—or, I (think, therefore I) is an other
I. Missing persons, bodies in pieces
Unlike Jesus in the popular bumper-sticker slogan, theory doesn’t love you. Theoretical writing is of course keenly concerned with the social, psychic, and political processes that allow or compel you to become a “you” or me to become an “I.” But theoretical writers generally don’t believe in any real “you” or “I”; they don’t believe in any essential or abiding core of identity for any one of us, don’t believe that there’s some truly “true self” trapped within, lurking behind, or floating above these socio-symbolic processes. “Anti-identitarian” theorists never claim that “we” don’t exist at all, you, and I; rather, they argue that none of us ever manages to abide in the purely self-identical, fully self-present way that we might be pleased to think. Given our irreducibly linguistic and representational condition, we can never quite seamlessly coincide with ourselves; we are always “extimately” alienated “strangers to ourselves,” always more or less or, in any case, other than what we (might like to) think (of ourselves).
But just so we’re clear—in this interpretation, it’s not as if anyone of us ever originally possessed some naturally “true self” back in the day, some organic or authentic identity that we managed to lose through some blunder, trauma, or trespass, some historical misfortune, social injustice, or original sin, an essentially “real core of self” that’s somehow been highjacked by malign forces and that we might actually recover some bright dawn through therapy, prayer, meditation, heroic intellectual effort, divine intervention, spiritual retreat, or worker’s revolution. No, sorry, fat chance of help for one’s “true self” from any of those redemptive quarters—in this interpretation “you are not yourself,” you’ve never been yourself, and you’re never going to be yourself, no matter what. So you might just as well get over it.
Now, this last piece of theoretical advice may seem cynically flippant, less sage than sour. For “alienation” is commonly recognized as a genuinely human malaise, a source of considerable human suffering. And according to no less of a theoretical writer than Theodor Adorno, “the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth” (1966/2007: 17–18). But truth be told, this seemingly cynical counsel about our self-alienation—that maybe we should just get over it—might also be taken as well-intended, user-friendly, even generously meant. This “anti-identitarian” idea of constitutive and irreparable “loss of self” could even be taken as a sort of “glad tidings,” as an invitation to throw off the burdens and constraints of consistent self-identity. In other words, the “ontological bad news” (Butler 1987/1999: 198) that we’ll never really get to be ourselves, you, and I, is offset by the more promising assurance that we don’t have to really be ourselves either (given that there’s never been any “real self” for any one of us to be). At the end of the day, the ardent identity-busters of “anti-humanist” theory aren’t simply callous misanthropes indifferent to personal suffering or spiteful nihilists who think nothing valuable about anyone’s humanity has ever been damaged or denied through assault, addiction, objectification, state-sanctioned violence, terrorist attacks, alienated labor, religious intolerance, racial oppression, colonial subjugation, the predations of consumer capitalism, or any other indisputably real source of humanly caused human misery—theorists just don’t think it’s some inherently “true self” that gets banged up on these avenues of immiseration. And actually it’s often in the interest of protecting or enhancing our potential for self-transformation—for developing richer and suppler modes of human agency, dignity, creativity, well-being, and freedom—that theoretical writers resist or reject the notion of the absolutely “true self.” For on this view, there’s already been enough damage done to human life in the service of mandatory selfhood; there’s already been enough impoverishment of human reality in the name of compulsory identity.
So while “the need to lend a voice to suffering” may well be “the condition of all truth,” as Adorno proclaims, the actual articulation of specifically theoretical “truth,” as Fredric Jameson describes it, “must always be accompanied by the shock of defamiliarization and demystification, and of the revelation of repressed or forgotten realities” (Jameson 2006: 369). And the shocking revelations that must always accompany radically theoretical truth-claims must also come as pain-causing kicks in the pants for our reified common sense, our clarified understandings of identity, our oldest and strongest feelings of familiarity with ourselves and our surroundings. Theoretical truth-tellers, then, demote or deride “the true self”—and stress identity’s contingency and fluidity (as opposed to its necessity and stability)—for a whole host of ethical, political, aesthetic, or even secularly “spiritual” reasons. Because they discern ideology busily working behind the scenes of all “identitarian” imperatives, theoretical writers see liberatory potential in hatching new strategies for subverting, abusing, or otherwise defamiliarizing and demystifying “identity.” Theoretical writers, that is, suspect that it’s invariably some representative of the “regulatory regimes” of “the Political Father” that encourages you to “be yourself” or commands you to “be all you can be” (to quote an old recruiting slogan for the United States Army); they suspect that it’s always some instrumental agent of the normalizing law that demands to see your dog-tags, your identity papers.1 So the question of whether and how successfully you can “play tag” with yourself and produce “your papers” before the law is always already political. But because the name-game of “identity politics” does involve the production of “papers” (or, in the broadest “cultural” sense, of writing, of inscribing and re-inscribing ourselves into our various “documents of civilization”), the question of what it means to be (or not to be) “all you can be” is always already “literary” to boot.2 Our purpose in this lesson is to investigate why this is the case. Or better, our purpose in this lesson is to consider how a “literary” response to the “political” question of our being or not being “really and truly” ourselves—a response that, as “literary,” is necessarily ambivalent, mixing anxiety and exhilaration as well as memory and desire—relates to both Adorno’s and Jameson’s truth-claims about “truth.”3
Taken in full, this lesson’s title is a mash-up of three sentences, one from a contemporary feminist visual artist, one from a seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher, and one from a nineteenth-century symbolist poet. The title’s first words—“You are not yourself”—are taken from a 1983 Barbara Kruger photograph, upon which they appear prominently and in Kruger’s trademark futura bold italic font. The “subject” of the photograph is a woman’s face reflected in a broken mirror. A densely reticulated circular shape appears in the top portion of the frame, and lines of fracture radiate from this point of presumably violent impact (perhaps the woman threw some blunt object at the mirror, or perhaps she hit it with her own forehead in anger, frustration, or disgusted self-hatred). The letters of the words “You” and “are” are scattered across the top of this scene of disintegration, those of “yourself” are strewn about the bottom, while the three comprising the word “not” are positioned in a straight line at the exact center of the visual space.
The photograph positions its spectator, you are looking at it, as the “You” addressed in its textual overlay, so that in viewing this shattered image, you are prompted to see “yourself” in and as the fragments of the woman, of this “other” who—unless you just happen to be she who posed for the picture—is “not” exactly you. As for the imaginary woman, she isn’t quite herself either. Nor does she seem to be particularly “joying in the truth of self-division” (Kristeva 1982: 89). Her expression sorrowed, her gaze downcast, a teardrop clinging to a piece of broken glass, “she” appears to be looking not at you or “You” or even at her own face within the frame but down and out, past “yourself,” perhaps at her own body, not shown, or perhaps at some missing shard of reflection that has fallen away from the frame and which “gives her back” some tiny piece of “herself” from the floor. At bottom left, there’s a disconnected hand with polished fingernails, presumably hers, shown holding a mirror-fragment like a piece of jigsaw puzzle. A sliver of white space just below the hand-held fragment brings it into relief, suggesting that the hand is either pulling this piece of glass away or attempting (in apparent futility) to put it back in place, to restore the broken mirror to something resembling wholeness.
If you were looking at this photograph as I at this very moment am—not on the wall of a gallery or in a book or on a computer monitor or cellular screen but while holding it as a postcard between the thumb, middle, and index fingers of your own left hand, with the index extended along the card’s edge—then your own hand would, like mine, be visually replicated by that of the woman in the photograph itself. Perhaps this replication implicates us in what Walter Benjamin calls “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” since what we hold and behold is not the “original” artwork, imbued with a quasi-sacred “aura” of singularity, but the “same” work in its cheaply mass-reproduced commodity form.4 But this “manual” and “digital” reproduction (of our own hands and fingers) can also raise the unsettling question of whether we “consumers” of contemporary art can ever masterfully “hold” this little picture (like little Ernst holds his reel in the fort-da) or whether “the picture” is not holding “us,” framing us, containing us, taking us in, cutting off some little piece of You yourself—mon semblable!—that none of us will ever get back (together with) again.5
Kruger’s photograph, then, achieves its alienating effects by implicating its viewers and readers in the “self-shattering” message that it both verbally delivers and visually enacts—You are not yourself. And so Kruger’s piece of jagged edginess not only provides us with the first sentence of our lesson’s titular mash-up but also leads us nicely (if that’s the appropriate word) to Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” For the first paragraph of Lacan’s most famous écrit features a discursive fragment of the second portion of the present lesson’s title. Here, Lacan writes of a certain “experience”—an early experience of constitutive “misrecognition” or méconnaissance—that sets psychoanalytic theory “at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito” (1966b/2006: 75). Cogito is of course short-hand for René Descartes’ slogan cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” the “root” statement of logically self-reflective self-certainty from which modern Western rationalist philosophy is usually considered to stem. The “experience” of which Lacan speaks, however, involves that fateful historical moment in which the human infant first apprehends its “self,” first feebly “grasps” its “own” image, in an “anthropogenetically” reflecting surface.
