Tournament: NSD | Round: 6 | Opponent: Justin Wen | Judge: Tate Weston
The fractured nature of the subject leaves one oriented around the mastery of a lost object- recognizing the right to strike is an attempt to satisfy this loss with an investment into the notion of dignified work- one that creates an image of a deracialized, patriotic worker that society is left to mimic
Barchiesi ‘9
Franco, THE Ohio State University. 2009. “That Melancholic Object of Desire: Work and Official Discourse before and after Polokwane,” https://www.academia.edu/421295/THAT_MELANCHOLlC_OBJECT_OF_DESlRE_WORK_AND_OFFlClAL_DlSCOURSE_BEFORE_AND_AFTER_POLOKWANE sosa
Whereby past proletarian struggles had actively subverted waged work, both through direct refusal or through workers’ unwillingness to confine their claims to productivity requirements, a powerful disciplinary narrative has now emerged to celebrate the “dignity of work” as a disciplinary construct that marginalizes, stigmatizes and criminalizes specific social categories identified as disruptive of wage labour discipline. Now “dignity of work” is a commonly used term in ANC parlance, but the term is of straightforward colonial origins. The first time I have found it used is in Cecil Rhodes’ endorsement of the Glen Grey Act of 1894. Under pre-apartheid segregation governments it was part of what Saul Dubow terms a “South Africanist” ideological discourse where, through hard work for wages, the “native” could become a modern “worker”, possibly even a “citizen”. Under apartheid there was of course no talk of equal citizenship for the “natives”, but the National Party government praised work discipline over resource redistribution for whites and blacks alike. As a normative construct, the imperative to work operated across the board. The South African state imagination of work, before and after 1994, reversed Immanuel Kant’s line that “every thing has either a price or a dignity”, where by dignity he meant a value that precedes and stands above market exchange. In South African official discourse, instead, the labour market and the wage relation stands simultaneously as measure and reward of human dignity.
After apartheid, the revived parlance of “dignity of work” and individual labour market initiative also, as Ivor Chipkin shows in his book Do South Africans Exist?, came to depict a virtuous condition of active citizenship rightfully enabling the full, practical enjoyment of formal, on-paper constitutional rights. As work becomes the normative premise of virtuous citizenship, it provides an epistemic device with which South African society can be “known” as an objective, socially ascertainable hierarchy ordered according to the seemingly natural, immutable laws of the labour market. (This view is clearly expressed in Thabo Mbeki’s “two economies” scenario.) At the pinnacle of such a hierarchical order stands a, by now largely imaginary, patriotic, respectable, hard working, socially moderate, conflict-averse, de-racialized worker as the virtuous citizen of democratic South Africa. Precisely as a creation of official imagination, however, such a subject indicates the practical conducts the poor have to follow, as workersin-waiting, on their path to actual citizenship: avoid complaining, stay away from social conflicts, and actively seek the “employment opportunities” available in poverty-wage schemes of mass precariousness like the Expanded Public Works Programme. A work-centered citizenship discourse also marginalizes and stigmatizes the, conversely, all too real subjectivities that try to navigate their way in conditions of precariousness, social duress, and the systematic violence of market relations: yesterday it was “workshy” township youth, women devoted to “immoral” activities, peasants recalcitrant to the market; today is the “tsotsi” element, the “girls” claiming child support grants, and those who “illegally” reconnect water and electricity.
As Fred Block and Margaret Somers have shown, the connection of state normativity and seemingly unassailable scientific reasoning confers to official discourses of citizenship the material capacity, made almost impervious to empirical counter evidence, to shape attitudes, dispositions and proclivities. It does not really matter for the centrality of work in South WHAT IS LEFT OF THE LEFT? 53 African citizenship discourse that in no way most experiences of work resemble the exalted social condition imagined in governmental pronouncements. What matters is that, by making social conditions, if not what it means to be human, orbit around labour market participation, the citizens of democratic South Africa are educated to position themselves within prevailing social and economic power relations.
In the interviews with workers I have conducted, wage labour clearly emerges as a place of insecurity, exploitation, unfair and racialized treatment, and inadequacy in relation to household needs. More than that, it is a reality of, as Felix Guattari called it, “systematic endangering”, or continuous exposure to unpredictable, potentially catastrophic labour market contingencies. As wage labour’s early promise of liberation and redemption went unfulfilled, workers tended to characterize waged employment as a place that they have to endure, but from which they would happily escape. Escape could be either material or symbolic, most often a combination of both. Sometimes it has to do with fantasies of self-entrepreneurship, often nurtured in the ascending religious language of individual empowerment of born-again Christianity. In this regard, workers may even be available to accept layoffs to cash benefits and buy a bakkie for a transport business, or the tools for a small electric repair shop, even if such money most often goes into the repayment of debts and school fees. Sometimes respondents idealize rural life – despite the grinding poverty many of their relatives’ experience in rural areas – as a symbolic, desirable counterbalance to the chaos and unpredictability of the city as regular employment and male “breadwinning” authority decline and collapse. Ruralism becomes therefore an imagined space where masculine power and age authority continue to structure social life. Another theme surfacing in my interviews are xenophobic feelings of blaming non-South African migrants’ acceptance of low-wage jobs as responsible for turning work from “what it is supposed to be” to “what it is”. Yet, even if they see their actual jobs as “elsewhere” from what they would consider a dignified life, most respondents remain attached to work and “job creation” as the solution to the country’s social problems. Such apparent paradox is reflected in their approach to the ANC, seen simultaneously as cause of the current social crisis and the imagined deliverer from it.
It would, however, be wrong to conclude that, as many conservative commentators and government consultants try to reassure us, despite all odds all South Africa’s poor want is “work, not handouts”. When I probed the meanings of “work” in workers’ discourse of “job creation”, I found that it is not “work” as a mere economic transaction that such narratives are primarily about, and surely not about the work such workers actually have. They are rather about a whole imagined social order ideally premised on an equally imagined idea of respectable work. Work regains its centrality in these narratives not so much for its economic importance, but as the repository of an imaginary that tries to find validation by harking back to the state’s and the unions’ work-centered citizenship discourse. As such, it tends to be a conservative workers’ imaginary too: for most of my respondents, images of decent work, what is left of past promises of redemption of wage labour, are deeply linked with ideas of family respectability, strict gendered division of household tasks, masculine power and national purity, where “disrespectful”, crime-prone youth are kept out of the streets and under control, women are confined to domesticity, reproduction and care, and migrants don’t “steal” national jobs.
If actual work is a place to escape from, such an escape is, however, expressed, in the absence of a political alternative to the hegemonic work-centered citizenship discourse, in conservative, when not overtly reactionary and authoritarian forms of what I call worker melancholia. Contrary to the nostalgic, who yearns for an idealized past, the melancholic yearns for the imagined yet unrealized possibilities. As Ranjana Khanna defines it: “Melancholia is not only a crippling attachment to a past that acts like a drain of energy on the present …. Rather, the melancholic’s critical agency, and its peculiar temporality that drags it back and forth at the same time, acts towards the future”.
What I identify as the emerging politics of worker melancholia provides some insights into the rise of Jacob Zuma and the post-Polokwane phase of ANC rule. Zuma’s rise has a lot to do with the country’s crisis of waged employment, manifested in organized labour’s resentment at Mbeki’s betrayal of the democratic promise of working class power and proletarian redemption. Zuma’s self-consciously masculine persona and his message of family values, social discipline, subservient womanhood, toughness on crime, and border control respond to the anxieties generated by employment precariousness by abetting the melancholic fantasies of a working class embittered by decades of disappointments and by the inadequacies of its putative political representatives. Under such conditions, the continuous glorification of work as the foundation of citizenship is at serious risk of contributing to an authoritarian, chauvinist social order presiding over the continuous brutality of the market.
