I have just returned from a talk with Morris Berman and Eleni Stecopoulos at The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, part of series on language and health. Morris was pessimistic about the future of the United States and about the possibilities for action. What is important is to enjoy yourself, he said, and not to divorce yourself from your body. I had not read his books, the earliest of which, at least, looked interesting. Here in California, somatics has become something of an institution. The local advertisements for it and related new age “modalities” are enough to completely support two local serial publications. Healers, hypnotists, Reiki practitioners, Alexander technique, it goes on and on, and becomes wearying. It’s hard to sort out the people providing value from charlatans, if you even get as far as determining which “modalities” are good for you. That’s the catch. It all costs money, and lots of it. If you run out of money and credit, out on the street you go. So, one would like to be rational in one’s spending, i.e. make sure it provides value. (Even Berman had complaints about what the healing industry has become, with asides to “Deep-Pockets Chopra” and “Oprah/Chopra.”) Ah, but isn’t that just the catch: being “rational” is the enemy. If you doubt the therapy will work, that will jinx it and it won’t work because, in the post-Heisenberg universe, the oberver affects the observation, see. You have to totally immerse yourself (and your bank account) in this stuff, or it won’t work. You can’t ask the question, “is this worth the cost?” Just do it, and the money will come. That thinking – rationality – does not belong in this framework. And if you get down to your last pennies doing it, well, it’s just the universe trying to tell you that you need a lifestyle adjustment. Lifestyle coaches are ready to help you in that area, too, but only if you can afford to pay.
This work has its political implications, as well. As Habermas wrote, you can’t engage politically if you are doing yoga (Towards a Rational Society). Marx was a rationalist – his case against capitalism was that it ultimately was not rational. Foucault points out, in The Care of the Self, this sort of intense care and interest in one’s wellbeing goes to the roots of Western civilization. And it also goes well with a good dose of cynicism about the world. Ah, it’s all going to hell in a handbasket. There’s no use trying to change anything, so we might as well just try to enjoy ourselves while Rome burns. At least, in the 1960’s, when many of the “new therapies” were first being invented, there was the idea that, if enough people became enlightened, a new consciousness would sweep the planet and save us from disaster. Now even that image, however illusory it may have been, is gone. Yes, Obama, hope is still audacious.
I always pick up a sense of wistful longing at these poetry events. There is the inevitable confrontation. I start talking about science or economics, and people say things like, “You’re being sarcastic…aren’t you?!?” I tend to be a bit rough with the sacred cows. I’m not an iconoclast, by a wide margin, but when people start to ask about things like, “What does it mean that the economy is good?” I tell them about GDP. When they complain that “GDP says nothing about how wealth is distributed in this country,” I refer them to the Nobel-winning work of Amartya Sen. I start talking about his ideas for a social welfare function, and they throw up their hands, as if to say, “What are you doing here?!?”
What am I doing, there? Where does the wistful longing come in? Certainly, anything that involves mathematics is frowned-upon, there. I really think that it is not so much economics that these people hate, but its mathematical basis. So, even math is taboo. That’s not a huge loss. It’s a Poetry Center, after all. But what interests me is the emotional baggage. Whenever people stop being even-handed about something, I can’t resist my urge to prod. Where’s the hurt? Where’s the pain? What does it come from?
I haven’t gotten far enough to write about these things, but it is what Mr. Berman criticizes when he rails against Cartesianism and “the disenchantment of the world.” It’s a profoundly poetic theme. I have written in here about the evils of “excess of signification.” Poetry is a bulwark against such excesses. Blanchot focuses on this theme explicitly in an essay on Bachelard, “Vast is the Night” (The Infinite Conversation, pp. 318-25). Against speech that is weighted down with meaning, with significance, with the kind of depth that makes reference to theory, stands a speech that is simple and light (of which Blanchot’s writing forms a wonderful example), the speech of images, of surface and illusion. This, by virtue of its lack of intellectual involvement, is often able to attain depth of another sort, human depth, and its own power to change consciousness, usually in far more profound and diverse ways. I get the feeling Berman shares and champions this view.
It seems that any sort of science, not least Economics, and perhaps even any sort of mathematics, with its implicit and absolute, lexicographic valuation of logical consistency, but certainly the psychoanalysis that Blanchot discusses, is based on analogy. That is its entire power. “Look, you can model it this way.” “You can model it as such.” These models only convince on the strength of their analogy. Provided that they have mathematical consistency, all that one can criticize about them is the assumptions on which they are based. Such criticism amounts to saying that the analogy is bad in some way. Usually such complaints can be either incorporated into the model, or it can be shown that the departures are without consequence to the results of the model. That’s what makes this form of thought so powerful, so adaptive, and thus universal.