This event can take place . . . from the age of six months; its repetition has often given me pause to reflect upon the striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror who has not yet mastered walking, or even standing, but who— though tightly held by some prop, human or artificial (what, in France we call a trotte-bébé)—overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the constraints of his prop in order to adopt a slightly leaning forward position and take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind. (1966b/2006: 75–6)
Now, our initial questions about this little piece of theatre—Lacan refers to a mirror stage to invoke theatrical performance rather than to designate some “organic” phase or natural plateau of human psychic development—are these: Why does it prompt Lacan to oppose “any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito?” How does Lacanian speculation about the psychic consequences of baby’s first mirror experience disrupt the Cartesian equation of epistemological activity (“I think”) with ontological self-certainty (“therefore I am”)?6 What is it about the formation of the “I function” through what Lacan calls “homeomorphic identification” (1966b/2006: 77) that will eventually lead him to make mincemeat of the cogito in the following manner?
I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking. These words render palpable to an attentive ear with what elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal string.
What we must say is: I am not, where I am the plaything of my thought; I think about what I am where I do not think that I am thinking. (1966e/2006: 430)
Finally, why would a clinical psychoanalyst like Lacan—ostensibly devoted to “the healing arts,” to the therapeutic project of reducing human suffering, making people “feel better” about themselves—develop such a painfully bewildering style of writing as what we witness here, a “violent” style that produces in the reader what Jane Gallop calls a “great malaise,” an aggressively disintegrative style that causes the typical reader “to feel non-identical to herself as reader” (1985: 117)?
We can address these questions only by continuing to read, however that activity may make us feel. And if our feeling upon attempting to come to terms with Lacan (or any difficult theoretical writer) is anything but placidly oceanic—provoking more alienation than jubilation, more unease than self-confident calm—then our sensations of readerly malaise, of self-divisive dis-ease, may be related to what Lacan considers the infant’s experiences of ambivalence and misrecognition when it first appears to itself (as an other) upon the mirror stage, on “the threshold of the visible world” (1966b/2006: 77), when it first begins to subject its sense of being-in-the-world to the articulated process by which “the specular I” or imaginary ego “turns into the social I” (1966b/2006: 79), the subject of the symbolic order. Perhaps Lacan’s writing provokes the reader’s malaise and alienation all the better to illustrate the point that “malaise and alienation” are the subjective conditions of reading and writing as such, to better illuminate the poet Artur Rimbaud’s grammatically deformed observation (and this is the third source of our lesson’s titular pastiche) that “Je est un autre”—“I is an other” (1871/1966: 304). Perhaps Lacan’s style makes the reader feel non-identical to herself as reader because his writings “can be understood only in reference to the truth of ‘I is an other,’ less dazzling to the poet’s intuition than it is obvious from the psychoanalyst’s viewpoint” (1966c/2006: 96).
For Lacan, then, the problem with “any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito” is that such reflection remains oblivious to this dazzlingly defamiliarizing “truth.” Just as Freud (and Nietzsche before him) objected to rationalism’s reduction of all psychic activity to intentional consciousness, its indifference to unconscious motivations and desires (particularly its own), so Lacan opposes the cogito’s seemingly seamless equation of epistemology with ontology, of meaning with being. For Lacan, as we’ve read, the thinking subject may very well desire to be, but it is required, instead, to mean, ordered to symbolize; meaningful thinking—for all the reasons belabored in previous lessons—always entails a lack or dislocation of complete being. To mean means not really, finally, or fully to be. So for Lacan it can’t be the case that “I think, therefore I am.” What the case must be, rather, is that “I think [cognitively participate in meaning only] where I am not [that is, in the symbolic, where I must lack completely real being] . . . I am not [that is, I lack completely real being] where I am the plaything of my thought”— which is nowhere else but in the symbolic.
The ecstatic “truth of self-division” that Lacan and I are driving at here involves the irreducible “splitting of the subject,” our unavoidable separation and alienation from ourselves in language. Linguistic self-estrangement is unavoidable for Lacan, and for you and I, because (1), like you, I have no “I” to speak of unless I can speak of it, and (2), I can speak and think of myself only by discursively splitting myself in two, scissoring myself, on the one hand, into the subject who performs the speaking and thinking and, on the other, into the potentially losable object—the elusive “ring” or “plaything”—of my “own” speech and thought. Whenever I put myself into play; whenever I put myself into words (as I must, if I want to participate in human reality); whenever I say, think, or otherwise mean “I,” I inevitably (albeit unconsciously) end up with more than one “I” (an embarrassment of rIches). I am thus put into the position of having to play the game of fort-da with myself, or at least of having to open myself, playfully or painfully, to the division between signifier and signified, the gap between what I say I am and what I think I mean. Lacan, being Lacan, exacerbates this crack, this fissure, and throws a handsawed bit of Hamlet into the breach, by thinking to ask:
Is the place that I occupy as a subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? That is the question. The point is not to know whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak. (1966e/2006: 430).
For Lacan, the only valid responses here are: (a) eccentric, and (b) not the same. Because I is an other, you are not yourself—all of which means, among other things, that our mutual friend “the cogito” just isn’t going to cut it anymore, at least not “directly,” and certainly not after “the linguistic turn” in the human sciences, not after “language invaded the universal problematic and everything became discourse” (Derrida 1966/1978: 280).
But let’s return, you and I, to the moment of the mirror stage, an “imaginary” event which does seem to complicate the cogito to no end but which would also seem to be a scene of cognitive “jubilation” rather than discursive alienation. As we’ve read, Lacan describes the infant at/upon this stage as a sort of speechless early reader, leaning toward the “first page” of its self-reflection “in a flutter of jubilant activity . . . in order to fix it in his mind.” Lacan then repeats the happy adjective, asserting that
the jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence—the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in its primordial form. (1966b/2006: 76)
And of course there is cause for celebration, for a bit of the old “hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!” here, for no “little man” of any gender is ever going to make it far in “the visible world” without a sense of identity, a valid ID, or a vehicular I of some make or model.7
But in Lacan’s account, the infant, prior to its premiere upon the mirror stage, lacks any formal sense of self, doesn’t yet possess an ego, is not yet strictly speaking an I, is not yet perceptually coordinated as the subjective locus or pivot of its “own” experience of being-in-the-world. Subjectivity, mind you, depends upon a working sense of differentiation, depends upon knowing the difference “between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (1966b/2006: 78), the inner world and the great outdoors. But as Lacan suggests elsewhere, “the very young child’s experience of itself . . . develops on the basis of a situation that is experienced as undifferentiated” (1966c/2006: 91), and, unless I’m very much mistaken, this early situation of experiential undifferentiation bears a close resemblance to our long-lost friend and implacable enemy—the real. Let’s say that before and outside the montage of the imaginary and the symbolic, before and outside the limits—and the libidinally normalizing limitations—of human reality, the infant has all of its “eggs” put into this one oceanic “basket,” that the infant has all of its sense of being situated—cathected or “invested”—in this “sea of yolky enjoyment” (Žižek 1992: 40) that is the undifferentiated real. Let’s say that the infant “in the real” doesn’t know the difference between subject and object, interior and exterior, can’t tell the difference between itself and everything else, can’t accurately say where its self-sameness leaves off and everything else or anything other “officially” begins.
Nor, let’s say, does the infant “in the real” have any conception of the way its own prematurely born body actually hangs together. If it happens to see its own hand flapping around in front of its as yet self-unseen face, it still may not visually “grasp” the proper connection of hand to arm to shoulder to “self.” Its “own” appendage might register as just another piece of meat swimming in the continuous visual stew, just another blob of perceptual flotsam in the great yolky sea—as, for that matter, might its own mirror reflection, if the infant happens to be exposed to that graceless figure before being developmentally capable of apprehending the image as its “own.”
For better and for worse, this oceanic feeling of undifferentiation contracts, dries up, at the moment of the mirror stage. For when the infant, assisted by its human or artificial “prop,” first recognizes itself as “an other” in the mirror, first sees the way its own fairly inept bodily movements correspond to those of the fairer shape or sharper image it beholds before it, it arguably “loses” undifferentiation—and loses it for good.8 The infant—formerly in the real, now formally being hauled out of it—must from now on discern and maintain the difference between itself and everything else, must note the contrast between figure and background, must come to know that “in reality” (as opposed to “in the real”) it is not everything but merely one relatively quite diminished thing, one “miserable glass shell of human individuality” (Nietzsche 1872/2006: 82) among others, what Freud ego-deflatingly calls a “shrunken residue” (1930/1989: 725), a separate and much smaller entity, constitutively discontinuous with everything else in the visible world.
However, beholding for the first time its own head tottering on its shoulders, as well as their connection to its own arms and hands, the infant may now be gratified to see that in the Umwelt—in external reality as represented in this “other scene” out there—its body does seem to hold together in an “ideal” or formally coherent way, or at least in a much better way than anything the infant had heretofore imagined. This ideal morphological “unity of self” was imperceptible, unimaginable, in the indifferent time before the mirror stage, back “in the real,” when and where the infant will have thus experienced itself only as a corps morcelé, a “body-in-fragments.” But as my emphatic and confusing use of the future anterior (the phrase will have thus) might suggest, here’s where “things” get particularly complicated, logically and chronologically, for the newly reflective “little man” (if not for the malaised reader of “The Mirror Stage” essay itself). For if a “fragment” is thinkable as fragment only in differential relation to the idea of some unbroken unity or whole, then how in the visible world could the infant—prior to the mirror stage, still residing within an experientially “undifferentiated” situation—be said to imagine itself as a fragmented body? Well, logically and chronologically, it couldn’t, and Lacan doesn’t exactly say that it does. What Lacan writes is that the mirror stage
is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: [it] is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. (1966b/2006: 78)
Now, to say that the mirror stage is experienced as a temporal dialectic is to suggest, among other things, that its effects and causes are never immediately present but must be read as unfolding in time.9 In other words, the narrative of the formation of the I function must be read in a sort of temporal loop, backward as well as forward, with an eye toward the phenomenon that Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, “deferred action” or “retro-determination” or “retroversive causality.” What occurs in a typical episode of psychic Nachträglichkeit is that a subject will experience a “new” discovery that retroactively “recodes” the memory of some earlier experience, imbuing the remembered event with a significance (typically a sexual significance) that it previously lacked. This freshly reinterpreted experience then circles back from the past to bear down upon and “pre-recode” the present revelation.