Three lessons emerge from this discussion. First, precariousness of work is not just produced by labour market dynamics but by the intersection of wage labour transformations, institutional dynamics and official imagination. Claus Offe puts it nicely in defining precariousness as “harmful unpredictability” arising from a condition where work declines as a foundation for a decent, meaningful life and yet it is maintained by the state’s policy discourse as the foundation of the social order. Second, precariousness is not, however, just a condition of domination and disempowerment, but can also open spaces to imagine strategies of liberation from the compulsion to work for wages. The history of proletarian struggles in South Africa and Africa shows that the crises of waged work are the result not only of the unfettered power of capital but also of everyday strategies of refusal, confirming indeed Mario Tronti’s point that “wage labour is the provider of capital; the refusal of wage labour means the destruction of capital”. Finally, social research needs to move beyond a purely normative understanding of citizenship as a desirable ideal of “inclusion” and focus instead on the paradoxes, contradictions and quandaries of what Cruikshank terms citizenship as a “technology” of empowerment based on specific disciplining of conducts and hierarchical stratifications where divides between inclusion and exclusion become blurred and uncertain.
Gilles Deleuze wrote: “If you get caught in someone else’s dreams, you are lost”. Over and over again, before, during, and after apartheid, South Africa’s the poor have been caught in the State’s unsettling biopolitical dream of ordering populations according to the hierarchies defined by a labour market that can enable decent lives only for a small minority. To avoid getting lost in the rulers’ dream, maybe it is time, in these crepuscular times of decline of neoliberalism, for everyday desires recalcitrant to wage labour no longer to be seen as harbingers of chaos and ungovernability but as constitutive elements of a new grammar of autonomy and liberation.
Our relationship to nature is defensive- desire towards consumption conflicts our attempts to halt climate change. Only a re-evaluation of the relationship between desire and nature can solve
Dodds ‘11
Joseph, Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) and Associate Fellow (AFBPsS) of the British Psychological Society and a Candidate Member of the Czech Psychoanalytical Society (International Psychoanalytical Association ). He lectures in various courses in psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of New York in Prague, Charles University, and the Anglo-American University and is the founder of Muddum Art Space. 2011. “Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze l Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate Crisis.” pat
Why psychoanalysis? On the face of it, it seems frankly irrelevant. Surely it is the basic sciences of geology, ecology, biology, and climatology that we need, combined with various hi-tech engineering? Yes and no. The science informing us of the risks and possible technical solutions has run far ahead of our psychological state. We are not yet at the point emotionally of being able to clearly grasp the threat, and act accordingly. We need to ask why this issue, despite its current prominence, fails to ignite people's motivation for the major changes science tells us is necessary. This concerns not only the `public' but the academy and the psychoanalytic community. In spite of the fact that Harold Searles was already writing in 1960 that psychoanalysts need to acknowledge the psychological importance of the non-human environment, until very recently his colleagues have almost entirely ignored him.
In this section we explore some of the theories with which we may be able to construct a psychoanalysis of ecology. Fuller elaboration will involve incorporating approaches from the sciences of complexity and ecology, and Deleuze and Guattari's ‘geophilosophy' or ‘ecosophy', which itself emerged in critical dialogue with psychoanalysis and complexity theory. However, we first need to explore the ecological potential within psychoanalysis itself, as without the latter's methods and theories for unmasking hidden motivations and phantasies, this investigation will not be able to proceed.
Renee Lertzman (2008), one of the first psychoanalytically informed social scientists to engage with the ecological crisis, describes a common surreal aspect of our everyday responses to ‘eco-anxiety’, the experience of flipping through a newspaper and being suddenly confronted with:
the stop-dead-in-your-tracks, bone-chilling kind of ecological travesties taking place around our planet today . . . declining honey bees, melting glaciers, plastics in the sea, or the rate of coal plants being built in China each second. But how many of us actually do stop dead in our tracks? Have we become numb? . . . if so, how can we become more awake and engaged to what is happening?
Environmental campaigners have become increasingly frustrated and pessimistic. Even as their messages spread further and further, and as scientists unite around their core concerns, there is an alarming gap between increasingly firm evidence and public response. The fact that oil companies donate millions to climate `sceptic' groups doesn't help (Vidal 2010). Nor does the fact that eight European companies which are together responsible for 5-10 per cent of the emissions covered in the EU emissions trading system (Bayet, BASF, BP, GDF Suez, ArcelorMittal, Lafarge, E.ON, and Solvay) gave $306,100 to senatorial candidates in the 2010 United States midterm elections who either outright deny climate change ($107,200) or pledge they will block all climate change legislation ($240,200), with the most flagrant deniers getting the most funds (Goldenberg 2010; Climate Action Network 2010). These are the same companies that campaign against EU targets of 30 per cent reductions in emissions using current inaction in the United States as a justification, while claiming their official policy is that climate change is a major threat and they are committed to doing all they can to help in the common cause of dealing with the danger (for the full report see Climate Action Network 2010).
Recent opinion polls show climate scepticism is on the rise in the UK as well. In February 2010 a BBC-commissioned poll by Populus (BBC 2010a, 2010b) of 1,001 adults found that 25 per cent didn't think global warming was happening, a rise of 8 per cent since a similar poll in November 2009. Belief that climate change was real fell from 83 per cent to 75 per cent, while only 26 per cent believed climate change was established as largely manmade compared with 41 per cent in November. A third of those agreeing climate change was real felt consequences had been exaggerated (up from a fifth) while the number of those who felt risks had been understated fell from 38 per cent to 25 per cent (see Figure 3). According to Populus director M. Simmonds, `it is very unusual . . . to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period . . . The British public are sceptical about man's contribution to climate change and becoming more so' (BBC 2010a).
Most remarkable here is the discrepancy between public and expert opinion. According to the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Robert Watson: `Action is urgently needed . . . We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low-carbon economy.' Why this shift? Whilst the poll took place with the background of heavy snow and blizzards in the UK, always a convenient backdrop to climate sceptic jokes, the BBC (2010a) article focused on a high-profile story concerning stolen emails alleging scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia (UEA). While this was a very serious accusation, no mainstream scientific body seriously imagines it changes in any real way the overall science, and yet this is not how the public perceived it.
Subsequently, the UK Parliament's Commons Science and Technology Committee completed its investigation into the case (BBC 2010c). The MPs' committee concluded there was no evidence that UEA's Professor Phil Jones had manipulated data, or tried `to subvert the peer review process' and that `his reputation, and that of his climate research unit, remained intact' (BBC 2010c). The report noted that `it is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers' and that `much of the data that critics claimed Prof Jones has hidden, was in fact already publicly available' (BBC 2010c) but called strongly for a greater culture of transparency in science. The report concluded that it `found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is induced by human activity' (BBC 2010c).
This story was followed closely by another in January 2010 when the IPCC admitted a mistake concerning the timetable of Himalayan glacial melting. In such a lengthy report of over 3000 pages, produced from the combined efforts of the world scientific community on a topic with as many variables as climate change, it is unsurprising some estimates need revising. Undoubtably there will be more revisions in the future, some major. It is important to emphasize that for the world's scientists the overall picture has not been affected, but public perception is completely different, with triumphant claims of proof ‘it is all made up’. No doubt many sceptics will use the Parliamentary committee's report as further evidence of an institutional cover-up.