What is criticized about this approach is that it all comes from the head. The assumptions may come from experience, but the results come entirely from the model, the logical consistency of which can be convincingly verified, i.e. proved. The model, of course, is entirely an intellectual construct. It only exists on paper (or silicon, magnetic media, etc.). This was a major shift in the way that people thought about the world. Prior to its invention, owed largely to Descartes, practical knowledge, knowledge that could reliably give a guide to action, was entirely based on experience. (This idea owes reference to the first essay in Gadamer’s The Enigma of Health, titled "Theory, Technology, Praxis.") Experience was handed down through tradition. And so you have things like the ten commandments, and other imperatives and cultural artifacts that sometimes kept a false validity when they outlived the conditions that gave rise to their formulation.
The results of models are not without a value that is too often called “intuitive” but which Blanchot rightly labels, after Bachelard, in Susan Hanson’s translation, “imaginary,” being based on images. In order for models to be truly effective, in order for them to provide “insight”, their results have to be translated back into the realm of images, or of poetry. It is not, in my experience, always the force of the analogy that convinces. One without a background in science or mathematics will have grave doubts about these analogies (usually unfounded). But the images will still get through. The model may alert the modeler to something that neither they nor the decisionmaker they seek to advise thought of in advance. A good model, according to Sam Savage, as well as his dad, does this. It “tells you something you didn’t tell it to tell you.” It tells you something you didn’t already know. But that something is not immediate. It requires careful and creative translation to reach the realm of images in all of its power to convince. But then it can convince even the most recalcitrant.
But this picture is all getting a bit too neat and happy. I’m becoming conscious of my own sacred cows. I’ve given the artist and the poet their own little alcoves in the hall of science, their own little houses in Plato’s republic, rehabilitating them two thousand years after Plato kicked them out. I am dissatisfied with this. I seek to break with the constraints of analogy altogether, to really let loose, to explore language in its own right, without always making reference to an idea or a referent, as Blanchot sought, with his ilk, his brethren I so adore or admire: Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida, et al. And so I sympathize with the poetic spirit. I read their books. I listen to their readings. I dutifully read my theory and can converse with undergraduates and graduate students in the literary arts as I can in my science. And my science suffers, in proportion that I do this. But I don’t learn any other languages, which is like not learning any math is to science. I don’t enroll in a matriculated program, or even a single class, or even a workshop. I don’t, in short, make a commitment, serious or otherwise. And when I listen to Mr. Berman, I find myself scoffing under my breath at his cynicism.
Maybe, it is because the economics of fear has been driven too deeply into me. I moved out of home at sixteen, in the mid-1980’s. The average person my age didn’t leave home until 25. I became financially independent, with hardly a dollar to my name, at age nineteen. I put myself through undergraduate school with almost no financial aid. I couldn’t even get a loan for two years because I had to prove my independence from my family. Then, when I became eligible for a loan, I didn’t take one. I put myself through a private graduate school the same way. And a good thing it was, for even without school debt, 34 years of age found me with no assets and $16,000 in credit card debt. About average. It took me five years of living hand-to-mouth to pay it off. And so, I feel a bit imprisoned by the need to constantly prove my economic value. It’s been so ingrained in me by hardship and the threat, sometimes very near, of hunger and homelessness. And so I studied subjects I did not so much like as through that they would be useful, either for accomplishing great works or merely for making a living (or for paying for accomplishing those great works).
So, the idea of living the life of a writer is something I secretly long for. To make one’s living this way, to live off of writing, to be able to afford to abandon everything else to its fate, seems fantastic. It feels profoundly uncomfortable to me, like I imagine it must be for someone to be in a body of water without knowing how to swim. And I notice a reverse effect as well, that the people who live this way feel uncomfortable with certain aspects of economic citizenship that are second nature to me. Their lack of faith in the structures of our society, evident and on display with Mr. Berman, is sometimes born of ignorance. “Because the stock market went up, does that mean that everybody's richer?” and artist asked me on the sidewalk. No, it means that the consensus estimate of how well businesses will do on average over time has just increased. And so, on it goes…
Friday, November 20, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
On the Gift Economy, A Response to Kermit
Kermit extols the virtues of gift-giving as an alternative to market exchange, with allusions to Marx and Bataille, but specific reference to Lewis Hyde (“Breaking Down the Market in our Heads: Abandoning the Logic of Capital” Slingshot #101).
Kermit identifies capitalism with market exchange. Marx uses market exchange to oppose capitalism in the first pages of Capital. I.e. capitalism is faulty because it breaks the basic law of the market, that exchange should be fair, equal value for equal value. Capitalism is to be criticized specifically because it seeks to “cheat”, to extract value by exchanging that of lesser value for that of greater. Furthermore, it is capitalism, and not market exchange, that subjugates value in use to value in exchange. In a natural, i.e. pre-capitalist society, markets serve the valid function of exchanging the products of one’s labor for the products of another’s labor. If I don’t have to train myself to be my own cobbler, architect, builder, garbage-man, farmer, and tailor, I can be more effective and efficient in my labor. However, in order to do so, I have to have access to a market in which I can exchange the products of my labor, whatever they are, for the products of the labor of the tailor, cobbler, builder, etc., that I need for my own very human (i.e. not artificially-created and not exchange-based) needs. Markets are far older than capitalism, and so is cheating, but it is capitalism that raises cheating to the status of a systemic necessity, in order to extract profit.