Considering, then, the “bad timing” of the corps morcèle in the light of Nachträglichkeit, we see that the infant in the undifferentiated real can’t cognitively experience itself at that time as an insufficient body-in-fragments. This can’t be the case because the infant can’t simultaneously experience undifferentiation and insufficiency (since “insufficiency” can be experienced only in differential relation to some ideally sufficient image). Never having seen its ego ideal before, never having seen its own “up-standing” self up-close and personal, the infant “in the real” can’t have the faintest suspicion that there’s ever been anything “wrong” with it. It is only after the moment of the mirror stage, only after the “orthopedic” or corrective perception of a totally coherent “body image,” that the infant’s earlier and “innocent” experience of the real is retroactively re-imagined as one of “organic inadequacy” (1966b/2006: 77), of corporeally scattered insufficiency. The fantasy of the hellishly fragmented body (Lacan references the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in this regard) gets retro-projected onto the infant’s “lost” situation of undifferentiation, while “the lure of spatial identification,” in the form of the fantasy of the “ideal-I,” gets projected into its future as a desirable “dialectical” resolution to what will have become the problem of fragmentation. Thus, Lacan writes of “the dialectic syntheses by which [the subject] must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality” (1966b/2006: 76). The subject of the mirror stage is suspended between the “insufficiency” of a still-present past and the “anticipation” of an attractive future good. The subject is situated between the (bad) idea of the fragmented body (which the subject is told, in so many words, that it should desire to forget or repress, should desire to start moving away from) and the (good) ideal of the unified, non-discordant self, the image of the purely self-identical I (which the subject gets told, in so many words, that it should eventually add or shape or live up to).10
But as these emphasized shoulds should suggest, here’s where the “political” or ideological aspects of “morphological mimicry” (1966b/2006: 77) come to the foreground. Here’s where the little man’s “house of mirrors” starts to look like the “department of corrections” that it actually pretty much is. For like everything else in a world that must be made to mean, the imposing ego ideal that appears in a mirror doesn’t grow on a tree or fall from the sky but is produced through human labor. As we’ll see, a mirror is never simply a neutral or objectively reflecting surface but is always “political” to its very tain.11 The mirror experience functions as the enabling gateway to a whole host of socially produced images, each ready to play its “orthopedic” part in the larger “cultural intervention” (1966b/2006: 79), each lying in wait for its chance to subject the subject to the rigors of “identificatory reshaping” (1966c/2006: 95). In other words, the subject of the mirror stage is always already subjected to ideology, and “ideology” is the precise term for and of this subjection.
Although Lacan never employs the word “ideology” in the mirror-stage essay, he nonetheless insists that what the mirror stage represents is not “a natural maturation process” but a “cultural intervention” (1966b/2006: 79). For Lacan, the ideal “specular I” that the infant is encouraged to mimic is a culturally “orthopedic” or corrective form, “the root-stock of secondary identifications . . . subsuming the libidinal normalization functions” (1966b/2006: 76). In “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan suggests that these “secondary identifications” work by virtue of the subject’s “introjection of the imago of the parent of the same sex,” and he thus stresses “the ‘pacifying’ function of the ego-ideal: the connection between its libidinal normativeness and a cultural normativeness” (1966c/2006: 95).
Now, boys and girls, what does it mean for Lacan to connect “morphological mimicry” to “libidinal normalization” to “cultural normativeness”? It means that no mirror in the history of the world has ever just “objectively” given back the simple reflection of a “good” little boy or girl anatomically destined to naturally mature and/or libidinally blossom into “normal” heterosexuality. Rather, the mirror functions as a sociocultural “apparatus” that “imposes” and “naturalizes” the vision of an always-already sociocultural subject who had better get its act together, who had better perform its mimicry correctly, and who had better turn out straight. For Lacan, the subject’s eventual concordance with its “own reality” entails a rather large quantum of fear-based conformity with the “pacifying” function of the ego ideal; it involves the coerced internalization of the “appropriate picture,” the successful introjection of the image of the parent of the same sex (who, as “successful” parent or effective “prop,” must be presumed to have turned out “straight” him-or-herself), and a perpetual identification with and docile endorsement of all the images of compulsory normativity that a given culture proffers.
The operative critical idea here is that any existing culture, working or doing business as a “system of constraints” (Greenblatt 1995: 227), depends upon the institutional circulation of normativizing images to continue to exist, to work, to “reproduce its conditions of production.” This last phrase comes to us from Marx via Louis Althusser, to whose essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses” we now turn. For here, Althusser develops an innovative and influential theory of ideology based in no small part on Lacan’s insights into the mirror stage.
What Althusser theorizes, however, is not any particular ideology, but “ideology in general.” In other words, Althusser isn’t into analyzing “isms” as codified sets of political ideas or “articles of faith” to which various individuals in a given society might consciously subscribe. Nor is he about debunking some specific “ism” as a pernicious piece of ideological “false consciousness.” Rather, Althusser sees “ideology in general” both as a pervasively unconscious formation and as “a necessary element of ‘sociality’ itself” (Kavanagh 1995: 314). Ideology in general is “a structure essential to the historical life of societies . . . indispensable in any society if [individuals] are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence” (Althusser 1970: 234–5). Because all human individuals are born prematurely, not “fully equipped” to respond to even the most basic existential demands, every stinking one of us must be formed and transformed, socialized and cultivated, brought into the fold of human reality in its current historical form.12
For Althusser, then, the phrase “ideology in general” designates a formal, structural, transhistorical, even “eternal” aspect of socialization, that “extraordinary adventure” which “transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child” (1971: 139–40). Ideology “in general” is now and forever integral to the “humanization of the small biological creature that results from human parturition” (1971: 140). Althusser thus isn’t concerned with specific “isms” that turn otherwise perfectly nice people into sinister or tedious “ideologues.” Rather, he investigates “ideology in general” as the necessary process that transforms individuals into subjects “in the first place.” Althusser is concerned not with ideological content, with what some specifically espoused ideology is, but rather with the ideological function, what “ideology in general” does and how it does it.
The first and overarching function of ideology is to secure “the reproduction of the conditions of production” (Althusser 1971/2001: 85). By “production” Althusser means the actual making of the world that must be materially made, that must be humanly generated or manufactured (that doesn’t grow on trees or fall from the sky). The “conditions of production” include both the “productive forces” (humans in and as their “labor power” to make the world) and “the existing relations of production” (1971/2001: 86)—the cooperative or conflictual relations of these producers (1) to each other; (2) to other humans (in a class society, these would be the owners of production, who don’t produce but who extract wealth and power from the workers who actually do; and (3) to the product(s) or fruit(s) of their labor (all the manufactured objects in the world and, in the largest “materialist” sense, the very history of the world, the very “world history” that they—we—are in the process of producing).
Now, the historical conditions of production or “world-making” are such that they always necessarily have to be reproduced—structurally, transhistorically, universally, “eternally,” the world must be made and remade. Such remaking involves physical, material, and of course sexual reproduction (the producers themselves must be produced—or, as Shakespeare’s Benedick crows in Much Ado about Nothing, “the world must be peopled!”). It is thus a truth universally acknowledged that “the ultimate condition of production is . . . the reproduction of the conditions of production”—or at least Althusser quotes Marx to the effect that “every child knows” (1971/2001: 85) such to be the case. Marxism holds these truths to be self-evident—the world must be peopled, and people all over the world always have to work to produce the conditions of their self-population. “Labor” in both senses of the word is an absolutely necessary condition of possibility, never a merely historical contingency.
But still one might ask—under what specific and historically contingent conditions do men and women (go into) labor? Leaving aside for the moment the question of the different ways in which “human parturition” might be handled, one can accept the inevitability of labor, can accept that people must work, but nonetheless still wonder—Which people? What sort of work? Under what “working conditions”? And for what actual purpose? Of course, one might imagine a world—a “fully human and humanly produced world” (Jameson 2010: 107)—in which the conditions of production were such that the real purpose of all work was to produce and reproduce equally humane and equitably humanizing conditions for all. Conversely, one might imagine a world in which the real “meaning and purpose” of everybody’s work everywhere was to produce wealth and power and pleasure for only some. But look—one doesn’t have to merely “imagine” the latter world. One has only to recognize contemporary global capitalist society (or “Planet Money,” as I’ve heard the phrase coined) for what it is and as our very “own reality”— not because we all own it, to be sure, but because we actively reproduce its conditions of production, simply by “being ourselves,” simply by living our purportedly “purpose-driven” lives.13
The main purpose driving ideology is, again, to secure the reproduction of the conditions of production. But ideological security apparently requires the labor of “making” historically specific and contingent conditions seem unconditional—necessary, inevitable—to the very producers of those conditions. Making the conditional seem unconditional is required whenever it appears that workers will continue to work only on condition that their working conditions appear to them as unconditional, unquestionable, absolutely inevitable. Without that ideological “job-security”—the job of ideationally securing people in their jobs, in their allotted places on the figurative or actual “assembly line”—these workers might refuse to work. In order to “make” workers (who) work, to make workers (who) “work all by themselves” (i.e., to “make” them without having overtly and physically to force them, without having to march them off at gunpoint to labor camps or factories or offices or universities), ideology works to “make” contingent conditions appear necessary, to reproduce or represent contingencies as necessities, securing the reproduction of the conditions of production by representing the contingent as eternal. The dominant effect of this reproduction/representation is to render alternative working conditions unrepresentable, even unimaginable, to and for the workers themselves.