The important psychological point is that people are ready for such events, indeed eager for it – the psychosocial equivalent of a sandpile in a state of self-organized criticality (Palombo 1999; Bak 1994), when a single grain can cause a major avalanche cascading through the whole system. Understanding such subtle shifts, and the often unconscious motivations behind them, is where psychoanalysis perhaps more than any other discipline has a lot to offer. As Lertzman (2008) writes:
What if the core issue is more about how humans respond to anxiety? . . . Environmental problems . . . conjure up anxieties that . . . we are done for, and nothing can really be done . . . To help me understand more, I turn to Freud . . . because I have found few others who speak as eloquently, and sensitively about what humans do when faced with anxiety or anxiety-provoking news.
Freud, civilization, nature and the dialectic of the Enlightenment
Is Freud really relevant to understanding our current crisis? While he was very much engaged in relating psychology to social issues, from war to racism, group psychology and the discontents of civilization (Freud 1913a, 1915, 1921, 1927, 1930), he was writing during a period when the possibility that human activities could bring the Earth's ecosystems to the brink of collapse would have been hard to contemplate. Romanticism may have complained about `unweaving rainbows' and industry's `dark satanic mills', but by Freud's day this could be seen as Luddite anti-progress talk, especially for those working within the Weltangschung of science and the Enlightenment to which Freud (1933) pinned his psychoanalytic flag. However, much of our current bewildering situation can be understood as rooted in part in a world view that was at its zenith during Freud's day and, as Lertzman (2008) suggests, in our responses to anxiety. In addition, Freud did offer us some crucial reflections on our relationship with nature:
The principle task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature. We all know that in many ways civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time goes on it will do it much better. But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subdued to man. (Freud 1927: 51)
Here we can see an interesting ambivalence in Freud's rhetorical style, which perhaps unwittingly captures two crucial aspects of our civilization's relationship to `Nature' and thus begins to open up a psychoanalytic approach to ecology. First, he depicts a series of binary oppositions typical for his era, and not so different in our own: human versus nature, man versus woman and (more implicitly) order versus chaos. Here we find the classic tropes of the Enlightenment, modernity, patriarchy, industrialism and capitalism, which Jungian ecopsychologist Mary-Jane Rust (2008) calls the myths we live by. The myths she is referring to in particular are the `myth of progress' and the `myth of the Fall'. She argues that in order to create a sustainable future, or indeed any future, we need to find other stories, other myths, through which to live our lives, to rethink how we have fallen and what it means to progress. Freud's work suggests that Western culture views civilization as a defence against nature, and against wildness, inner and outer, but as Rust (2008: 5) writes, at `this critical point in human history we most urgently need a myth to live by which is about living with nature, rather than fighting it.' Thus, according to Rust,
we find ourselves . . . between stories (Berry 1999), in a transitional space . . . of great turbulence, with little to hold onto save the ground of our own experience. Our therapeutic task . . . is to understand how these myths still shape our internal worlds, our language, and our defences . . . Somewhere in the midst of `sustainability' . . . lies an inspiring vision of transformation . . . We need to dig deep, to re-read our own myths as well as find inspiration from the stories of others. (ibid.)
The myth of progress enters the climate change debate in calls for geoengineering and utopian techno-fixes such as putting thousands of mirrors in space, and in the dismissal of even gentle questioning of current economic models of unlimited growth. We will later look at Harold Searles' (1972) approach to our fascination with technology and its role in the current crisis. Returning to Freud, however, there is, as always, another side, an implicit awareness that the feeling of mastery civilization gives us is in many ways a dangerous illusion. Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature.
There are the elements which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them . . . With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization. (Freud 1927: 15-16)
Here is the other side of Freud's writing on the relation between `Nature' and `Civilization', with humanity portrayed as a weak and helpless infant in awe and fear of a mighty and terrible mother. The lure and horror of matriarchy lie behind the defensive constructs of patriarchal civilization, just as Klein's paranoid-schizoid fears of fragmentation, engulfment, and annihilation lie behind later castration threats (Hinshelwood 1991). With each new earthquake or flood, nature erupts into culture – similar to Kristeva's (1982) description of the eruption of the `semiotic' into the `symbolic' – and we are thrown back into a state of terror. The `illusion' in the title of Freud's 1927 essay The Future of an Illusion was meant to refer to how religion arose to deal with these anxieties. However, the structural function of the myth of progress, while undoubtably more successful in terms of practical benefits, can also be included here. In these words of Freud we have already a deep understanding, albeit largely implicit, of our own current crisis: a relationship to nature based on a master-slave system of absolute binaries, and an attempt to maintain an illusory autonomy and control in the face of chaos.
There is often a tension in Freud, between the celebration of Enlightenment values found in works such as The Future of an Illusion (1927) and the more Romantic Freud who won the Goethe prize and constantly emphasized the elements Enlightenment rationality leaves out such as jokes, dreams, slips and psychological symptoms. Thus, as well as being a perfect example of the Enlightenment with its call to make the unconscious conscious and give the `rational' ego greater power over the wilds of the id, psychoanalysis also provides a serious challenge to this way of thinking. There will always be something beyond our control. We are not, and never can be, masters in our own house, and the core of who we are is irrational, and often frightening. Marcuse (1998) touched on a similar tension when declaring Freud's (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents both the most radical critique of Western culture and its most trenchant defence. Psychoanalysis, as always, is exquisitely ambivalent.
Ultimately, for Freud, both the natural world and our inner nature are untamable and the most we can hope for are temporary, fragile, anxious compromises between competing forces (Winter and Koger 2004). The chaos of nature we defend against is also the chaos of our inner nature, the wildness in the depths of our psyche. Civilization does not only domesticate livestock but also humanity itself (Freud and Einstein 1933: 214). However, attempts to eliminate the risk have in many ways dangerously backfired, comparable to the ways that the historical programmes aiming to eliminate forest fires in the United States have led to far bigger and more uncontrollable fires taking the place of previously smaller and more manageable ones (Diamond 2006: 43-47).
The control promised by the Enlightenment, the power of the intellect to overcome chaos (environmental and emotional), is therefore at least partly a defensive and at times dangerous illusion. In our age of anxiety, with the destruction of civilization threatened by nuclear holocaust, ecosystemic collapse, bioweapons and dirty bombs, Freud's warning is more relevant than ever:
Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man . . . hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. (Freud 1930: 135)
This cultivates in a politics of melodrama wherein threats to the state’s biopolitical ordering are registered as affective wounds that necessitate violent redemption – their commitment to regain mastery morphs their advocacy into a blank check for imperial expansions and eliminates ideological resistance to state control.
Anker ‘14
Elizabeth, American Studies at George Washington University. 2014. “Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom.” KB/spaldwin rc/pat
What I call melodramatic political discourse casts politics, policies, and practices of citizenship within a moral economy that identifies the nation-state as a virtuous and innocent victim of villainous action. It locates goodness in the suffering of the nation, evil in its antagonists, and heroism in sovereign acts of war and global control coded as expressions of virtue. By evoking intense visceral responses to wrenching injustices imposed upon the nation-state, melodramatic discourse solicits affective states of astonishment, sorrow, and pathos through the scenes it shows of persecuted citizens. It suggests that the redemption of virtue obligates state power to exercise heroic retribution on the forces responsible for national injury. Melodrama depicts the United States as both the feminized, virginal victim and the aggressive, masculinized hero in the story of freedom, as the victim-hero of geopolitics. Its national injuries morally legitimate the violence, extensions, and consolidations of state power that melodrama posits as necessary both for healing the nation’s wound and for reestablishing the state’s sovereign freedom. Melodramatic political discourse provides the tableaux and the legitimacy for the late-modern expansion of state power.