Students of anthropology will note that even very primitive, pre-capitalist societies, indigenous peoples who live as nearly as possible outside of industrialization, have very rigorous notions of exchange. These concepts of exchange extend even to human beings, and the loss of one person from the tribe is often seen as compensatable by an equivalent exchange in livestock and other goods, which is seen to compensate for the lost labor that the lost person would have produced in the remainder of their life in the tribe. Students of anthropology will also make reference to The Gift as the locus classicus for gift economy, not the one by Lewis Hyde but the one by Marcel Mauss. Mauss achieved noteriety by pointing out that gifts necessarily put their recipient in debt. The only difference, in fact, between gift exchange and market exchange is that the compensation for gifts is normally paid at a different time and in a different form than the original item or a currency. People who fail to make this exchange will be seen as tight and will not be the recipients of further gifts, as the givers will feel cheated.
And who has not been the recipient of an unwanted gift? A gift can be highly obnoxious in its coercive effect to initiate an exchange of gifts where one is not wanted, a relationship that is not desirable, nor desired. This gives rise to the phenomenon of guilt, an already huge cultural edifice and the subject of extended meditations by Nietzsche. This leads to the subject of gifts that not only seek to establish an unwanted relationship but are in fact unwanted themselves. They may be given to someone who is thought to need them, through they profess not to want them. Much psychiatric treatment falls into this category, and these gifts seldom serve the interests of anyone but their givers.
The appeal to nature is poorly made. Yes, fruit rots on trees. Yes, such waste is riotous with life. Yes, it is hardly calculated. However, although it is not the result of calculation, its results are the same. For the fruit to rot, the spores of mold or microorganisms must reach it. For spores to reach it, they must spread everywhere. For them to reach everywhere, they must be produced very economically, in enormous number and microscopic size. The organism must organize its reproductive cycle and allocate its biomass within very tight limits if it is to meet these demands. The process of variation and selection in evolution disciplines organisms to be very strategic or else go extinct. In fact, many concepts in classical economics had their origins in ecology. The effect is identical to systemic calculation, even if it was reached by other means. Calculation itself is little more than the attempt to speed up evolution by anticipating evolutionary dead-ends in advance, rather than actually suffering through them, a process that can take time on a geologic scale. Who can really say what “waste” is, in this context? The fruit is rotting, so it is waste to us humans, but it’s serious business for the rot, and may be key to the tree’s reproductive cycle as well. I’m averse to visions of nature as a big factory, a market, etc., but what’s interesting is that it isn’t decidable. Whether to see it one way or the other is up to you. Sure, not every spore matures into a full-fledged organism (far from it!). But are the rest still waste if they are necessary for the statistical likelihood of one spore to survive? Profligate waste everywhere evident in nature can thus be evidence of life’s mere impotence. Whether the evolutionary variations are truly random “mistakes” in genetic transcription, etc. (i.e., “waste”, the conventional view) is debatable and an unfortunate opportunity for religious lunacy. For an early survey of the arguments in this area (bereft of religious overtones), consult Bergson’s Creative Evolution.
Let’s not forget how deep the logic of exchange really goes, as Nietzsche and others remind us. Exchange is deeply rooted in notions of fairness and justice. Negative exchanges are completed through retribution and old, old laws going back to Homer, the Torah, etc. The syntagmatic compulsion to complete the cycle can be irrisistable, and goes beyond the distinction between gifts and exchange. Is long-sought revenge a gift or the end of an exchange? What about the return of the repressed in Freud? The master/slave dialectic in Hegel?
In short, gift economies are impractical to meet all human needs, are already ubiquitous to a negative degree in human society, and not simply opposed to capitalism (in many ways, consonant with it). This is not to vitiate the point of Kermit’s article, but to burn away the detritus that clouds and obscures it, that the notion of exchange corrupts human relationships and makes them overly worldly, cheap, and ultimately insufferable. The problem is more pervasive than can be dispelled by a simple giving of gifts. Yes, keeping a mental accounting of one’s position vis-à-vis everyone else is wearying, penurious, and withering of the spirit, but what is to be done?
To escape these traps (of the pervasiveness of the logic of exchange, whether through gifts, capitalism, or otherwise), one needs to reach for Bataille. Bataille, careful student of Hegel and Nietzsche, was wary of these traps. He realized that there is no freedom from exchange except in the conscious practice of intentional waste, which he elevated to fundamental status. All forms of exchange, the results of careful calculation, etc., Bataille relegates to the status of restricted economy. The bigger processes, the general economy, is exemplified by things like potlach – the intentional, useless and profligate destruction of wealth that can never be compensated – among the first nation peoples of the pacific northwest (The Accursed Share). Yes, the effect of evolution is as if strategic and carefully calculated, in the small, but to what end? The ultimate end of all life is only death (and then more life). In order to break out of the small-minded, alienating cycle of exchange, we must will specifically unnecessary sacrifice and waste, per Bataille. We must practice what has been condemned in society as evil. It is in fact the anguish of loss that forms emotional bonds between people. It is in fact the bereaved company of the funeral that is the basis for all community, and thus all political society, a theme explored by Jean-Luc Nancy in his masterful The Inoperative Community. It is perhaps this that Kermit is trying to get at with his rotting fruit example.