This work of making the contingent seem eternal involves both reproduction and representation. It depends, actually, upon a crucial shift from “reproductive systems” (involving the biologically real) to “systems of representation” (involving the cultural forms of human reality, pretty much anything comprised of images and/or words). This shift from systematic reproduction to systematic representation leads us to a second major function of ideology. Althusser writes that to secure the reproduction of the conditions of production, ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1971/2001: 109). “Imaginary” here means imagined, otherwise than real, and so Althusser clearly implies a discrepancy between representations of “imaginary relations” and non- representationally “real conditions.” He suggests, in other words, that people’s real conditions of existence might be otherwise than what they imagine for themselves or see represented to them.14
But “imaginary” also means imaged, comprised of images, involving the social circulation of pictures. Karl Mannheim has observed that “a society is possible in the last analysis [only] because the individuals in it carry around in their heads some sort of picture of that society” (1964: xxiii). James Kavanagh writes that “with the important addition of ‘and their place in it,’ ” Mannheim’s observation “might serve as a fair introduction to current ideology theory, which tries to understand the complex ways through which modern societies offer reciprocally reinforcing versions of ‘reality,’ ‘society,’ and ‘self’ to social subjects” (1995: 309).
Ideology designates a rich “system of representations” . . . which helps form individuals into social subjects who “freely” internalize an appropriate “picture” of the social world and their place in it. Ideology offers . . . a fundamental framework of assumptions that defines the parameters of the real and the self . . . Ideology is less tenacious as a “set of ideas” than as a system of representations, perceptions and images that precisely encourages men and women to “see” their specific place in a historically peculiar social formation as inevitable, natural, a necessary function of the “real” itself. (1995: 310)
The basic critical idea here is that men and women, in order to be “men” and “women,” must be “encouraged” to see their allotted places in a particular “social world” as necessary functions of “the real itself” or else they might not want to stay in their places, might not want to keep being what they “are.” Encouraging people to just “be themselves” and discouraging them from imagining any other destiny, ideology involves systematically framing/forming people, keeping them in line and on task, mainly by “giving” them the impression that by staying “on the job” (of being themselves) they are just “doing what comes naturally.” Impressing us with (and into) our given identities; representing our imaginary relations to our real conditions; offering “reciprocally reinforcing versions of ‘reality,’ ‘society,’ and ‘self’ [in pictures and in words] to social subjects” (Kavanagh 1995: 309)—all this is ideology’s “business.”
And ideology is always quite busy, particularly in those intimately “personal” places where ostensibly non-ideological “common-sense” is most loath to find it. “Common sense,” as you’ll recall, involves the reception/affirmation of “given meaning,” of whatever seems to go without saying, whatever seems perfectly obvious, self-evident, clear, right, and true—to anyone with “common sense.” But Althusser argues that ideology works its magic by enforcing and reinforcing “common sense,” or, as he puts it (and here’s the third major ideological function), by imposing certain “obviousnesses as obviousnesses.” Althusser writes:
It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable reaction of crying out . . . : “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!” (1971/2001: 116)
For Althusser, ideology (1) secures the reproduction of the conditions of production by (2) representing people’s imaginary relations to their real conditions in a way that (3) imposes obviousnesses as obviousnesses. By getting social subjects to cough back up its “inevitable” common-sense truisms, ideology offers what Althusser calls “the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen—‘So be it.’ ” (1971/2001: 123).
This phrase [‘So be it!’] which registers the effect to be obtained proves that it is not ‘naturally’ so . . . This phrase proves that it has to be so if things are to be what they must be: [i.e.,] if the reproduction of the relations of production is to be assured . . . in the attitudes of the individual subjects occupying the posts which the socio-technical division of labour assigns to them. (1971/2001: 124)
Through this imposition of the obvious as obvious, ideology gets people to work by getting people to work on their attitudes, on the pictures they carry around in their heads, in order to turn what merely happens to be (an historically contingent division of labor) into what “simply” and “obviously” has to be (a veritable “force of nature”). In other words, ideology operates in exactly the same “clarifying” way that Roland Barthes says “myth” functions in his 1957 book Mythologies. As you’ll recall from our introductory chapter, for Horkheimer and Adorno, “False clarity is only another name for myth” (1947/2002: xvii). Similarly, for Barthes, “myth,” or ideology—the words can be used interchangeably—is a particularly clarified “type of speech,” a “purified” or “depoliticized speech,” a mode of communicative action whose primary function is to “transform history into nature” (1957/1972: 129). As Barthes writes
Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology. If our society is objectively the privileged field of mythical significations, it is because formally myth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society: at all the levels of human communication, myth operates the inversion of anti-physis into pseudo-physis. (1957/1972: 142)
To elaborate on this inversion, let’s recall that since “physis” here means the “raw material” of the natural world, the project of “anti-physis” entails the transformative work on or against “brute materiality” in which humans must engage to produce the conditions of their existence, to produce their “world-history.” To put this process or project in roughly “dialectical” terms, we can say that if physis stands as the negation or antithesis of constitutively humanizing labor, as the negation of human dignity, autonomy, freedom, etc., then labor itself assumes the form of the negation of this negation. “Antiphysis” thus expresses the project of the dialectic of freedom, the productive, progressive, and (one can always hope) liberatory process of our collectively and cooperatively making human history itself—the dialectical project not of intepreting the past but of what Michael Hardt militantly calls “making the present.”15 What Barthes calls “pseudo-physis,” then, would thus be a sort of “bogus nature,” a “naturalized” reproduction/representation of the laborious production of human reality that effectively “freeze- frames” or reifies it. The “inversion of anti-physis into pseudo-physis” thus involves transforming a mutable and (perhaps) progressive human history into an immutable and seemingly inevitable human nature. And this inversion/transformation is the “very principle of myth” (1957/1971: 129). As Barthes explains:
What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined . . . by the way [people] have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality . . . Myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things; in [myth] things lose the memory that they once were [humanly] made. The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. . . [Myth] has emptied [human reality] of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance . . . In passing from history to nature, myth . . . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectic, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something all by themselves. (1957/1972: 142– 43)16
Now, if turning history into nature is the “very principle” of myth, this principle subtends all three of the major functions of “ideology in general” described thus far. There is, however, a fourth function in Althusser’s theory, a function which effectively connects the mythological work of making “things appear to mean something all by themselves” with the ideological work of getting workers to “work all by themselves” (Althusser 1971/2001: 123), that is, without their having to be forced into labor at gunpoint. This function involves “constituting individuals as subjects,” imposing the very “category of the subject” as a primary obviousness, and thus eliciting an individual’s subjective “self-recognition” as an “inevitable reaction,” a “perfectly natural” response.
And here’s where Althusser’s theory of ideology gets really “personal.” He writes that “the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology” but adds that “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects” (1971/2001: 116).
It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary “obviousness” (obviousnesses are always primary): . . . Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word “name a thing” or “have a meaning” (therefore including the obviousness of the “transparency” of language), the “obviousness” that you and I are subjects—and that that does not cause any problems—is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. (1971/2001: 116)
For Althusser, the most elementary ideological effect is the recruitment or interpellation of individuals as subjects. Thus, ideological analysis “is concerned with the institutional and/or textual apparatuses that work on the reader’s or spectator’s imaginary conceptions of self and social order in order to call or solicit (or “interpellate,” as Althusser puts it, using a quasi-legal term that combines the senses of ‘summons’ and ‘hail’) him/her into a specific form of social ‘reality’ and social subjectivity” (Kavanagh 1995: 310). As Althusser puts it:
Ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognised that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else). (1971/2001: 118)
In a footnote, Althusser explains that “hailing as an everyday practice subject to a precise ritual takes a quite ‘special’ form in the policeman’s practice of ‘hailing’ which concerns the hailing of ‘suspects’ ” (118). And yet, he also argues that interpellation as an “everyday practice” is always a “police action”, regardless of whether the “hailer” is an actual cop or the “hailed” a guilty perp. In other words, anyone who is anyone, anyone who “answers to the description” of the second-person pronoun in a hailing address—hey, you there!—is ideologically interpellated, effectively constituted or recruited as a subject. Althusser even includes under the rubric of “ideological subjection” such “everyday” banalities as answering “it’s me” to the question “who’s there?” posed from the other side of a knocked-upon door.
But here, one might well wonder—as long I’m not “suspected” of being a criminal, a maniac, a “terrorist,” a “pervert,” or some other type of “bad subject,” as long as I’m “suspected” only of rather blandly “being myself,” what’s really so “ideological” about my being constituted as a subject? In Althusser’s view, the problem involves “the ambiguity of the term subject.” As he writes:
In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission . . . The individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order . . . that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself’. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they ‘work all by themselves’. (1971/2001: 123)
This ambiguity explains why there’s something fundamentally fishy about the category of the subject, why “the ‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects . . . is an ideological effect” (1971/2001: 116) —the more self-confidently we “imagine” ourselves as “subjects” in the first sense, the more “freely” we “turn” or screw ourselves into our subjection in the second.