Melodrama is often associated with intimate affairs, personal misfortune, and domestic problems within the home, and even scholars who have written most incisively about the political effects of melodrama primarily examine how it attends to social injustices within the nation and finds redress for them in intimate relationships rather than in eff orts to challenge injustice in more directly political ways. Yet as a political discourse, melodrama operates in different registers: the suffering of U.S. subjects that it depicts appears to be caused by something outside the national body; an unjust injury wounds the entire nation, and this transforms melodrama to a more public, national, and state-centered register. The eradication of injustice in melodramatic political discourse is not about finding consolation in the domestic sphere, as it is in many fi lm and literary melodramas; it is about an aggressive performance of strength in the national political sphere. The agency in melodramatic political discourse focuses on global and spectacular displays of power; its sphere of action is public and usually institutional because of the villainy it aims to countermand. In melodramatic political discourse, the nation’s terrible injury becomes the foundational justification for violent and expansive state power.
Orgies of Feeling investigates the history, political strategies, and affective pulls of melodramatic political discourses, with a focus on contemporary U.S. politics. While melodramatic cultural expressions are not limited to the United States—a s the phenomena of Latin American telenovelas, Nigerian “Nollywood” videos, Soviet expressionism, and South Korean fi lm make clear—t his book focuses on American melodrama in order to map its work as a nation- building and state- legitimating discourse.4 Melodrama became an influential political discourse after World War II, gaining popularity with the rise of the cold war and televisual political communication. It circulated throughout the second half of the twentieth century, as its conventions helped to narrate the expansion of U.S. global power and justify the growth of the national- security state. Melodramatic political discourses often legitimated anticommunist international relations and the burgeoning neoliberal political economy (though as I also show, melodrama sometimes worked in different or contradictory ways, and had unintended effects). In the twenty-first century, and especially after the 9 / 11 attacks, melodrama’s popularity exploded in political discourse, in large part because of the nation-state’s realignment against terrorism. Orgies of Feeling examines the rise of melodramatic political discourse after World War II, but pays special attention to melodrama’s operations in the new millennium.
The melodramas that I track in this book often promote a specific type of citizenship, in which the felt experience of being an American comprises not only persecuted innocence and empathic connection with other Americans’ suffering but also the express demand to legitimate state power. In these melodramas, the nation’s unjust suffering proves its virtue, and virtue authorizes dramatic expressions of state action, including war and state surveillance. In contemporary politics, the intensifications of antidemocratic and often violent forms of state power—including military occupation, the exponential growth of the national-security state, the formalization of racial profiling, the narrowing of already minute points of access to political power for nonelite citizens, the criminalization of nonviolent protest, the militarization of police power, and the further abridgements of institutionalized civil liberties—are partly rooted in the melodramatic mobilization of a political subject who legitimates them as an expression of the nation’s virtue.
A paradigmatic example of melodramatic political discourse is President George W. Bush’s speech on the War in Afghanistan at the Pentagon on October 11, 2001. The story that the speech emplotted relied on melodramatic genre conventions— including a narrative of virtue and redemption, heightened affects of pain, detailed explanations of individual suffering, and a sense of overwhelmed victimhood that transmutes virtue into strength— to both unify national identity and authorize a war that had already begun four days prior. He stated,
On September 11th, great sorrow came to our country. And from that sorrow has come great resolve. Today, we are a nation awakened to the evil of terrorism, and determined to destroy it. That work began the moment we were attacked; and it will continue until justice is delivered. . . . The loss was sudden, and hard, and permanent. So difficult to explain. So difficult to accept. Three schoolchildren traveling with their teacher. An Army general. A budget analyst who reported to work h ere for 30 years. A lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve who left behind a wife, a four-year-old son, and another child on the way. But to all of you who lost someone h ere, I want to say: You are not alone. . . . We know the loneliness you feel in your loss. The entire nation, entire nation, shares in your sadness. . . .
The hijackers were instruments of evil who died in vain. Behind them is a cult of evil which seeks to harm the innocent and thrives on human suffering. Theirs is the worst kind of cruelty, the cruelty that is fed, not weakened, by tears. . . . This week, I have called the Armed Forces into action. One by one, we are eliminating power centers of a regime that harbors al Qaeda terrorists. We gave that regime a choice: Turn over the terrorists, or face your ruin. They chose unwisely. . . . We’re not afraid. Our cause is just and worthy of sacrifice. Our nation is strong of heart, firm of purpose. Inspired by all the courage that has come before, we will meet our moment and we will prevail.5
The speech details the events on September 11, 2001, through melodramatic conventions that emphasize the intense pain the attacks caused to ordinary individuals, and the speech uses that pain to mark the virtue of all Americans who share in the sadness of the people directly injured or killed by terrorism. Bush details the violence of the 9 / 11 events by specifying the people who died as moms and dads, schoolchildren, and neighbors— ordinary people, people just like his listeners. It is as if their travails could be, indeed are, our own. Melodrama confers virtue upon innocent people who unjustly suffer from dominating power, and this is part of the genre’s cultural work; in this deployment of melodrama, all Americans suffer from the attack, and thus all share in the nation’s virtue. The speech connects the children who lost parents with “our country”: the children’s innocence is a metonym for that of the nation, for what it has lost after this terrifying attack. This connection is a binding gesture that brings a nation ordinarily riven and stratified by class, race, immigration status, and sex into a shared unity that circumvents instead of represses stratification. It makes hierarchies of power and identity irrelevant to the experience of being an innocent and injured American in the wake of 9 / 11. The suffering that unifies the nation is suffering from terror. Other political modes of understanding also circulate in this speech to bind people together and mark the legitimacy of war: a deep sense of injustice and fear from the 9 / 11 attacks, American exceptionalism, and masculinist protection.6 Yet melodramatic conventions work here to solicit the sense that war has already been legitimated by the felt sorrow that unifies the nation. Melodrama, in this speech, insists that the affective experience of sorrow is equivalent to the authorization of war.
This speech cultivates the heightened affects Americans were experiencing by explicating them, naming sorrow, loss, and resolve in a way that turns them into norms for proper feeling and then yokes them together into a narrative trajectory. Sorrow and loss pave the way for “great resolve,” so that the determination to “destroy” evil is positioned as a foregone conclusion that grows organically out of sorrow. The move to destroy terrorism then becomes a moral requirement and a narrative expectation for addressing the nation’s suffering, rather than a contestable political decision.7 In this speech, melodramatic conventions form a nation-building discourse that distinguishes who is and is not American by demarcating proper victimhood in relation to state power: virtuous Americans identify with the suffering of grieving Americans, but they also sanction heroic state action against evil. War is promised to deliver a justice so clear and right that it is “worthy of sacrifice.” The willingness to sacrifice further gestures to the goodness of the nation willing to make itself sacrificial in response to its sorrow, even as it is presupposed that real sacrifice will never be asked of the vast majority of the polity; in other speeches Bush asks Americans to sacrifice for the war effort by hugging their children, going shopping, and traveling by airplane.8 In this melodrama the primary indicators of good citizenship, of what it means to be a real American, consist of a felt suffering from terrorism, plus the resolve to go to war. More than other genres, such as the jeremiad and the impasse (which I will discuss), melodrama offers a reassuring narrative trajectory that bestows innocence and moral authority on the United States, and then authorizes state power as an expression of the nation’s virtue.9
Melodramatic political discourses can mark people who find its depictions unconvincing or wrong, or who actively question the legitimations it enables, as morally bankrupt, as un- American, as villainous, or even as terrorist.10 This is not to say that deployments of melodramatic discourse eliminate dissent, but rather that their depictions cast dissent as both illegible and unbearably cruel to injured victims—to real Americans. Many people, of course, have condemned melodrama’s moral injunctions or refused its legitimations of state power, even if they have not labeled these injunctions or legitimations melodramatic.11 Since the first days after 9 / 11, for instance, marginalized political groups (especially but not limited to those on the left ) resisted the melodramatic assumption that the attack signified American innocence or a virtuous nation, and spoke out against its moral mandate for retributive state violence. But melodrama may still have contributed to the affective responses to the events, even for people who resisted some of its terms. Upon encountering its depictions, one may hate its overt pathos yet cry at the suffering it shows. One might reject melodrama’s depiction of national identity yet find welcome connection in the virtuous community it offers. One might find that melodramatic tenets unacceptably simplify politics yet want to see brutal villains duly punished. Some parts of melodrama are more compelling than others, and melodramatic conventions do not need to be totalizing to have partial effects. Individuals are often moved in inconsistent ways by its depictions. These inconsistencies are part of melodrama’s affective charge. Many people have had to struggle with or against melodramatic conventions in staking their interpretations of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, indeed in staking what kind of citizens they are or want to be. Even for those people who have responded ambivalently or antagonistically to it, melodrama has become the most powerful genre form of the war on terror.