These ideas are not only heterodox but blasphemous to our culture’s most treasured ideals of humanity and society, a small list of which I have just given. Derrida sounds these themes in his early essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy A Hegelianism without Reserve”, pp. 251-77 in Writing and Difference, and returns to their specific consequences for the ideal of exchange much later in his Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. On a psychoanalytic level, the classical ideas of good and evil (so well summarized by Schelling) have led, through a sort of excess of the good, to the phenomenon of abjection, of vomiting up the mother’s milk (Kristeva, Powers of Horror). Since Aristotle at least, political society is supposed to be based on the sharing of collective ideals and goals, i.e. “the Good”. However, not only do the relationships that spring from working towards common goals (such as the maximization of societal wealth, i.e. capitalism) superficial and unsatisfying in many ways, the apotheosis of this ideal is fascism. This is not just the hyperbolic assertion of irresponsible French scholarship, it has a very sound echo on this side of the Atlantic in Social Choice Theory (SCT). SCT was founded by Kenneth Arrow’s mathematical study of voting algorithms, leading to the astonishing result that there can be no such thing as a social welfare function (a common goal) that is in any way an aggregate of the goals of the individuals in society (Social Choice and Individual Values). In fact, it can only be imposed by a dictator if it is to meet minimal standards of rationality. The very distressing results of this thesis for political economy are summarized by Riker, Liberalism Against Populism. Insofar as we wish to be democratic, we are condemned to irrationality in our societal policies. “The Good” is a fascist chimera.
“It was easier, when I was younger, to hold onto a sense of righteousness when I looked out at the world…” begins Kermit. Certainly. One of the dangers of tarrying with such postmodern ideas is that one can become very skeptical of righteous zeal. Taking them seriously, one may find oneself the receipt of the unwanted gift of police surveillance and psychiatric treatment, the last defense against dangerous ideas and the people who espouse them by a defensive and insecure society, badly on the ropes of the contradictions in its logic and ideals.
Kermit identifies capitalism with market exchange. Marx uses market exchange to oppose capitalism in the first pages of Capital. I.e. capitalism is faulty because it breaks the basic law of the market, that exchange should be fair, equal value for equal value. Capitalism is to be criticized specifically because it seeks to “cheat”, to extract value by exchanging that of lesser value for that of greater. Furthermore, it is capitalism, and not market exchange, that subjugates value in use to value in exchange. In a natural, i.e. pre-capitalist society, markets serve the valid function of exchanging the products of one’s labor for the products of another’s labor. If I don’t have to train myself to be my own cobbler, architect, builder, garbage-man, farmer, and tailor, I can be more effective and efficient in my labor. However, in order to do so, I have to have access to a market in which I can exchange the products of my labor, whatever they are, for the products of the labor of the tailor, cobbler, builder, etc., that I need for my own very human (i.e. not artificially-created and not exchange-based) needs. Markets are far older than capitalism, and so is cheating, but it is capitalism that raises cheating to the status of a systemic necessity, in order to extract profit.
Students of anthropology will note that even very primitive, pre-capitalist societies, indigenous peoples who live as nearly as possible outside of industrialization, have very rigorous notions of exchange. These concepts of exchange extend even to human beings, and the loss of one person from the tribe is often seen as compensatable by an equivalent exchange in livestock and other goods, which is seen to compensate for the lost labor that the lost person would have produced in the remainder of their life in the tribe. Students of anthropology will also make reference to The Gift as the locus classicus for gift economy, not the one by Lewis Hyde but the one by Marcel Mauss. Mauss achieved noteriety by pointing out that gifts necessarily put their recipient in debt. The only difference, in fact, between gift exchange and market exchange is that the compensation for gifts is normally paid at a different time and in a different form than the original item or a currency. People who fail to make this exchange will be seen as tight and will not be the recipients of further gifts, as the givers will feel cheated.
And who has not been the recipient of an unwanted gift? A gift can be highly obnoxious in its coercive effect to initiate an exchange of gifts where one is not wanted, a relationship that is not desirable, nor desired. This gives rise to the phenomenon of guilt, an already huge cultural edifice and the subject of extended meditations by Nietzsche. This leads to the subject of gifts that not only seek to establish an unwanted relationship but are in fact unwanted themselves. They may be given to someone who is thought to need them, through they profess not to want them. Much psychiatric treatment falls into this category, and these gifts seldom serve the interests of anyone but their givers.