But the larger problem involves the type of society by and into which we’re screwed. For example, at this historical moment in the dark fields of the republic in which I write, debates about reform of the “health care system” are raging. On the op-ed page of the New York Times, a pundit named Matt Miller opines against making the health insurance that covers members of the US Congress available to the American public on the grounds that it “does little to encourage people to be smart health care shoppers” (21 July 2009).
Now, it shouldn’t take an Althusserian brain surgeon to diagnose the problem with this symptomatic “encouragement,” to recognize “smart health care shoppers” as an ideologically interpellative phrase that basically prescribes and endorses the commodification of all life in the United States. Attempting to make it seem obvious that whatever is done about the US health care system should “encourage people to be smart health care shoppers,” the phrase “encourages” people to envision “health care” itself only as a shopping item rather than as, say, oh, I don’t know, maybe something like a human right. Further, the phrase “encourages” American people to imagine “the American people” themselves only as consumers, smart or stupid, with or without purchasing power, rather than as say maybe a collective of socially empowered citizens with certain inalienable rights (i.e., rights that shouldn’t be privatized, shouldn’t be taken away and then sold back to us as commodities in order to generate abundant monetary health for capitalists). The interpellative phrase “smart health care shoppers” works to naturalize “market solutions” to all human problems, to represent private property and the “free market economy” as inevitable functions of the real itself.17 The phrase reproduces-represents- imposes a world in which, as Fredric Jameson laments, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than to envision the end of capitalism.18
Now, as may or may not be “obvious,” my point in turning to the journalist’s turn of phrase is to connect what occurs “in the text” or “on the page” to the “physical conversion” that transpires in Althusser’s theoretical street-scene, wherein the individual turns into a subject simply by turning in response to a policeman’s hail. In other words, while the pundit’s hegemonic hail “hey, American health care shopper!” may seem “merely textual,” the phrase is structurally complicit with the cop’s more forceful and compelling “hey you there!” The journalist, an editorial agent of an Ideological State Apparatus, works in collusion with the cop, a uniformed agent of the Repressive State Apparatus, to defend, protect, and serve the private property system.19
Here, though, let’s turn from the theoretical scene of interpellation, which occurs in “the street,” with its strong police presence, back to Lacan’s earlier “theatrical” scene of mirror-stage recognition, which occurs “in the home,” and from which the constabulary would seem to missing. Althusser, however, admits the police into the house, shows their warrant to search your imaginary premises, when he writes that “the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects . . . is speculary, i.e., a mirror structure,” and that “mirror duplication is constitutive of all ideology and ensures its functioning” (1971/2001: 122).
To see how the “mirror duplication” of the “specular I” functions ideologically, consider the moment in Lacan’s account when he writes that the mirror-stage infant is “held tightly by some prop, human or artificial,” and that the infant “overcomes . . . the constraints of his prop” to better “take in” the view. Implying that it doesn’t really matter whether the “prop” be human or artificial, Lacan suggests both that the artificial prop is laboriously human (i.e., the trotte-bébé contraption is brought about through human labor, even if our commodity fetishism helps us forget that fact) and that the properly human is also artificial—that is, socially produced through representational labor.20 The mirrored subject is formed by being informed that it should “shape up,” that it should eventually add or live up to the ideal formal totality that it sees before it. But the agent of this information is none other than the aforementioned “prop,” the primary caretaker (let’s say, the mother) who works all by herself, who does her duty and hoists the otherwise incapable one up to eye-level with the mirror and “encourages” it to identify with what it sees. With her own “body language”—her gestures, her looks, her smiles—this supportive “prop” signals a message to the homunculus—“there you are—there’s my good boy!” And the good boy normally responds with a flutter of jubilant activity. All seems well and good with this scenario, everything in its right place, everything perfectly obvious and true. For after all, it’s obviously really him in the mirror and not someone else.
But while the maternal “prop” seems only to be doing what would “come naturally” to any human mother, isn’t mumsy actually following certain stage directions, rehearsing pre- scripted lines, performing the duties of “the good mother” as she has seen these chores systematically represented to her basically all her life? Granted, it does seem more “natural” that the mother should at this juncture utter something like “there’s my good boy” rather than raise her fist and shout “Workers of the world unite!” Nonetheless, when “the good mother” says “there’s my good boy,” all these “obvious” terms are actually shot through with political meaning. While “good” may seem to mean inherently worthy of any mother’s love, it also means fully compliant with the prevailing norms of the polis, the “historically peculiar social formation” in which tot and mom have to live, with all of its attendant “institutions for the enforcement of cultural boundaries through praise and blame” (Greenblatt 1995: 226).
As for the tot, is it really all that obvious to him that it’s really him and not someone else who’s being addressed with the “there’s my good boy” line? Or is there not already a self-alienating subtext to his prop’s orthopedic script? Even in the midst of its jubilant flutter, the infant might begin to get the real picture, to “read” between the lines, to hear the inner voice that effectively says—there, reflected in that mirror, not here, in your body’s immediate experience of itself, is the “good boy”; that figure there who seems to hang together like a little man-in-full, he’s the “good boy,” he’s the version of yourself that we like, that we recognize—not you, little mister craps-his-pants, not you, leaky little corps-morcèle, still trapped in your motor impotence and nursling dependence, your yolky enjoyment, polymorphous perversity, and the devil only knows what else.
Small wonder, then, that when you look in the mirror and see how the hip-bone’s connected to the thigh-bone, you hear (and fear) the name of the Lord. But while you might believe that in hearing this call and leaning toward this image “in order to fix it” in your mind you are thereby overcoming the constraints of your “prop,” what you’re actually “leaning into” is an ever more effective system of constraints. Because ideology, my friend, is eternal, there has always been and will always be a correspondence and a complicity between the prop’s “there you are!” and the cop’s “hey you there!”
III. Aesthetics of resistance?
Is there, then, no possibility of “yours truly” ever resisting or eluding “ideology”? For the Marxist Althusser, this question truly misses the point. Since “ideology in general” is basically synonymous with socialization (the always necessary process of turning little animals into little human beings), and since our species’ prematurity at birth ensures that the need for socialization “will always be with us” (as Jesus supposedly said about the poor), “ideology in general” is pretty much eternal, elemental, inescapable, for all individuals—past, present, and future. The truly political question, then, is not whether an individual can somehow heroically resist ideological subjection/interpellation; rather, the only valid political question for Althusser concerns the historical character of the society in/to which the individual will be subjected. In the last analysis, Althusser is less concerned with any individual’s “personal” transformation than he is committed to the radical transformation of all social relations as a whole:
In a class [or capitalist] society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between [people] and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless [or communist] society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between [people] and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of all [people]. (cited in Kavanagh 1995: 313)
Unlike Althusser, however, some theoretical writers interested in questioning identity and effecting political change would settle for less than a classless society, or they desire but don’t see the possibility of any such society on the near horizon, or they don’t interpret oppression and liberation primarily or exclusively in Marxian economic terms. These theoretical writers do see individual subjectivity as a possible site of resistance to “naturalized” forms of social domination. They understand “personal identity” as the axis of intersection for a number of discourses of power, as a nodal point for the reproduction of various relations of oppression (including but not limited to economic processes or class). These theorists thus discern liberatory potential— “resistance-value,” or what might be called “ref-use value”—in discourses that disturb, subvert, transform, or even abject self-identity, in whatever might unsettle, short-circuit, or reconfigure the regnant human reality, in whatever helps “to fuck shit up” (Halberstam 2006: 824) when it comes to our standard imaginary relations to our real existential conditions.
Michel Foucault, for example, studied arduously with Althusser but never ardently followed Marx. Describing his intellectual training in an interview called “The Minimalist Self,” Foucault writes, “I was a pupil of Althusser, and at that time the main philosophical currents in France were Marxism, Hegelianism and phenomenology. I must say I have studied these but what gave me for the first time the desire of doing personal work was reading Nietzsche” (1983/1988: 8).
Now, I would say that this “desire of doing personal work” that Foucault claims to have contracted from reading Nietzsche relates quite intimately to Nietzsche’s “antimoral” stance that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (1872/2006: 58). I would venture that Foucault’s desire to do “personal work” corresponds to what he elsewhere calls “the search for an aesthetics of existence,” the “elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art” (1984/1988: 51). As we read at the end of the preceding lesson, for Foucault, “personal work” as “intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself”; Foucault, as we’ve read, believes that “this transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is . . . something rather close to the aesthetic experience” (1983/1988: 14). So, while Althusser’s star pupil agrees with his teacher that “the subject is constituted through practices of subjection” (i.e., in politically and economically predetermined ways), Foucault also believes that we subjects of human reality can reconstitute ourselves aesthetically, self-transformatively, “in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in [pre-Christian] Antiquity, on the basis of course of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be found in the cultural environment” (1984/1988: 50–1).
Elaborating on this liberatory stylistics—what I’ll call “the will to style”—in an interview titled “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” Foucault remarks:
What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? (1983/1997: 261)
Asked how his aestheticist perspective differs from the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Foucault responds:
I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre [rightly] avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves—to be truly our true self. I think the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity—and not to that of authenticity. From the [salutary] idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. (1983/1997: 262)
And when Foucault’s interlocutor remarks that his aesthetic work-ethic, which pits style and creativity against morality and authenticity, “sounds like Nietzsche’s observation in The Gay Science that one should create one’s life by giving style to it through long practice and daily work,” Foucault concurs, “Yes. My view is much closer to Nietzsche’s than to Sartre’s” (1983/1997: 262).