Orgies of Feeling investigates different forms of melodramatic political discourse, including melodramas of neoliberalism, communism, and capitalism, with particular focus on melodramas of terrorism. Melodramatic political discourses can be found in the news media, political interviews, popular punditry, informal conversation, micro political registers, political theory, and organizing norms, as well as in the formal state rhetoric of presidential addresses: melodramas move through multiple vectors. The use of melodrama is not forced or coordinated across media outlets or political parties; its popularity across two centuries of cultural media make it readily available to multiple sites of power and address for depicting political life. Even though melodrama became a common rhetorical genre of the Bush administration in the first de cade of the new millennium, and the administration certainly seized on melodrama’s popularity to support its policies, melodrama did not originate from the administration or from any single source of authority. Its widespread use came from a much larger and contested historical trajectory that spans fields of power and political affiliation. Given the circulation of melodrama across political registers, I am thus less interested in judging whether melodrama is right or wrong in its depictions of political life— whether melodrama gives a true account or a false one—than in discerning its multiple workings and effects, its different appeals for different sites of power and subjectivity. People are not compelled by melodrama merely by coercive rhetoric or charismatic leaders. Melodramatic depictions of virtuous victimization, and predictions for the heroic overcoming of subjection, work on and through people in ways quite different from and beyond what institutional deployments of melodrama may intend. People who are drawn to melodrama’s conventions, or who welcome its narrative assurances, do not necessarily respond to melodrama in predetermined ways. The processes of melodramatic subjectivity are not identical with the strategic aims of melodramatic political discourse, although they are coextensive. To presuppose that subjectivizing processes are the same as or are exhausted by discursive intent would be to assume that political discourses equal political subjects that discourses determine psychic life, and that melodrama works the same way in different spaces, structures, and institutions.
To ascribe intent by a few elites for the pervasive use of melodrama is to ignore its appeal to a broad segment of the U.S. population, and to miss what melodrama’s popularity reveals about contemporary American political life. The question of who intends for melodrama to happen, or who controls its circulation and employment, is not unimportant, but to answer it by placing responsibility for melodrama’s popularity only on a few bad, powerful apples—rather than by also examining its appeal to a broad citizenry— is to mirror melodrama’s strategy of claiming innocence and virtue for its victimized protagonists while displacing blame only to an all-powerful villain. The interesting question for this book is therefore not “why are citizens duped by the elite’s use of melodrama into legitimating antidemocratic and violent state power?” but “what type of citizens may be compelled by melodramatic political discourse, and what do they imagine the powers it legitimates will do?”
The Promise of Freedom
Melodramas grapple with moral questions and aim to establish “moral legibility,” as Peter Brooks argues in his seminal account of the form.’2 They identify virtuous behavior and postulate that society also recognizes real virtue. In many film and television melodramas, the recognition of virtue is the endpoint of the narrative, and the climax of the story demonstrates the protagonist’s moral goodness. Yet in melodramatic political discourse, moral legibility—the identification of the nation’s virtue—is not the only factor motivating the widespread use of melodrama. There is another, perhaps more compelling, attraction: melodrama promises freedom for those who are virtuous. The moral legibility of melodramatic political discourse is in the service of an expectation that freedom is forthcoming for both injured citizens and the nation-state. The allure of melodramatic political discourse is the promise of emancipation that it offers those who unjustly suffer.
The norm of freedom that circulates in melodramatic political discourse is rooted in particularly liberal and Americanized interpretations of freedom as self-reliance, as unconstrained agency, and as unbound subjectivity. It combines these interpretations together as normative expressions of a sovereign subject, one who obeys no other authority but one’s own, who can determine the future and control the vagaries of contingency through sheer strength of will. Freedom requires the capacity for final authority over the space of the nation and aims to shore up boundaries of territories and bodies to make them impermeable to the influence of others. Freedom as this form of sovereign subjectivity seems to require control or mastery over the external world for its full exercise. Freedom, in this normative definition, is often equated with both individual and state sovereignty. Indeed, melodrama provides a site at which state and individual agency are conflated, as if the achievement of state sovereignty confers personal sovereignty upon every American. The practices of freedom that melodramas depict thus often take shape through an imaginary of freedom as the performance of sovereignty through unilateral action, war, intensified national security, and even as the institutionalization of what Gules Deleuze calls “societies of control:” as all are deployed in the service of controlling the political field and taming risk. This version of sovereignty implies that the state—and by extension the individual citizen—should be not only free from the coercions of others but also free over others. This latter freedom, though seldom explicitly acknowledged, is what ensures the possibility of the former.
The promise of sovereign freedom is present in melodramatic political discourse whether it shapes the cold war argument in the 19505 that the na tion has a moral requirement to eradicate the evil of communism from the world order, or the neoliberal argument in the 198os that welfare must be eliminated because it is a form of oppression that erodes individual freedom. Both melodramas, while organized around different stories and deployed for different purposes, offer the promise of future freedom through state power for virtuous Americans under siege. Neoliberal melodramas might seem to link freedom to limited state power, since economic policies grouped under the term neoliberal claim to facilitate individual freedom by deregulating cor porations and cutting both taxes and welfare. However, they typically limit only certain types of state power, those that hamper corporate profit or provide social services, both of which come to be cast as un-American, as outside the proper national body, and as forms of individual oppression. They increase state powers that expand military might, corporate growth, and surveillance. As Sheldon Wolin notes, neoliberal policies discredit the state’s ability to serve the needs of the people, but they do not weaken state power.’4 Neoliberal melodramas use the language of individual freedom not to retrench state power but to expand securitized and militarized forms of it.’5
Melodrama hearkens a future in which U.S. citizens and the state exercise their rightful entitlement to unconstrained power. As in Bush’s speech announcing the War in Afghanistan, melodramatic political discourses promise that U.S. military and state actions, together with the corporations that work through and as state power, can transform a sense of being over whelmed by power into a scene of triumphant strength and sovereign control. Similarly, Bush’s very first words to the nation describing the 9/11 attacks do not reflect a deep misunderstanding of the events or an empty rhetorical flourish: “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.” These words are a precise expression of the promises that melodramatic political discourse offers the un justly injured nation: virtuous victims can gain back their sovereignty from anti-American forces by feats of heroic might.’6
A desire for sovereign freedom is thus a decisive factor in the authorization of state power as it takes shape in melodramatic political discourse. The promise of melodrama is that the American nation, once victimized, will eventually reassert its sovereign freedom through the virtuous acts of heroism it must perform against the cause of its injury. The melodramatic legitimation of violent, expansive, and constraining forms of power is thus paradoxically motivated by a desire to experience unconstrained freedom. This differs from the way that melodramatic genre expectations shape cin ema, theater, and literature, when story lines can end in pathos and tragedy for injured protagonists: an innocent victim may die after his or her virtue is celebrated, as in Uncle Toni’s Cabin or Brokeback iviountain (2005), or a hero will sacrifice his or her own life in order to save another or to uphold justice, as in The Birth of a Nation or Savi ng Private Ryan (1998). But in na tional politics melodramatic story lines that end without securing the universal freedom of their protagonists are generally left outside the expecta tions of the narrative. Freedom is frequently the stated goal of melodramatic initiatives in foreign, domestic, and military policy, and it is crucial to take these myriad and explicit claims for freedom seriously as motivating factors behind expansions of state power. It is no coincidence that the Iraq War’s combat zones were called “the front lines of freedom,” or that the War in Afghanistan was officially titled Operation Enduring Freedom. To be sure, freedom is not the only desire motivating the legitimation of these wars; vengeance, violence, Islamophobia, and an escape from fear coexist along- side freedom.’7 But these other motivations have gained much more schol arly attention at the expense of the study of freedom, and they have over shadowed the ways that a desire for freedom sits beside and even underwrites these more overtly insidious motivations, giving them a legiti mate form of expression.