The appeal to nature is poorly made. Yes, fruit rots on trees. Yes, such waste is riotous with life. Yes, it is hardly calculated. However, although it is not the result of calculation, its results are the same. For the fruit to rot, the spores of mold or microorganisms must reach it. For spores to reach it, they must spread everywhere. For them to reach everywhere, they must be produced very economically, in enormous number and microscopic size. The organism must organize its reproductive cycle and allocate its biomass within very tight limits if it is to meet these demands. The process of variation and selection in evolution disciplines organisms to be very strategic or else go extinct. In fact, many concepts in classical economics had their origins in ecology. The effect is identical to systemic calculation, even if it was reached by other means. Calculation itself is little more than the attempt to speed up evolution by anticipating evolutionary dead-ends in advance, rather than actually suffering through them, a process that can take time on a geologic scale. Who can really say what “waste” is, in this context? The fruit is rotting, so it is waste to us humans, but it’s serious business for the rot, and may be key to the tree’s reproductive cycle as well. I’m averse to visions of nature as a big factory, a market, etc., but what’s interesting is that it isn’t decidable. Whether to see it one way or the other is up to you. Sure, not every spore matures into a full-fledged organism (far from it!). But are the rest still waste if they are necessary for the statistical likelihood of one spore to survive? Profligate waste everywhere evident in nature can thus be evidence of life’s mere impotence. Whether the evolutionary variations are truly random “mistakes” in genetic transcription, etc. (i.e., “waste”, the conventional view) is debatable and an unfortunate opportunity for religious lunacy. For an early survey of the arguments in this area (bereft of religious overtones), consult Bergson’s Creative Evolution.
Let’s not forget how deep the logic of exchange really goes, as Nietzsche and others remind us. Exchange is deeply rooted in notions of fairness and justice. Negative exchanges are completed through retribution and old, old laws going back to Homer, the Torah, etc. The syntagmatic compulsion to complete the cycle can be irrisistable, and goes beyond the distinction between gifts and exchange. Is long-sought revenge a gift or the end of an exchange? What about the return of the repressed in Freud? The master/slave dialectic in Hegel?
In short, gift economies are impractical to meet all human needs, are already ubiquitous to a negative degree in human society, and not simply opposed to capitalism (in many ways, consonant with it). This is not to vitiate the point of Kermit’s article, but to burn away the detritus that clouds and obscures it, that the notion of exchange corrupts human relationships and makes them overly worldly, cheap, and ultimately insufferable. The problem is more pervasive than can be dispelled by a simple giving of gifts. Yes, keeping a mental accounting of one’s position vis-à-vis everyone else is wearying, penurious, and withering of the spirit, but what is to be done?
To escape these traps (of the pervasiveness of the logic of exchange, whether through gifts, capitalism, or otherwise), one needs to reach for Bataille. Bataille, careful student of Hegel and Nietzsche, was wary of these traps. He realized that there is no freedom from exchange except in the conscious practice of intentional waste, which he elevated to fundamental status. All forms of exchange, the results of careful calculation, etc., Bataille relegates to the status of restricted economy. The bigger processes, the general economy, is exemplified by things like potlach – the intentional, useless and profligate destruction of wealth that can never be compensated – among the first nation peoples of the pacific northwest (The Accursed Share). Yes, the effect of evolution is as if strategic and carefully calculated, in the small, but to what end? The ultimate end of all life is only death (and then more life). In order to break out of the small-minded, alienating cycle of exchange, we must will specifically unnecessary sacrifice and waste, per Bataille. We must practice what has been condemned in society as evil. It is in fact the anguish of loss that forms emotional bonds between people. It is in fact the bereaved company of the funeral that is the basis for all community, and thus all political society, a theme explored by Jean-Luc Nancy in his masterful The Inoperative Community. It is perhaps this that Kermit is trying to get at with his rotting fruit example.
These ideas are not only heterodox but blasphemous to our culture’s most treasured ideals of humanity and society, a small list of which I have just given. Derrida sounds these themes in his early essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy A Hegelianism without Reserve”, pp. 251-77 in Writing and Difference, and returns to their specific consequences for the ideal of exchange much later in his Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. On a psychoanalytic level, the classical ideas of good and evil (so well summarized by Schelling) have led, through a sort of excess of the good, to the phenomenon of abjection, of vomiting up the mother’s milk (Kristeva, Powers of Horror). Since Aristotle at least, political society is supposed to be based on the sharing of collective ideals and goals, i.e. “the Good”. However, not only do the relationships that spring from working towards common goals (such as the maximization of societal wealth, i.e. capitalism) superficial and unsatisfying in many ways, the apotheosis of this ideal is fascism. This is not just the hyperbolic assertion of irresponsible French scholarship, it has a very sound echo on this side of the Atlantic in Social Choice Theory (SCT). SCT was founded by Kenneth Arrow’s mathematical study of voting algorithms, leading to the astonishing result that there can be no such thing as a social welfare function (a common goal) that is in any way an aggregate of the goals of the individuals in society (Social Choice and Individual Values). In fact, it can only be imposed by a dictator if it is to meet minimal standards of rationality. The very distressing results of this thesis for political economy are summarized by Riker, Liberalism Against Populism. Insofar as we wish to be democratic, we are condemned to irrationality in our societal policies. “The Good” is a fascist chimera.