Foucault’s perspective is indeed closer to Nietzsche’s than to Sartre’s, or to Althusser’s, or, for that matter, to the revolutionary views of Karl Marx. Again, Foucault isn’t a Marxist by any measure (he once expressed the desire never to hear the man’s name again).21 But unlike the unabashedly antidemocratic Nietzsche, or the cheerfully slave-owning citizens of classical Antiquity, Foucault comes off as fairly egalitarian in his radical aestheticism, implicitly refusing the idea that “the practice of creativity” should be reserved for some elite cadre of artists/experts within the ruling class. Foucault, that is, seems more sincere than naïve when he poses the “utopian” question—“couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” (1983/1997: 261, my emphasis).
Moreover, Foucault, though not a Marxist, could be considered a sort of historical materialist, at least to the extent that he doesn’t believe that anything related to our “personal work,” to our human reality, grows on trees or falls from the sky. For Foucault, everything specifically human must involve our old friend antiphysis, must involve human “practices” of power and resistance, of discourse and counter-discourse, of subjection and of liberation— practices of creativity that are simultaneously “political” and “aesthetic” and that can develop only on the basis of “rules, styles, and inventions to be found” nowhere else but in the prevailing “cultural environment,” nowhere else but in a cultural language that is by nature fictional, nowhere else but in our own making of the present, our own creative writing of the “history of the present” (1975/1995: 31).
Perhaps the most conspicuous sign of Foucault’s non-Marxist historical materialism is his emphasis on sex, rather than economic class, as a principal vector of oppression and possible self-transformation. In The History of Sexuality and elsewhere, Foucault famously posits “sex” not as some inherently revolutionary “force of nature” to be repressed or liberated but as a socio-discursive construction, “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power” (1976/1990: 103). Foucault investigates what he calls the “deployment” of sex, the way “sex” is “put into discourse.” He analyzes those strategically “discursive orthopedics” (1976/1990: 29) that “encourage” individuals to understand and articulate their “sexuality” as the “truth” of their “identity.” For Foucault, there are no “natural” or “inevitable” connections among sexual practices, truth-claims, and identity-formations; rather, the connections among sex, truth, and self are produced and enforced through disciplinary institutions, discursive implantations, carceral segregations, capillary relays of power, and panoptical technologies of self-surveillance.22 But since all these “police actions” take place discursively (they are socially enacted in various institutional, medical, psychological, religious, juridical, pedagogical, and literary discourses— what Althusser would consider ISAs), and because they occur at the level of subjectivity/subjection (what Althusser calls interpellation), these practices of sexual self- policing can be confronted and resisted discursively and subjectively as well, through “practices of creativity,” through “deployments” of style and invention. In other words, in Foucault’s view, “we” subjects of the social construction of sex don’t have to wait for a worker’s revolution or for the final breakdown of late capitalism to try to unsettle dominant relations of power, to try to renegotiate sexual identities (or untether “sex” from “identity” altogether), to try to invent new forms of aesthetic existence, new styles of corporeal subjectivity, new ways of orchestrating our “bodies and pleasures” (1976/1990: 159). To re-orchestrate some of Foucault’s words in “The Subject and Power”—we don’t need Marx to “refuse what we are” and “to promote new forms of subjectivity though the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries” (1983/2000: 336).
But while we may not need Marx (or Sartre) for this promotion of the subjectively new, this refusal of the centuries-old, we might very well need Nietzsche, as Foucault claims he did, to discover our desire for doing our own “personal work,” for undoing the work that’s already been done on our persons. For if the authentic and moral “kind of individuality” that Foucault stylistically resists here has in fact been “imposed upon us for several centuries,” Nietzsche was one of the first to chafe, rail, and write against the imposition. As for the “individuality” in question, it’s clearly more Cartesian than Nietzschean. As you’ll recall, we began this lesson by considering Descartes’ cogito ergo sum as a truth-claim involving both epistemology and ontology, both personal knowing and subjective being. In the purely rational truth of Cartesian self-certainty, I think I know both that I am and exactly what I am. As we noted, Lacan opposes any philosophy directly issuing from the cogito because such philosophy reduces all thinking, and hence all being, to rational consciousness. But Nietzsche also objected to this reduction, this “rationing” or reasonable impoverishment of the “aesthetic phenomena” of human psychical life. In Book V of The Gay Science, Nietzsche offers a stingingly “elitist” critique of consciousness, suggesting
that consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that [consciousness] has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, . . . “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.” Our thoughts are continually governed by the [herd] character of consciousness . . . and translated back into the perspective of the herd. (1887/2006: 367–8)
Translating Nietzsche into a sort of Althusserian Lacanese, we could say that our given or conventional sense of self-understanding is dominated by the ideological character of consciousness, governed by the props and cops of the symbolic order. To “know ourselves” under prevalent “herd” conditions means to tame, police, contain, and domesticate ourselves, to convincingly demonstrate that we have assumed or fixed in our minds all the pictures of libidinal and cultural normativity that pertain to us—the images most familiar to and hence most useful for the dominant order in its continuous efforts to secure the reproduction of its conditions of production. If this normalization qua familiarization is actually all that rationally “knowing ourselves” amounts to, then it’s pretty clear that under this epistemological regime any “unfamiliar” aspects of ourselves would have to remain alien, “unknown,” unrealized, excluded from consciousness, hustled into the unconscious and/or projected onto some strange god or abject scapegoat or another.
In Nietzsche’s view, maintaining normal everyday consciousness or common sense always depends upon reducing “the strange” to “the familiar.” He sees this “will to familiarize” as the very engine of normative epistemology, as “The [very] origin of our concept of ‘knowledge.’ ” As Nietzsche writes in Gay Science under this titular heading:
I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers—have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home. Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security? (1887/2006: 368)
In bringing the hammer down on “knowledge,” Nietzsche’s writing here adumbrates Althusserian and Lacanian motifs; it features both an ontological scene of common, “street- level” recognition and an epistemological “flutter” of mind-fixing “jubilation,” thus grounding the highest flights of metaphysics in the basest instincts of fear. But if Nietzsche here foreshadows Lacan’s theory of “paranoic” knowledge, he also sets the stage for performing an abrasively Foucauldian “aesthetics of resistance” to fear-based familiarization, to the anxious expulsion of strange “foreign elements” that still seems to dominate our “everyday” self-understanding. Nietzsche, that is, anticipates not only Foucault’s commitment to “aesthetic existence” but Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization as the defining aesthetic technique of all literary writing worthy of the name. We’ll consider Shklovsky’s self-estranging “formalism” at some length in subsequent pages. Here, however, we’ll let his main idea—that literary writing as literary writing defamiliarizes “the subject” of any literary text—remind us of the underlying thesis of this introductory text—that “theoretical writing” is itself a “practice of creativity,” that “theory” is not merely a way of “approaching” literature but a way of performing the strangely “personal work” of living one’s “life as literature.”
Now, having earlier quoted Stephen Greenblatt to the effect that literature is “one of the great institutions for the enforcement” of normative culture as an ideological “system of constraints” (1995: 226, 227), I would be an ass to suggest that “creative” theoretical writing—theory “not of literature but as literature” (Rabaté 2002: 117)—could ever be essentially liberatory, inherently resistant to reification, naturalization, libidinal normalization, etc. I would be an ass to think that “theory as literature” could ever work as a sort of permanently subversive riposte or transcendental antidote to “eternal” ideology, could ever stand as what Foucault dismissively calls the “single locus of great Refusal, . . . soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary” (1976/1990: 95–6). After all, some of the “greatest” literary works in the world have worked quite diligently to familiarize and naturalize dominant power relations, reinforce given meaning, impose obviousnesses as obviousnesses, and so on. Some “great works of literature” disturb particular aspects of regnant human reality while leaving other matters all too comfortably settled, all too readily known. And theoretical writing, like any other kind, can all too quickly become weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, can lose the capacity to desediment, subvert, or surprise, can fail to keep open that crucial antiphysical difference “between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be” (Critchley 1997: 22).
But to the extent that theory can stay aesthetically frosty, can work to remain politically and personally resistant, this kind of writing can invite or provoke all but the most frightened of us to imagine ourselves and “things as they are” otherwise; at its most effective, theoretical writing can make our imaginary relations and our real conditions of existence seem strangely unnatural, radically fictional, anything but inevitable. By delivering, among other malaise-inducing messages, the “ontological bad news” that we are not ourselves, that we can never really or “authentically” be ourselves—along with the “glad tidings” that we don’t necessarily “have to be ourselves,” don’t really have “to be truly our true self” (Foucault 1983/1997: 262)— theoretical writing might be able to keep us open, if only just barely, to the possibility of self- alteration, the radical practice of creativity, the secular miracle of change.
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Five:
culture, aura, epistemology, ontology, dialectic, Nachträglichkeit/deferred action, interpellation, hegemony, ideological/repressive state apparatuses, commodity fetishism, panopticism
Notes
1 In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Butler writes that “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes . . . the normalizing categories of oppressive structures” (1991/2007: 1707). In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes that “The text is . . . that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father” (1975: 53). But the patriarchal figure being mooned here is for Barthes not necessarily your own personal daddy but rather whoever or whatever attempts “to fix meaning.” Thus, for Barthes, the uninhibited text “liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law” (1968/1977: 147).