By positioning melodrama in relationship to freedom, this book emphasizes how contemporary desires for freedom are often constituted and de limited by the very forms in which they are articulated. Taking seriously Saba Mahrnood’s warning not to “tether the meaning of agency to a pre defined teleology of emancipatory politics,” this inquiry asks instead how a desire for sovereign freedom is cultivated out of melodramatic depictions of political events.’8 Mahmood cautions scholars against uncritically accepting that there is an ontological desire for freedom that drives individuals, especially when freedom is imagined as a settled achievement of an abstract liberal subject. She asks instead, “what sort of subject ¡s assumed to be normative within a particular political imaginary?” Rather than using Mahmood’s warning to deny that desires for freedom exist in American political subjects, however, I examine how a desire for freedom is produced within and conditioned by various melodramatic political discourses. I specify the particular content of “freedom” that shapes the very political subjectivity that desires it, and use the study of melodrama to ask: How do unilateral state violence and individual license come to inhabit contempo rary definitions of freedom and agency? How is a teleology of emancipation melodramatically imagined through the legitimation of war and national security? I posit that the melodramatic cultivation of a desire for freedom develops at a moment in which long-standing frustrations of political powerlessness combine with the immediate shock of terrorism to operate on national subjects already constituted by certain expectations of liberal freedom and democratic citizenship.
Melodramatic discourses are so widespread, I argue, because they revive the guarantee of sovereign freedom for both the state and the individual in a neoliberal era when both seem out of reach. This lost guarantee of sovereignty has a long and contested genealogy that I examine more in the book, but one way to unpack it here is to work backward and start from the spectacle of nonsovereignty on September ii. The 9/11 attacks were shocking not only for the violence they committed but for the story of freedom they derailed. They disclosed—in a spectacular and horrifying way—failures of both state and individual sovereignty, and melodramatic conventions promised that both types of sovereignty could be regained. Judith Butler argues that 9/11 entailed “the loss of a certain horizon of experience, a certain sense of the world itself as a national entitlement,” and melodrama became appealing in the post-9 i n era because it seemed to reestablish that sense of entitlement.20 The loss of “the world itself as a national entitlement” was a loss of unconstrained freedom for the nation-state, a loss of its seeming capacity to protect itself, monopolize the use of force, and steer geopolitics. Enacted by “faceless” cowards—inconspicuous agents whose weapons of mass destruction were ordinary objects like box cutters and commercial airplanes, and who seíf-destructed upon their own “victory” (doers that did not exceed the deed)—the attacks appeared to be the effect of invisible forces rather than identifiable state actors, their agents easily eluding state apparatuses of surveillance and militarized border systems.
They performed, as the collective Retort argues, “the sheer visible happening of defeat.”2’ In effortlessly penetrating national borders, the attackers upended two beliefs: that America was invulnerable to serious attack by foreigners and that geopolitical boundaries could demarcate state sovereignty. Indeed, if the state is defined through Max Webers classic definition as that which has “the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence,” a defini tion in which state power is ipso facto sovereign, then the 9/11 events challenged the very workings of the state by revealing its nonsovereignty.2 The loss of the world as a national entitlement traversed individual and state agency.23 The attacks created a loss for individuals in their presumed capacity under reigning norms of liberal individualism to be self-reliant and sovereign over their own bodies. By indiscriminately murdering un known and unsuspecting individuals, the attacks challenged the monadic premises of individual self-reliance, what Sharon Krause calls the long standing liberal belief that “the individual is understood to be the master of her own domain’24 The mass violence shed light on the intense social vul nerability of individual bodies, revealing how individuals are always, as Butler argues, “exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that expo sure”25 The terrorist attacks thus violently upended the sovereign freedom story that entwines states and subjects. Whether sovereignty is defined as having the ultimate power or authority to make decisions about life and death (as in Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben), the capacity to authorita tively reign over a defined geographic or bodily space (as in Thomas Hobbes or Jean Bodin), or the right of self-determination and self-making against the dominations of others (as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau), the 9/11 events revealed contracted possibilities of sovereign power.26 In highlighting the vulnerabilities and dependencies of contemporary life, the attacks challenged sovereignty as the grounding presupposition of both individual agency and international relations.
Melodrama’s narrative teleology of freedom responds by revitalizing norms of sovereignty for both individuals and states, and this is part of its widespread appeal. Melodrama’s affective and narrative forms aim to rese cure the nation’s virtue and reestablish its sovereign power. Melodrama becomes more potent after 9/ ii’s radical destabilization of national narratives about freedom and power because the genre’s emplotment of a familiar nar rative trajectory—injury then redemption—seems to restabilize the promise of sovereignty. Bonnie Honig writes that melodramas thematize “the sense of being overwhelmed by outside forces”; melodramas depict individual protagonists as vulnerable to and powerless against the violence and cruelty of the outside world. This makes melodrama well suited for depicting situations of overwhelming vulnerability. But in political discourse melodrama goes further, as it also promises that overwhelmed subjects can overcome their vulnerability by dramatic counter-acts of force, acts that melodrama equates with the achievement of freedom. In promising that freedom is forthcoming for virtuous sufferers1, melodrama implies that complex global vulnerability and interdependence can be overcome by expressions of state power reasserting U.S. global might, which will then reflect back to American individuals their own sovereignty.
In melodrama’s narrative temporality, however, sovereign freedom can only be achieved after an overwhelming experience of vulnerability, powerlessness, and pain: this is how melodrama positions the United States as the victim and hero of world politics. In Dick Cheneys war on terror melodrama, for instance, “This is a struggle against evil, against an enemy that rejoices in the murder of innocent, unsuspecting human beings. . . . A group like Al Qaeda cannot be deterred or placated or reasoned with at a conference table. For this reason the war against terror will not end with a treaty, there will be no summit meeting or negotiations with terrorists. The conflict will only end with their complete and permanent destruction and in victory for the United States and the cause for freedom”28 The nation’s overwhelming experience of unjust victimization heralds its grandiose reclamation of sovereign power through permanent destruction” of the evil villain that caused the nation’s powerlessness. Melodrama’s moral economy transmutes affectively intense experiences of unjust victimization into the anticipation of, and justification for, violence imagined as sovereign agency.