“It was easier, when I was younger, to hold onto a sense of righteousness when I looked out at the world…” begins Kermit. Certainly. One of the dangers of tarrying with such postmodern ideas is that one can become very skeptical of righteous zeal. Taking them seriously, one may find oneself the receipt of the unwanted gift of police surveillance and psychiatric treatment, the last defense against dangerous ideas and the people who espouse them by a defensive and insecure society, badly on the ropes of the contradictions in its logic and ideals.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
“That Excess of Signification”
I was struck by a passage by Giogio Agamben, the other day, “So the patient work of civilization proceeds in every domain by separating human praxis from its concrete exercise and thereby creating that excess of signification over denotation that Levi-Strauss was the first to recognize” (State of Exception, p. 37). Forget the preamble, I only want to focus on this “excess of signification.” The Lévi-Strauss reference is to his work in structural anthropology, in which he finds huge significance accorded to kinship structures, even locating them at the origin of all language. I hate this “excess of signification” of which he speaks. Nothing gives me more pain.
What is “excess of signification”? Agamben is talking about that process of interpretation whereby this or that comes to have a huge meaning and significance, way out of proportion with what we can call “the reality” and he calls the denotation. It’s about the way that a man looking at a picture of a fully-clothed child playing on a swing is considered an act of pedophilia if the man is considered a pedophile. It’s about the way that people who find children attractive or arousing are lumped together with criminals, far more rare, who rape and kill children. It’s about cognitive errors, such as the way that the acts of mentally ill criminals always making the papers causes us to associate dangerousness with mental illness far in excess of actual propensity for violence. It’s about the craziness and hysteria of society to prefer simple and easy associations to the complicated and ambiguous truth. It’s about assigning a weighty and overbearing “meaning” to this or that innocent fact. It’s about, also, those congealed meanings hidden in and by everyday terms, like “straight” is hidden in “man” and “woman.”
I was listening to a comedian last night at Pirate Cat Radio make fun of the usual arguments of anti-gay inactivists, that men and women biologically fit together, that such unions are natural, etc. I won’t repeat his response, out of respect for his comedic material. There’s plenty wrong with those arguments, but the horrible truth is that men and women do “fit together” socially, a lot better than other couplings. I do not need to remind anyone of the huge cultural edifice that supports and enables heterosexual unions. Heterosexuality is cultural entropy. If you don’t make any effort to resist, it will be assumed that you’re straight, you’ll get shoe-horned into a straight relationship, and before you know it you’ll be married, with children. Great efforts will be made to support your union, to which you will be expected to contribute. Money and status will tend to be be heaped upon you, if you are white and upper-middle-class, to egg you on. It’s like falling off a log.
I also don’t need to mention the importance of conventional sex roles in this process. You will be told, though never explicitly, what to do, think, feel, desire, etc. As an obscure 70’s rock band put it, “Welcome to the machine.” And these messages will be not only dichotomous but opposite and complimentary, depending on your gender.
Meanwhile, left behind somewhere in the darkness, are the realities of the situation: the reality, documented by the very mainstream Hite report, that around 60% of all women are not orgasmic about (i.e. don’t really like) penis-vagina fucking. They’ve learned to fake the orgasms just like they fake 90% of everything else that passes for appropriate female behavior, to keep the family together, to support the father in his efforts to materially support the family, for the children, for their parents, etc., etc. And that’s not to say that maleness has an enormous pricetag of its own, in the form of loneliness (your intimate partner – your only real friend – tells you almost nothing but lies), overwork, associated health problems, etc., all that orgasmic penis-vagina fucking notwithstanding.
It’s not as simple as just choosing to be gay as an act of resistance. I don’t need to remind anyone of the punishment that awaits those who deviate, that is advertised every day in the nation’s newspapers, but I’d like to point out the subtle, deep, and treacherous ice that lies beneath the surface, as opposed to those comparatively distant, ostensible and visible tips of the icebergs. For instance, we’d all like to think that the therapists are on our side. We want to believe that pathologizing homosexuality was just an epiphenomenon, an anomaly, the hallmark of a bygone era. Who would want to raise that ugly issue again? But look a little more closely. Austen-Riggs, a swank, east-coast psychoanalytically-based mental hospital, touts the restoration of meaning to human lives, as its cornerstone. We’re right back to Agamben, with his “excess of signification” that was at the start of this whole mess. In the very etiology of schizophrenia, “ego-weakness” is at the core. What is ego-weakness? It’s weakness of interpretation. In other words, “weakness” in the assignation of meaning. “Weakness” in exactly those excesses of signification that are the problem. The message is clear: If you won’t play the game – i.e., if you won’t whitewash a complicated, ambiguous reality with a ready and easy (and ultimately dismissive) interpretation – then get off of the field (stand in the nut box over there), because you’re in the way of those of us who will.