2 With the phrase “documents of civilization,” I’m alluding to the title sentence of our seventh lesson (which concerns the fates of literary formalism)—Walter Benjamin’s axiom “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1950/1968: 256). As for the term cultural, in his essay on “Culture” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Stephen Greenblatt characterizes culture as “a system of constraints” and describes cultivation as “the internalization and practice of a code of manners” (1995: 227). Noting that in literary studies the concept of culture is “closely allied” to that of ideology, Greenblatt writes that “the ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a given culture function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire of models to which individuals must conform” (1995: 225). The use- value of “culture” for literary studies involves recognizing that “Western literature over a very long period of time has been one of the great institutions for the enforcement of cultural boundaries through praise and blame” (1995: 226).
3 Since both Adorno and Jameson are resolutely Marxist intellectuals, both of their truth-claims about truth are consciously and conscientiously “political.” But while Adorno’s straightforward stance on the “condition of all truth” is morally or ethically political, Jameson’s description of what must accompany the practice of “truth” is, one might argue, aesthetically or poetically political as well, not because the claim itself is particularly beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, but if only because of the way the claim couples those unsightly terms “defamiliarization” and “demystification.” The first term, as we’ve read in this book’s introductory chapter, and as we’ll consider more fully in Lesson Seven, hails from the poetics of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky; this “lit-crit” term also relates to the “alienation effects” intentionally wrought upon the audiences of the theatrical productions the German Marxist dramatist Bertholt Brecht. But the term “defamiliarization” is also quite relevant to the philosophical hammerings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who, as we read in the previous lesson, issued the famously “anti-moral” and paradoxically “anti-veridical” truth-claim that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (1872/2006: 58)—and who for this and other reasons isn’t exactly a Christian or Marxist saint. As for “demystification,” that critical procedure has pretty much been the prime directive of all rational “Enlightenment” thinking since Kant, and it remains an indispensible weapon in the Marxist arsenal for any assault against “false consciousness.” And if reification is still the principal method of “mystifyingly” maintaining “false consciousness” within the ideological machinations of late capitalism itself, “demystification” would have to equal “dereification” for Jameson and would have be a crucial aspect of theory insofar as theory must involve our “attempt to dereify the language of thought” (2009: 9). But here, returning to this lesson’s focus on “personal identity,” is the rub, the point of seeming tension between Adorno’s stance and Jameson’s. Many people, particularly among the global poor and working class, the dispossessed and wretched of the earth, utterly depend upon forms of mystification and reified “false consciousness” to make their sufferings bearable—they depend, in other words, on faith, on religion, on a strongly familiarized sense of self-identity recognized by parents, priests, and despots, blessed by a beneficent deity, etc. Such people do not “suffer” from reified “false consciousness” so much as they enjoy and benefit from it, psychically and spiritually. To subject such people to abrasively dereifying, defamiliarizing, and demystifying revelations or “truths” would surely only increase their sufferings. And so if Adorno’s “lending a voice to suffering” is taken to mean alleviating suffering, protecting wretched sufferers from even more pain than they already feel, then in this case compassionately hiding or withholding theoretical “truth” automatically becomes the “condition of all truth.” But this seeming tension or paradox is actually an old problem in Marxist theory, one solved in advance by Marx himself—for just as he insists that “the point” is not simply to interpret the world but to change it, so the early Marx writes that the political objective of critique or demystification is not simply to destroy people’s illusions, but to destroy or abandon or otherwise change “a condition that require illusions” (1844/1978: 53). Religion, as Marx quite famously opines, is “the opium of the people” (1844/1978: 54), and while, again, “the need to lend a voice to suffering” may be “the condition of all truth” for Adorno, “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (1844/1978: 54) for the early Marx. But the point of lending a voice to suffering is not simply to offer the sufferer a comforting fix, any more than the point of criticizing religion is stoically to “just say no” to all spiritual narcotics and deny oneself and everyone else the “promise of happiness” they provide. Rather, as Marx writes, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of [people], is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions” (1844/1978: 54). “Criticism,” Marx continues, “has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that [people] shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that [they] shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions [people] so that [they] will think, act and fashion [human] reality as [humans] who have lost [their] illusions and regained [their] reason” (1844/1978: 73). The question that will be taken up by Nietzsche and his non-Marxist followers (like Foucault) involves the extent to which life itself might be a condition that for humans absolutely requires illusions, requires art, much more than it demands or even involves “reason” or “truth.” The question for Nietzsche is whether all the thinking, acting, and fashioning of human reality of which Marx speaks aren’t ultimately aesthetic (rather than moral, rational, or veridical) phenomenon. We’ll be returning to this question.
4 Writing in the 1930s about photography and cinema as serious but accessible popular arts, Benjamin argues that in the artwork in the modern age suffers disenchantment as it gains democratic mass appeal. In modernity, Benjamin says, art loses its aura, both its elitist, aristocratic associations and its hallowed connection to religious ritual. While in the past some paintings were not publically displayed but kept locked away in cathedrals to be seen by only a few, a Hollywood film is of course produced to be viewed by as many as possible. And while today one might still want to make a quasi-religious pilgrimage to, say, the Prado in Madrid to see the Picasso’s “Guernica” in all its horrific and “auratic” splendor, no one would go out of her way to see the original print of the latest installment of Star Wars or Saw. Indeed, with cinema, one might even forego traveling to the radiant multiplex and just wait to have the DVD delivered in the mail with the rest of the junk.
5 “Mon semblable!” is thrown in as an allusion to “Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!” (hypocrite reader, my twin, my brother), the line from “To the Reader” in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) that Eliot appropriates in The Waste Land.
6 Epistemology is “the branch of philosophy that is concerned with theories of knowledge” (Childers and Henzi 1995: 98), while ontology, “literally translated as ‘the science of being,’ ” involves “the study of existence itself” (214). In regard to the cogito, Childers and Henzi point out that “Descartes’ formulation ‘I think, therefore I am,’ while a statement of ontology or being, is also fundamentally epistemological” (98).
7 The words “hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!” appear at the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922/1986: 314); according to Gifford, these words represent “The cry with which a midwife celebrates the birth of a male child as she bounces it to stabilize its breathing” (1988: 408/09). Here, though, against Lacan’s little mannerisms, let’s remember that the child whose image bounces back to it in the mirror isn’t necessarily male, and, following the vehicular metaphors employed above, that in some countries an adult female can’t legally operate an auto or even obtain a license to drive (see Milani 2011). The point to be driven home here is that it isn’t simply natural “breathing” but socio-cultural gendering that starts getting stabilized even at such a seemingly “neutral” moment as the mirror stage.
8 The infant loses undifferentiation “for good” in both the “temporal” and the “moral” senses, both “forever” and “for better”: for once the infant fixes its distinct image of itself in its mind, once the infant is installed in the imaginary and the symbolic, there’s no “going back” to the real for the subject as subject, however much the fantasy of return might animate a subject’s unconscious desire (and in a sense all fantasies are this fundamental fantasy, including, perhaps, the fantasy that “all fantasies are this fundamental fantasy”). But this fantasmatic return “to an earlier state of things” is both spatio-temporally impossible and “morally” prohibited (since, as we discussed in the previous lesson, primal undifferentiation is “eroto-thanatically” analogous to “incestuous” merger with the maternal).
9 Dialectic can be provisionally described as a model of conceptual agency that proceeds through confronting (and perhaps even resolving or overcoming) contradiction, particularly the conceptual agent’s contradictory self-alienation. When associated with Hegel—or, more precisely, with Hegelianism—the dialectic is often reduced, inaccurately, to an abstract “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” formula and to the notion that any synthesis or unification of opposites becomes a new thesis, which in turn generates another antithesis, which is then overcome, or sublated, by an even greater synthesis, and so on and so on, until ideally all ontological/epistemological contradiction is resolved or subsumed into the rational/conceptual maw of “absolute knowing”—a Hegelian phrase commonly or “vulgarly” understood to represent Hegel’s hubristic faith in the philosophical possibility of rationally possessing a totally complete and absolutely unified knowledge of “the ultimate meaning of everything” (Findlay 1971: 93). We will consider Hegelian matters more extensively in our next lesson. But since we are here trying to come to terms with Lacan and the dialectic, I will let a few sentences from Fredric Jameson’s essay “Lacan and the Dialectic” serve to further provisionally describe the latter term—“At its most general,” Jameson writes, “we can call dialectical any thought mode which grasps its objects, terms or elements as subject to definition, determination or modification by the relationships in which they are by definition seized” (2006: 395). Countering the pseudo-dialectic of “vulgar Hegelianism,” Jameson writes that the dialectic “is a tormented kind of language which seeks to register incommensurabilities without implying any solution to them by some facile naming of them, or the flattening- out of this or that unified philosophical code” (2006: 375). One might note here that Lacan’s “dialectical” writing is not only a “tormented” but a tormenting “kind of language.” Hence, the “great malaise” produced by Lacan’s style, if not, paradoxically, by Lacanian therapy, in the clinical experience of which the discovered lack of “any solution” to the problems of contradiction and alienation becomes itself the solution to the problem. In clinical terms, the absolute lack of cure turns into the cure itself. In Slavoj Žižek’s Wagnerian terms, the cure involves the realization that “ ‘the wound is healed only by the spear that smote you’ ” (1993: 165). Meanwhile, in stylistic terms, the “great malaise” produced by Lacan’s writing—that is, the speared or smitten reader’s feeling of non-identity with herself as reader—paradoxically becomes the very standard of Lacanian well-being.