Vote negative as a refusal to play hide and seek with the lost object in favor of embracing its death- accepting the fact mastery can never be achieved is the first step toward ending a cycle of repetitious destruction
Anker ‘12
Elizabeth, American Studies at George Washington University. 2012. “Heroic Identifications: Or, ‘You Can Love Me Too – I am so Like the State,’” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/469324/summary spaldwin rc/pat
Attempts to challenge experiences of unfreedom would seem more effective if instead, as a first step, they work to examine the precise forms of power that contribute to experiences of unfreedom, and aim to scrutinize geopolitical realignments. They might develop collective practices of freedom that are undergirded by acknowledgements of interdependence, practices that take account of differentiated forms of exploitation, violence, and social vulnerability. Peter Fitzpatrick argues that the post-9/11 moment requires reconceiving freedom to entail responsibility for others as a necessary precondition.39 A more critical engagement in this vein might begin by drawing upon the animating impulses of individualism – resisting dominating power upon the self – yet refigure its legitimating function by sustaining recognition that, as Sharon Krause notes, freedom does not entail sovereignty even as it demands individual and collective accountability for political life.40 This recognition opens the space for new modes of political agency that are more collective and interdependent in their work to challenge material and structural experiences of unfreedom. It can enable tools for pushing more resourcefully against encumbrances of power, instead of rehabilitating the lost, dead object of individual mastery. As Judith Butler, Jill Bennett and many other feminist thinkers have suggested, by acknowledging lived conditions of interdependence in a post-9/11 era, challenges to structural unfreedom might draw more deeply upon the resources of collective life for establishing conditions of social justice, freedom, and human equality, using interdependence as a source of strength that works with collective resources rather than against them. This might also assist the crucial work of distinguishing foundational social interdependence from the increasing binds of regulatory, violent, and governmentalizing powers.
Other possibilities include sustaining the acknowledgement that loss engenders: that the object of desire is gone, that one’s ideal is no longer tenable and perhaps was never viable. For Freud, this involves a mourning process that concludes by rerouting desire to a new, more tenable, more live object. This process is not clearly delineable or fully predictable; the desire to contain contingency and garner complete knowledge of the future is itself a derivation of ontological narcissism, of the desire for mastery, its satisfaction clearly impossible. The rerouting of desire can never be predicted in advance – and this is part of its necessary danger. Yet static predetermined ideas of freedom are also insufficient to develop its practice. Freedom entails not just a static or binary condition, in which one is or is not free, or in which the settled terms of freedom’s experience are laid out in advance of its pursuit. Part of the practice of freedom is a keen responsiveness to the specific experiences of constraint and regulation one wishes to change.
While post-9/11 political subjects who legitimated war and increases in the national security state were partly motivated by a desire to resist the intense and rapidly intensifying regulations of power, it remains to be seen whether those desires could be transformed into a more productive challenge that responds to the specific conditions they aim to change, or whether they can nourish new conceptions of agency and freedom outside those that sustain the damages and unfreedom of current politics. Only by actively grappling with the imposibility of mastery, and the reckoning with power’s complex operations in contemporary life, might political subjects collectively engage with the political powerlessness, constraining norms, and structural unfreedoms that shape contemporary experience. This experience includes the 9/11 events but certainly is not limited to them, and it includes reckoning with ways subjects are imbricated or complicit in the exploitation and powerlessness of others. The predicament of the post-9/11 political subject is that in order to maintain the claim that sovereignty is possible, it transforms its desire to resist impinging power into a legitimation of what it resists. The predicament is thus not a subject that remains blind to its experiences, or even reflexively desires subjection, but a subject whose impulse for resistance is refigured by the very methods it draws upon in its effort. By way of desiring opposition to contemporary power, post-9/11 subjects end up authorizing one of its most imposing forms, repudiating the possibility for a more rigorous critique of their conditions, perpetuating their burdens, and justifying violence and war.
I conclude by suggesting that even in one of the more unliberatory moments in recent political life – when political subjects did not just acquiesce to but actively supported policies that sanctioned large-scale violence and murder, that overtly contributed to their own regulation and surveillance, and that explicitly diminished venues for dissent, possibilities for political participation, and pursuits of justice – we might observe political subjects’ desire to challenge conditions of unfreedom and to undo experiences of oppression and exclusion that they otherwise seem so willing to uphold. To make this suggestion is not to offer an optimistic reading of a horrifying moment in political life or to justify the complicity of American citizens who acquiesced to and actively sanctioned violent, inhumane, or oppressive policies -- quite the contrary. But it is to tell a different and overlooked story, about a contemporary political subject that does not necessarily desire unfreedom, but whose resistance to unfreedom is thwarted by the very mechanisms it adopts in its struggle.
The Role of the Judge is to be an analyst – psychoanalysis is a science of rhetoric at the level of rhetorical tropes – that allows us to theorize the empirical life of desire.
Lundberg ‘12
Christian, rhetoric at UNC-Chapel Hill. 20120. “Lacan in Public.” pat
Lacan’s claims to the “science” of rhetoric respond to a number of critics who had framed psychoanalysis as an alchemical mix of unfounded theories, intuitions and inherited practices. Borrowing from Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, such critiques of psychoanalysis argued that analytic practice was non-falsifiable, resting on the idea that no empirical evidence could be mustered to refute it. Any claim to evidence to the contrary of Freudian theories could always be elided by generating another explanation with dubious empirical grounding to account for potential exceptions. In drawing on rhetoric as a systematic mode for theorizing the nature of the sign, representation, and the logic and social functions of discourse, Lacan rescues Freudian categories from non-falsifiability. Rhetoric, which is so squarely rooted in “art,” became one of Lacan’s most powerful allies in articulating psychoanalysis as a science, providing a vocabulary for attending to the repeatable elements of signification that might be held up to empirical verification.
Lacan vacillated at different points in his career on psychoanalysis’s status as a science, arguing at points that it was clearly a science, at others that it was not, and at others that it was a special kind of science. Generally, Lacan’s early career embodied the strongest claim for the scientific status of psychoanalysis, while in his later career he became less invested in the idea, arguing that it need not attempt to assume scientific status to validate itself. What is most interesting about the ambivalence toward science in Lacan’s thought is that at each instance where the relationship between psychoanalysis and science is at stake, the question of rhetoric is never far from the conversation. For example, in The Psychoses and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is a science on the basis of its attention to a set of repeatable logical forms, specifically to trope as a way of specifying the possible connections underwriting discursive and representational practices. Other accounts read Lacan as eventually giving up on the idea that psychoanalysis is a science, but do so, once again, with explicit reference to rhetoric. For example, Stuart Schneiderman argues that by 1977 Lacan had given up the quest to prove psychoanalysis as a science, that “after having posed the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis for so many years, he had come to the conclusion that it was not a science. The reason was one offered by Karl Popper, namely that psychoanalysis was ‘irrefutable.’ Lacan said that analysis was closest to rhetoric. . . . Thus analysis seeks to persuade but not convince, to persuade the analysand to recognize things that he knows they know already and to act on his their desire.” Of course, one might take issue with the account of rhetoric that is implicit in this claim, particularly on the grounds that the framing of rhetoric in Schneiderman’s account affirms an understanding of rhetoric exclusively through reference to persuasion, contingency, and probability—a conception that is, as I have been arguing, at odds with Lacan’s understanding of the work of rhetoric. More accurately, rhetoric affords Lacanian psychoanalysis a status as a special kind of science by providing it with a set of techniques for paying attention to the mathematical qualities of discourse. Regardless of how one understands the moniker “science,” rhetoric drives psychoanalysis toward a systematic account of the possible modes of connection that animate actually existing discourses, and toward an observation of the concrete functions of trope in the social life of the subject.
Lacan derives this understanding of psychoanalysis as the systematic science of attending to discourse from Freud. For example, in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud argues for a practice of reading dreams that revised received methods for interpreting dreams. Prior to Freud’s intervention there was a long-standing tradition that held that an image in a dream correlated with an unconscious meaning in much the same way that a word in a dictionary correlates with a definition. In order to found his mode of dream interpretation, Freud dissents from a definitional understanding of dreams by distinguishing between manifest “dream content” and the underlying logic of a dream, or the “dream-thought.” Although the manifest content of a dream may seem utterly random, it is driven by the dream-thought expressed in it, investing the specific contents of the dream with a meaning dependent on the thought that articulates it. For Freud there is no universal protocol for the expression and interpretation of dream contents, but rather a set of associations unique to an individual which, although not uniform in content, are bound by a more universal logic of expression.