Psychiatry has been criticized for this over and over again. Jacques Lacan, famous critic of psychoanalysis now revered equally with its founders, but also grouped with Lévi-Strauss under the aegis of structualism, was conscious of the part played by meaning, or “excesses of signification” in the “sickness” of his patients. The patient confronts an overwhelming weight of cultural and societal meaning, he wrote, amongst which her own voice is very easily lost. The job of the analyst is to restore and strengthen that voice. But this project ends up subverting itself. The patient must use the language passed onto her by society, and ultimately this amounts to affirming the patrifamilialism which generated the language (per the groundbreaking work of ueber-structualist Lévi-Strauss), the system of meanings, to perpetuate itself. If the ideal of recovery is ready assignation of societal meanings, then a toll must be paid to the origin of those meanings outside the patient. Ultimately, this amounts to constraining one’s possibilities to a contrived deviancy, a parsimonious, provisional deviation.
The signs of gayness-as-provisional deviation are upon us. A month or two ago, on Swirl, a queer radio show on KGRN 960 AM, the host condemned bestiality as unacceptable, as a whole. Here, we have a prime example of a lumping-together and disparagement of entire realms of human and nonhuman interaction and behavior into a single block, that is summarily dismissed, the very hallmark of the “excess of signification” that is our topic. It sounded eerily familiar. It sounded just like a right-wing talk show bashing homosexuality might sound, by identifying it with promiscuity and moral decay, except that some of the words had been changed. Astonished I was to learn that the very passages in Leviticus that condemn homosexuality also condemn bestiality in the same breath, with the same tone, on adjacent lines. Ironic, it seems, that anyone would put themselves on a more moralistic and moralizing ground than Leviticus, at the level of a sort of hyper-bible, more biblical than the mere bible. For that is what one needs to do in order to say that one line of Leviticus represents true morality, morality accurately judged, and that the very next one represents error, folly, mistake, etc., i.e. deviation. I.e. that the bible itself is deviant when compared to a sort of ueber-bible, a hypermorality. Is it possible to pick and choose certain lines of the bible, and not others? Isn’t one open to the charge that one is just using the bible where it supports one’s position and condemning it where it isn’t? Much more seriously, isn’t one affirming the whole biblical project when one should be critical of it? Isn’t the better part of wisdom to criticize the entire bible, as it were, from below? As a moralistic and moralizing system? And look at how that system works and supports meanings and consequent oppression? (This work has been undertaken with interesting results by Eileen Scarry in The Body in Pain.)
Looking over past decades, there seems to be a pattern and a danger. It is as if there were a fixed quantity of moral opprobrium, and all that has changed is its distribution. After the feminist 80’s and the gay 90’s, we are left with greater liberties for women and the LGBT community, but apparently at a cost. “The family”, whether gay or straight, is upheld with still greater energy than before. Psychiatry is posing ever-more-exacting limits on what is acceptable. Psychiatric drugs are selling in amounts vastly in excess of historical norms, such that one in five women in the United States is now taking them. Antipsychotics alone are now a $17B/year industry, with rampant, double-digit growth. It’s as if, complimentary backsliding taken into account, we haven’t gained anything at all. It’s as if, in order to move gayness closer to acceptability, we’ve had to cut ties and distance ourselves greatly from all other forms of deviance, such as mental illness, such as bestiality, etc. In order to make gayness not only acceptable but respectable, clean of all untoward associations, it now must disparage moral scum. It’s like the kid who, previously accepting of gender-ambiguous peers, learns that gay-bashing will gain him acceptance and popularity in an exclusive group, learns to do it. (More sinisterly, he may learn to do it in order to survive, i.e. not get beaten to a pulp for his own, other form of deviance.) Now, as gays wanting to be accepted in mainstream society, we are learning to bash bestiality, bash mental illness, bash all kinds of things, for the acceptance that may be tendered to us as a reward. Yes, we will eventually be able to marry, etc., but how will we live with the lingering possibility that it may only be because enough straight people witnessed our bashing of bestiality, etc., on Swirl and other forums of GLBT community, that they allowed us to join the club? And how much more intense will the oppression of bestiophiles, et al., be as a result? We will get our liberation, I am confident, but I shudder at the cost.