10 It’s instructive to read the dynamics of Lacan’s mirror stage in relation to Freud’s slogan Wo Es war, soll Ich werden— “where id was, there ego must be” (1933/2001: 80), or “where it (Es) was there I (Ich) must come into being.” But it’s also important to grasp the counter-intuitive coordinates, the weird whens and wheres and theres, of this ego-boosting scenario. If, that is, we apply our habituated, common-sense understanding of the difference between an “I” and an “it”—a pure self and a mere thing, an active subject and an inert object—to the scene of the very young human child situated in front of a mirror, our normal tendency would be to think of the child as being situated on the “spiritual” side of the I/self/subject and the mirror as being on the “material” side of the it/thing/object. In the first moments of the mirror encounter, however, these “sides” are actually reversed—the real living body of the child is, precisely, the soulless and unspiritualized “it,” while the ego or “I” initially “resides” in a contraption of deadwood and glass, the mirror as lifeless thing or inanimate object. One of the many paradoxes here is that the infant exits the real and begins to enter human reality by virtue of a formally mortifying experience. Or, more precisely, at the crucial moment of the mirror experience, a specter of human reality, launched from the “dead” side of the mirror’s surface, enters and inhabits/inhibits the body of the helpless child, so in a sense it’s from the position of the mirror image that the Wo Es war, soll Ich werden is articulated—where “it,” that stupidly living body, is, there “I,” a culturally endorsed form, will move, intervene, plant my flag, etc. In their 1999 film, The Matrix, the Wachowskis visually literalize this “extimate” movement of cultural intervention: after Neo takes Morpheus’s red pill, he sees his own image, at first cracked and then “whole,” in a mirror. When Neo reaches out and touches this mirror, its surface begins to liquefy, moving out from the frame and into Neo’s space, moving onto his person, covering his hand and arm and creeping quickly up his neck, eventually “invading” his interior by cascading down his open throat. Assuming, consuming, or introjecting his own image, Neo is forced, as it were, to eat himself. In a sense, as we’re just about to see, all “subjects of human reality” are similarly force-fed ideology.
11 The “tain” is the foil or silvered backing applied, by dint of human labor, to a piece of glass (itself produced through labor), thus turning it into a mirror.
12 We can begin to consider the difference between ideology as “false consciousness” and ideology in general as unconscious formation by comparing the two versions of the horror film The Fly. In both films, a scientist invents a teleportation device that can zap matter from one chamber to another; he intentionally tries the device out on himself and (unintentionally) on the eponymous insect that has lighted into the launch chamber with him; and he emerges from the destination chamber in an altered, “insectified” (or, let’s say, “ideologized”) form. In Kurt Neumann’s 1958 version of the film, the disastrous alteration is quite obvious—the scientist steps out with his human head (his truly human consciousness) missing and with a huge fly-head (i.e., ideological “false consciousness”) conspicuously in its place. By contrast, in David Cronenberg’s 1986 version, the scientist emerges on the other side of the botched experiment looking exactly like himself, but his ideal self-resemblance is preserved only because he has internalized the fly (i.e., ideology) at the general, invisible, and systemic level of DNA. Later on, the horrifically insectile manifests itself quite visibly, but at least at first, the invisibility of the scientist’s “inner fly” allows “DNA” to metaphorize ideology as an unconscious formation. Cronenberg’s treatment of the scientist’s dilemma thus implies that the problem of ideology cannot be remedied in an old-school “humanist” fashion—by restoring the true, self-conscious (and now wiser) human head to the human. Actually, given the nasty fate of the tiny human head in Neumann’s version (attached to fly, caught in Web, nearly eaten by spider before being smashed by rock), neither Fly seems to suggest that the problem of ideology can be remedied at the level of heroic individual effort. In this judgment, as we’ll see, both films concur with Althusser.
13 I allude here to “evangelical” blowhard Rick Warren’s 2002 best-seller The Purpose-Driven Life. I would suggest, however, that in a capitalist society, it doesn’t really matter what you imagine or believe to be the “purpose” driving your life; in a capitalist society, the real purpose, the real practical effect, of all of your “real life” activities is to create profits for capitalists, to enrich and empower the owners of Planet Money. Not that it always works out that way, but capitalist social reality is structured so that that’s the dominant intended effect of your actual living, what your living actually materializes. In capitalist reality, whatever you may imagine, everything that you actually do—living somewhere, eating, drinking, being clothed and shod, being entertained and/or educated, staying healthy, staying alive—requires/costs money, and thus makes money and power for capitalists. Unless you are a capitalist, the work that you do, which makes you some money, ultimately makes more money for capitalists than it does for you, since you turn most of that money back over to capitalists so that you can continue to do all the things mentioned above (i.e., live). So, again, whatever you imagine you’re purposively doing with your life doesn’t really matter; what you’re really doing with your life is generating wealth and power for capitalists.
14 If you can’t bring yourself to imagine a discrepancy between the imaginary relations and the real conditions of your own “purpose-driven” life, consider what happens to Neo in The Matrix. Neo “imagines” or “knows perfectly well” that he is Mr Anderson who lives and works and is basically in control of his own life; but when he swallows Morpheus’s red pill and “goes through the looking glass,” he “awakens” to his real conditions of existence and discovers he is in fact a “coppertop,” a passive, plugged-in, quasi-fetal energy source whose only real purpose “in life” is to generate power for “the matrix,” the computer-generated “system of representations” in which he “lives” out his imaginary relations.
15 As you’ll recall from our introductory chapter, Hardt, in the essay called “The Militancy of Theory,” writes that “the task of theory is to make the present and thus to delimit or invent the subject of that making, a ‘we’ characterized not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it” (2011: 21).
16 In a splendid footnote, Barthes writes “To the pleasure-principle of Freudian man could be added the clarity-principle of mythological humanity. All the ambiguity of myth is there: its clarity is euphoric”—an observation that nicely explains why readers who insist upon “clarity,” who like to take their meanings neat, tend to dislike and/or steer clear of theoretical writing—they find its dereifications dysphoric.
17 Another example of “mythic” interpellation at work—I was recently on a “commercial flight” from Atlanta to Salt Lake City and noticed an interesting detail in the airline safety instruction video that played prior to take-off. There came the standard moment in the video when we’re shown how to behave if “cabin pressure drops” and we suddenly find oxygen-masks dangling in front of us. The video depicted a man properly attaching the mask to his own face before turning to help the young male child, presumably a son, sitting beside him; meanwhile the narrative voice-over instructed us to negotiate our own masks first “before assisting other customers”—not the old “others who might need help” or even “other passengers,” but other customers. Thus are we instructed to conceive even (or especially) our own children as corporate capitalism conceives/interpellates them and us—as markets. And the point here is not that reading “ideology at work” in the airline’s safety video entails discerning some “hidden meaning” or “subliminal message.” The “myth” here is anything but subliminal; rather, it’s blatant, an imposed obviousness, as clear as the oxygen mask on your face—You and yours are customers; your life is a commercial transaction; don’t bother with any other flights of fancy; don’t bother imagining alternatives; just relax, sit back, and enjoy the ride. Amen, so be it.
18 “It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations” (Jameson 1994: xii).
19 Althusser’s theory of ideology is indebted to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which “refers to relationships between classes, specifically the control that the bourgeoisie exerts over the working classes. For Gramsci, hegemonic control is not maintained merely by force or the threat of force, but by consent as well. That is, a successful hegemony not only expresses the interest of a dominant class . . . but also is able to get a subordinate class to see these interests as ‘natural’ or a matter of ‘common sense’ ” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 131). Similarly, Althusser’s distinction between Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses seems based on Gramsci’s “analytical distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary . . . affiliations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination” (Said 1978: 7). Althusser distinguishes Repressive State Apparatuses, like the police and the army, which work primarily by repressive force, from Ideological State Apparatuses—churches, schools, families—which function primarily by ideology rather than force. He stipulates, however, that the RSAs are not purely repressive—they depend upon ideology “both to ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in the ‘values’ they propound externally” (1971/2001: 98). Nor are the ISAs purely ideological, for “they also function secondarily by repression . . . Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ . . . their flocks. The same is true of the Family” (1971/2001: 98).
20 “Fetishism is the endowment of an object or a body part with an unusual degree of power or erotic allure, as in the cases of cultures that attribute magical powers to idols or human effigies. Use of the term often betrays a skeptical attitude toward such beliefs; thus, Karl Marx coined the term commodity fetishism to express the way that capitalist emphasis on the abstract value of commodities conceals the underlying social relations of their producers” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 109).
21 “Don’t talk to me about Marx anymore! I never want to hear anything about that man again. Ask someone whose job it is. Someone paid to do it. Ask the Marxist functionaries. Me, I’ve had enough of Marx” (cited in Erbion 1992: 266).
22 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault “derives the concept of panopticism from a diagram drawn up by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1791. Bentham’s Panopticon was a model prison in which supervisors could observe prisoners in their individual cells without being seen themselves. According to Foucault, this system was effective because prisoners never knew whether or not they were being watched: ‘he is seen, but he does not see . . . what matters is that he knows himself to be observed’. Foucault [argues] that this constant sense of surveillance and visibility is what characterizes the development of disciplinary societies in toto. In such societies, ‘the automatic functioning of power’ is guaranteed because individuals police themselves and each other. For Foucault, the notion of individualism in Western society is in fact a direct effect of panopticism. The individual is constructed by having internalized the disciplinary power of penitentiary and/or medicinal discourses, with their numerous methods of segregation and social exclusion. This is why, as Foucault concludes, modern institutions such as hospitals, schools and factories all resemble prisons” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 237).