecrate into this place Lacanian psychoanalysis. “Deconstructionism is a modernist procedure par excellence; it presents perhaps the most radical version of the logic of ‘unmasking’… It is only with Lacan that the ‘postmodernist’ break occurs, - insists Žižek, - in so far as [Lacan – A.Ž.] thematizes a certain real, traumatic kernel whose status remains deeply ambiguous: the Real resists symbolization, but it is at the same time its own retroactive product. In this sense we could even say that deconstructionists are basically still ‘structuralists’ and that the only ‘poststructuralist’ is Lacan, who affirms enjoyment as ‘the real Thing’, the central impossibility around which every signifying network is structured.”[4]

Following this plan of evacuation, several questions arise. The first interesting point is that as a counterpoint to discourse theory and as the incarnation of the real is taken the notion of the symptom. For Lacan the symptom is a meaningful signifier, which substitutes the missing one. Lacan insists that “between the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject…”[5] According to this interpretation, it is trauma which takes the place of the real, thereby the symptom only substitutes for it in the signifying chain and should reveal its meaning in the process of interpretation. So if, as in Žižek’s case, the symptom is real, maybe this seeking for the real is the symptom of something else, fixing some inaccessible signification. To put it in another way, what is the symptom of this symptom? Why ‘post-structuralism’, deconstruction or ‘postmodernism’ are interpreted as something intolerable, that should be displaced and refused? Couldn’t this constant strategy of displacement be interpreted as the trauma of ‘postmodernism’? Postmodernism is experienced as an impossible and traumatic place, which has no meaning and no sufficient explanation. Could be that  ‘postmodernism’, refused and displaced in the symbolical, returns in the Real and as the Real?   

II.  The Real Problem / Problems with the Real

The first question is, why these two positions are so incompatible, that they need one others exclusion? As we said earlier, the distinction between the two concerns the question of the ‘outside’: ‘post-structuralism’ is interpreted as an sovereign interplay of signification, whereas psychoanalysis refers to some enigmatic ‘outside’ beyond discursive play. My idea is that this appearance of difference is nothing other as a gesture of repetition. The first point is that both positions - so called ‘post-structuralism’ and psychoanalysis - presuppose some irreducible deadlock around which meaning and representation are organized. Deconstruction, for example, is involved into insurmountable aporias of appearance and non-appearance, cognition and non-cognition,  representation and non-representation. If something – the present (gift), responsibility, or even democracy, - doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist. But if they appear as such to our sight or cognition, they doesn’t exist still more, because they deny the unpredictable and unlimited nature of the present, or responsibility, or democracy. Deconstruction theory creates some kind of ontological diastheme: we are confronted either with absence, or with some distorted, illusionary presence, which signals the absence of ‘true’ meaning. As a consequence, either something doesn’t exist, or it exists in some inappropriate way.

For Lacanian psychoanalysis the main deadlock is the Real, which resists symbolization and representation. Lacan makes a distinction between reality (la réalité) and the Real (le réel), where reality means ‘discursive construction’, while the term ‘the real’ refers to pre-discursive, material real. Ch. Shepherdson interprets this Lacanian distinction in terms of ‘presymbolic real’ and ‘postsymbolic real’. In the first case the real precedes the symbolical and ‘exists’ independently, while in the second case, the real is a ‘product’ of the symbolical order, a residue or surplus-effect that ‘exists’ only as a result of the symbolic operation that excludes it.[6] When we set apart the reality and try to find out that the Real is, we are involved into the same sliding of meaning. J. Butler, making references to Žižek, observes that it is unclear whether the Real is to be understood as a pre-discursive, material real, a hard ‘kernel’ located outside symbolization, or whether it is to be understood as a product of the symbolical order, “an effect of the law”, in which case we would be concerned, not so much with a “material” real, but rather with a “lack”.[7] In the first case there is something (a ‘rock’, a ‘kernel’ or sometimes a ‘substance’), although this something is meaningless before the advent of new symbolical network; in the second case we perceive the real as a ‘lack’, a ‘loss’ or ‘negativity’, as the real, which is always missing. Here we can detect the same ontological diastheme as in deconstruction theory: the Real persists either as meaningful absence, or as presence without meaning.  