It is tempting to see in Freud’s presentation of the interpretation of dreams a cognitive semiotics that verges on a proto-presentation of Saussure’s conception of differential signification, albeit sixteen years prior to the publication of the Course in General Linguistics. Each element in a dream means something not because it has an intrinsic referent, but rather because it is defined by a relationship of difference to other elements in the dream content, and cumulatively the structure of differentially related signs allows for an interpretation of the underlying dream-thought. Naturally, this is the reading of Lacan’s employment of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams by those who see Lacanian psychoanalysis as an integration of Freud’s unconscious and the insights of Saussure. The difficulty arises when one tries to determine what exactly Lacan is attempting to do by reading the regularities of structure that animate dreams and, by extension, discourse. On one account, this reading produces a logic of dreams and discourse that emphasizes structure at the expense of the empirical. But a second account replaces the structuralist poetic account with a rhetorical conception of trope, inventing a science of rhetoric that forces attention to the interchange between form and its empirical manifestations. To instantiate a rhetorical relation between the logics and manifestation of dream contents, Lacan turns to a science of oratory that drives analytic labor toward the empirical life of discourses.
“What specifies a science,” writes Lacan,” “is having an object.” To say that a science must have an object elicits an objection that specifying an “object” presumes a science engages something given in advance as opposed to contingently made. But approaching an object requires equal parts analytic rigor and prudence: “we must be very prudent, because this object changes . . . as the science develops. . . . We cannot say that the object of modern physics is the same now as at its birth.” Attention to a changing object implies a relationship of mutual determination between the mode of inquiry and the objects that such a mode takes up. A science is not a general theory to be mapped onto reality because sciences are parasitic on the specific. As Lacan argues, science always begins with the particular: “To be sure, analysis as a science is always a science of the particular. The coming to fruition of an analysis is always a unique case, even if the unique cases lend themselves . . . to some generality. . . . Analysis is an experience of the particular.”
But what is the particular object around which a science of oratory might emerge? The answer is the economy of trope and enjoyment. Claiming that Freud drew attention to a “fundamental” opposition between metaphor and metonymy in “mechanisms of dreams,” Lacan argues that “what Freud calls condensation is what in rhetoric one calls metaphor, what one calls displacement is metonymy.” That this reference to a rhetoric of trope frames Lacan’s application of the vocabulary of structural linguistics is clear from the concluding sentence of this paragraph: “It’s for this reason that in focusing attention back onto the signifier we are doing nothing other than returning to the starting point of the Freudian discovery.”
In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan argues that the core insight of The Interpretation of Dreams might be fruitfully applied to more than just unpacking dreams. The logic that inheres in dream work is the same logic that underwrites the function of speech generally. If, following Lacan’s reading of Interpretation of Dreams, one is inclined to agree that speech serves as a synecdoche for rhetorical processes generally; by extension one might conclude that speech offers privileged insight into the functioning of everyday discourses. Thus it is no surprise that Lacan recommends instruction in rhetoric as an indispensable component of analytic practice. According to Lacan, this realization should compel attention to the function of “rhetoric . . . ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition—these are the syntactical displacements; metaphor, catachresis, antonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche— these are the semantic condensations in which Freud teaches us to read the intentions . . . out of which the subject modulates his oneiric discourse.” This extension of Freud’s dream work to speech by means of a globalization of trope founds the possibility of psychoanalysis as a science, via recourse to the scientific properties of oratory:
At the bottom of the Freudian mechanism one rediscovers these old figures of rhetoric which over time have come to lose their sense for us but which for centuries elicited a prodigious degree of interest. Rhetoric, or the art of oration, was a science and not just an art. We now wonder, as if at an enigma, why these exercises could have captivated whole groups of men for such a long time. If this is an anomaly it’s analogous to the existence of psychoanalysis, and it’s perhaps the same anomaly that’s involved in man’s relationships to language, returning over the course of history, recurrently, with different ramifications and now presenting itself to us from a scientific angle in Freud’s discovery.
Why wonder at the “enigma” of a science of oratory and the “exercises” that constituted it? The “exercises” that Lacan is most likely referring to were the progymnasmata—the graduated sequence of somewhat formulaic pedagogical practices that introduced the student of oratory to the inventional moves one might make in composing and/or delivering a speech. This attention to form, embodied in both a theory of arrangement and delivery, attuned the budding orator to the regularities in speech that render inventional moves not only intelligible, but potentially eloquent. Oratorical practice had foreseen and, long in advance of contemporary linguistics, “discovered” the formal properties animating discursive practice.
There are two senses of the word “formal” for Lacan: one that relies on quantification and another that relies, if not on math as we typically understand it, then on the mathematizable, or that which can be symbolically rendered as a repeatable relation. A science is defined by mathematization, as opposed to quantification: “what is distinctive about positive science, modern science, isn’t quantification but mathematization and specifically combinatory, that is to say linguistic, mathematization which includes series and iteration.” The oratorical tradition discovered that rhetorical invention was scientific: in discovering the progymnasmata, the tradition articulated a conception of inventio (invention) as the discovery of repeatable symbolic forms. Lacan prefers the first sense of “formal” because it comports with oratorical pedagogy’s insight that language is mathematizable (amenable to a description of its repeatable formal properties), which is the condition of possibility for a science of oratory. The science of oratory discovers a mode of knowing that would eventually make “linguistics the most advanced of the human sciences” by specifying that which is formally repeatable in the life of the subject and its discourses.
This understanding of rhetoric moves it from a prudential “art” of the intuitive intersubjective judgments to the symbolic science of forms. For Lacan, an art premised on the disciplining of critical intuition does not move beyond the Imaginary because “everything intuitive is far closer to the Imaginary than the Symbolic.” In place of the art of intersubjectively grounded intuition, Lacan calls for attention to the trans-subjective apparatus of the Symbolic: “the important thing here is to realize that the chain of possible combinations of the encounter can be studied as such, as an order which subsists in rigor, independently of all subjectivity. . . . The symbol is embodied in an apparatus—with which it is not to be confused, the apparatus being just its support. And it is embodied in a literally trans-subjective way.” This understanding of rhetoric as science does not abandon the subject; rather, it decenters the subject as a taken-for-granted interpretive maxim, replacing attention to what goes on between subjects with the formal movement of tropes, a movement that is mathematizable, and therefore amenable to a formal scientific account of its effects:
In as much as he is committed to a play of the Symbolic, to a symbolic world . . . man is a decentered subject. Well, it is with this same play, this same world, that the machine is built. The most complicated machines are made only with words.
Speech is first and foremost that object of exchange whereby we are reorganized. . . . That is how the circulation of speech begins, and it swells to the point of the symbol which makes algebraic calculations possible. The machine is the structure detached from the activity of the subject. The symbolic world is the world of the machine.
The world of the symbolic is machinic in a very specific way: only insofar as it relies on the set of regularized, logically possible connections between words and other words. In other words, the Symbolic is machinic because it is tropologically constituted. But because the Symbolic is tropologically constituted, its machinic nature is premised on the various failures in unicity that invite the trope as a compensatory function. Thus, if the Symbolic is a machine, it is a machine that fails. In the next chapter, I take up the paradox of the failing machine by suggesting the metaphor of economy as a way of parsing the relationship between the machinic (or automatic) and its failure in the life of the Symbolic