The concept of the real, in spite of its ambiguity, is interpreted as an argument to distance psychoanalysis from the so called ‘poststructuralism’. J. Butler insists that the Real presents us with a ‘limit’ to discourse: “Žižek begins his critique of what he calls ‘poststructuralism’ through the invocation of a certain kind of matter, a ‘rock’ or ‘kernel’ that not only resists symbolization and discourse, but is precisely what poststructuralism, in his account, itself resists and endeavors to dissolve”.[8] Butler agrees that “the category of the real is needed”, and notes that Žižek is right to be “opposed to poststructuralist accounts of discursivity”, because we must provide a more adequate account of what remains ‘outside’ discourse.[9] Simultaniously she acknowledges that this ‘outside’ remains very ambivalent, because it is difficult to say, whether it is a prediscursive element ‘beyond’ representation, or an ‘effect’ of language itself. Ch. Shepherdson argues that the first version of the real amounts to a ‘naïve’ appeal to ‘prediscursive reality’, while the second one would be very close to certain questions formulated by Foucault and Derrida. This last version would seem to bring Lacan/Žižek closer to the thesis that ‘reality’ is ‘discursively constructed’, though with additional complication that the real implies a ‘lack’ that remains in some enigmatic way irreducible to the symbolic.[10]

So the question is how real the Real is, or is it possible to construct some ‘outside’, which is ‘beyond’ symbolization and representation. If so called ‘poststructuralism’ is   conceived (rightly or wrongly) as a theory of ‘discursive construction’, some ‘outside’ should be invented – as suggests E. Laclau, - as a legitimate ground for the critique. The most common reproach, which is constantly directed against ‘poststructuralism’, is that it presupposes unsurpassable ideology of discourse. We are always immersed in text and have no reality outside it, - there are no such things as ‘true presence’, ‘true mother’, or ‘true sex’, because all these things function like discursive supplements for other discursive supplements. As says the most worn-out dictum, ‘there is no outside-text’ – il n’y a pas de hors-texte. But isn’t this interpretation of interpretation theory somehow to simple? Isn’t the most worth lesson of ‘poststructuralism’ that it tells us about difficulties and complications, which arise in making references to extra-discursive reality? Doesn’t this description sound in the same way as the second version of the real, which seems to bring          Lacan/Žižek closer to the thesis that ‘reality’ is ‘discursively constructed’, though with additional complication of the Real.

As if responding this criticism against the Real as some enigmatic ‘beyond’, Žižek invents the new distinction between the Real and (objective) reality (sic), though not explaining that ‘objective reality’ should mean. In this precise sense the Real “is inherent to the symbolic (system of differences), not the transcendent Beyond which the signifying process tries to grasp in vain… And the Real cannot be signified not because of it is outside, external to the symbolic order, but precisely because it is inherent to it, its internal limit: the Real is the internal stumbling block on account of which the symbolic system can never ‘become itself’, achieve its self-identity.”[11] This interpretation of the Real qua internal limit of the symbolical order perfectly fits with deconstructionist claim that any presence or self-presence is involved into the process of supplementation, and by this reason can never be complete in itself. Even this attempt to ‘explain’ the Real could be exposed as a good example of the ‘logic of the supplement’: at first we have reality problem, then we are introduced with the distinction between reality and the Real, later this distinction dissolves into the gap between the Real and (objective) reality, and so on. It seems as if the argument for the Real perfectly fits into the framework of discourse theory with additional (e.g. supplementary) complication of the Real.            

This enigmatic complication, which separates ‘post-structuralism’ and psychoanalytically oriented theories, is the question of the body and ‘sexuality’. Shepherdson insists that “if psychoanalysis has taken on an increasing urgency today, it is precisely for this reason, for psychoanalysis has perhaps the clearest conception of the ‘real’ of the body, as a material dimension of the flash that ‘exceeds’ representation, yet does not automatically refer us to a ‘natural’ domain of ‘pre-existing reality’.[12] Shepherdson’s argument is that notions of the body and sexuality produce the same ambiguity or ‘sliding of meaning’ from ‘biological essentialism’ to the assertions of the ‘historical construction’ of sexuality, and in this way they only displace the theoretical difficulty they seek to solve. J. Butler insists, that the ‘defense’ of the Real itself could have psychoanalytical significance, because the Real always refers to a generalized model of trauma, namely, the ‘threat’ of castration. “If the ‘threat’ of castration is to be protected, - continues J. Butler, - what then does the threat of castration secure?”[13]

The possible answer could be that this ‘threat’ secures the real difference or antagonism - sexual, ethical, or political, - which is the condition of the possibility of the social. Starting with the sexual difference we should say, that for Lacan sexual difference is not socially constructed (as for Butler and Foucault), but is the Real of an antagonism/deadlock that the two positions endeavour to symbolize. The Real qua antagonism prevents any sexual position from achieving its identity. As a consequence, there is no defined sex and no sexual relationship (here we can refer to Lacan’s dictum il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel). In that case the notion of sexual trauma should mean not the childhoods sexual encounter, but the simple fact that there is no sex in the Real. Maybe this is the reason why sex should be invented: even if ‘there is no sexual relationship’, it should be revealed from its displaced or repressed form. Psychoanalysis invents new kind of ideology of the body and sex, referring to these notions to explain every puzzle in Symbolical or Imaginary domain. Precisely because ‘there is no sexual relationship’, everything becomes sexual, or, to use terminology of deconstruction, ‘there is no outside-sex’, - il n’y a pas de hors-sex.   

Concerning ethical and political antagonism as the Real, there could be formulated two possible implications. The first implication is, that the ethics of the Real or politics of the Real (a political project, based on the ethics of the Real) do not differ from the deconstructive ‘ethics of difference’. In “Melancholy and the Act” reading Derrida (with or against) Lacan, Žižek asks, “is Lacan’s ethics of the Real, the ethics that focuses neither on some imaginary good nor on the pure symbolic form of a universal duty, ultimately also another version of this deconstructive-Levinasian ethics of the traumatic encounter with radical otherness to which the subject is infinitely indebted?”[14] Of course, there are two separate ethical trends: humanistic one, which is involved into the infinite debt to the abyssal Other, and anti-humanist one, which refers not to the imaginary other or symbolic big Other, but to the “Other qua real, the impossible Thing, the inhuman partner, the Other with whom no symmetrical dialog, mediated by the symbolical Order, is possible”.[15] But isn’t this humanistic appeal nothing other as an attempt to ‘give a human face’ to monstrous presence/absence of the Other? Isn’t this face as a fetish nothing other as the Other-Thing, which makes the ethical relationship impossible? And do not these two positions – deconstructive and psychoanalytical – presuppose the ethics of the impossible, there impossibility acquires an imperative tone.                   

The next thing to say is that besides the ethics of the impossible, these two positions  anticipate the politics of the impossible and in fact blur the distinction between the ethical and the political. For deconstruction the political is promising but impossible task, because the political decision is based on the responsibility towards the Other, so the political decision is impossible as well as ethical. Democracy or justice have the same form of non-appearance as responsibility: if they appear as such, they necessarily gain totalitarian forms. The same holds for psychoanalytically grounded political theory (Laclau, Mouffe, Žižek), which is organized around a certain traumatic impossibility, a certain fissure which cannot be symbolized, or in other words – around the Real. It is the Real of social antagonism, which dissolves the contours of any social or political identity. In fact the social or the political doesn’t exist, but if it appears as existing, it acquires it’s existence only by means of ideological manipulations. Žižek’s attempt to add the traumatic real to the otherwise differential notion of the political doesn’t change ‘the order of things’, because there is no specifically political trauma – in spite of its political configurations, it always has an ethical content.            

III. Obscene miracles

After having done this illegal procedure of quasi-comparison, we are back to our question: why these two positions are incompatible, why so-called ‘post-structuralism’ or postmodernism should be displaced from its place? Who takes this place, or who is the subject/object of postmodernism? The ‘true’ signifier of postmodernism is inaccessible, though we have its symptoms. For Žižek the symptom of postmodernism is the direct object, which is either so proximate, that becomes obscene, or so evident, that becomes a miracle. In “Obscene Object of Postmodernity” Žižek defines ‘postmodernism’ as a process, which “consists not in demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence [as it is in case of modernism – A. Ž.], but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character.”[16] This direct proximity of the object is conceived as obscene and nauseous phenomena, which cause anxiety because of being simply too close (Žižek takes as an example Kafka’s universe). At the same time this direct object can have an opposite effect of meaning: if it leaves enough space, it is perceived as a miracle (for example, bells in the sky in Breaking the Waves). In both cases it is the presence of the object (or the object as a present) which introduces the distinction between modernism and postmodernism: “what characterizes postmodernism is precisely that one can return to a pre-modern ‘enchanted universe’ in which miracles effectively do occur, as an aesthetic spectacle, without ‘really believing it’, but also without any ironic or cynical distance”, - says Žižek.[17]

In both cases that disgusts and that fascinates is the Real – its presence and evidence. These examples reveal that so-called ‘postmodernism’, which was accused for  excluding the problem of the Real, presents itself as the Real. Interpreting the symptoms of postmodernism, we can reveal the missing signifier: the trauma of postmodernism consists of this simple fact, that the phenomenon of postmodernism, always escaping any definitions, is nothing other as the Real, with all its stupidity, obscenity and everyday miracles. Here we can refer once more to the difference between reality and the Real, the antinomy of postmodern reason, entitled as postmodern realism. Postmodern realism consists of two contradictory ideologies: ideology of realism, directly appealing to reality, and discursive ideology, insisting that reality is a result of a set of discursive practices. Žižek makes from this contradiction a Hegelian twist: the hard kernel of the Real preserves the character of reality, and vice versa: the Real persists against the pressure of reality. But what if this dialectic is even more horrible, what if besides the direct appeal to reality, what resides on the banal evidence of the Real, and the discursively constructed reality, persists the third one, namely, the banality of evidence, which is a result of  discursive practices? What if the Real is this banality of evidence, which after discursive manipulations appears as an obscene miracle, persisting in every moment of our everydayness?