We all know the sticks with which we are beaten to accept these stories, these “excesses of signification.” Just as the woman who visits a women’s health clinic is identified, through some ludic, hyperbolic, and irresponsible process, with a perpetrator of infanticide, schizophrenics are identified, i.e. in David Harvey’s otherwise-commendable The Condition of Postmodernity, with a man who baked his children into charcoal with an industrial metallurgy ladle. Ironically, this wasn’t done just to condemn the mentally ill (i.e. those who wish to “remain” mentally ill through their resistance to treatment), which would only have been comparable to the ludic identification of millions of women with a handful of freak infant killers. No, Harvey went even farther. This was done to condemn the work of Deleuze and Guattari, prominent postmodernists, who were critics of the very “excesses of signification” in psychoanalysis, ergo critics of psychiatry, ergo letting the mad run in the streets, ergo allowing this one of them to do an act so bizarre that it threatens to escape condemnation for all of its strangeness. Ergo, ergo, ergo = excess of signification. D & G now have a significance they lacked before, ironic because the very process they criticized so well had been used against them so skilllessly. And so we have also The Insanity Offense by E. Fuller Torrey, who has created a nonprofit from which he draws a six-figure salary, whose main occupation seems to be the collection of newspaper clippings of every mental-health-related violent offense in the country in order to create a veritable avalanche of signification upon anyone who would dare oppose psychiatric authority and the gargantuan psychopharmaceutical industry that accompanies it. Much can be said about that, but I will wait for a more opportune moment. And of course, there’s 9/11. Those people were undoubtedly crazy as well. Of course, no reasonable person can condone terrorist acts, and so a loss of unnecessary civil liberties is entirely warranted. Excess of signification once again, and incidentally very close to the topic of Agamben’s book.
I needn’t mention all the ways that gay society has been criticized for borrowing from straight society. What else are we to do? And so, instead of fucking vaginas, we fuck anuses. The same lack of imagination bemoaned in Adnrea Dworkin’s Intercourse applies, and much that follows it. We are allowed this modicum of deviance, but don’t forget to take your meds. Don’t forget to attend twelve-step meetings, and psychotherapy, in order to deal with your oppression and make sure it doesn’t manifest into neurosis. Yes, you now require extra scrutiny. But the same “excess of signification” is at work. All the cultural baggage, the fucking as result-oriented, orgasm-centered, genitally-focused sex, the masculinity, the striving for symbols of conventional success, is still there. We’ve just interchanged one term in the system. In a sense, we have to limit ourselves to this, in order to make our deviance intelligible. “Gay” signifies this very specific substitution. Everything is the same, except for the gender of one party. And we work for a world in which this is in fact true, in the name of equality. But how many other forms of deviance are possible, and desirable, and what are their cost? What if we could sacrifice intelligibility?
Myself, I struggle with these excesses of signification every day. I attempt to do volunteer work for a nonprofit. I say “attempt” because they do not direct my work. I would welcome such direction, within certain limits, but precisely those limits set everything off from their possible direction, because the work I do is scientific. So it is up to me to sell the value of my work by example. I do substantial work through a kind of “hit-or-miss” approach, hoping that I will hit upon something that strikes their fancy. But actually, it is only the CEO of this organization with whom I have dealings. In order to minimize the feeling they may have of being “shown up” in some way (excess of signification), I have had to cut all other ties with the organization, even though it was never my objective to diminish or incapacitate anyone through my work. Even so, I face formidable difficulties. My work seldom even engenders a reply. Lacking a sexual partner (itself something of a calcified role with tiresome programs and scripts, about which far more ambiguity could be desired), I feel that I must take extra precautions not to be seen as (excess of signification) trying to endear the CEO to me through overly zealous volunteer work, through a sort of Freudian sexualization of everything, even though this has never been my intention. Even when it is not my intention, psychoanalysis licenses everyone to suspect subconscious intentions. Foucault railed against this, Dreyfus and Rabinow reading it in his work as “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (Michel Foucault: Beyond Structualism and Hermeneutics). All society believes it is pursuing the truth through these overbearing glosses on everything, through which they become all the more weighty, but it is all the more a production of truth, and of truth-effects. A great deal of my effort appears necessarily directed toward objectives of impression management, so much so that the actual work, the impression of which is ever to be managed (of which this essay is even part of that management), despairs of eventual completion. And this is only one “fold” in a veritable thicket of binds and double-binds.
And who hasn’t struggled with the sorts of ambiguities of desire, of their failure to fit a socially intelligible form? Among heterosexuals, affection is a precursor to penis-vagina fucking, the “quintessential male quest.” I’ve found in myself a longing for aim-inhibited sex, itself a term from psychiatry, identified and pathologized as a form of deviance, precisely as a tool with which to subvert this overbearing, noxious and offensive syntagmatic force (but at the same time honored, as in the polymorphous perversity of Freud). The urge is so irresistible to “complete,” as it were, “the sentence,” (with its proper punctilious puncture/punctuation) that resisting it, deflecting it, subverting it, becomes the whole of desire (while I also wish to remain mindful of the sort of reversal it went through in Tolstoy’s lamentable treatment of his wife).
I close with the newspaper article, lying open on a table at Pirate Cat. A man had been sentenced to death for the senseless killing of two innocent people. He conducted his own defense, and cracked jokes all the while. The jury took just 45 minutes to condemn him. The article took turns with the people it quoted, to comment on the monsterousness of this man, in both his acts and his accounts thereof. There needn’t have been any mention of mental illness, of moral decrepitude as such, of deviance, because it was so everywhere apparent that no psychiatrist would, I imagine, be able to do substantially more than point out the obvious. (And none were needed, as no pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI), incompetent to stand trial (IST) nor guilty but mentally ill (GBMI) were entered.)
Looking more closely, however, one sees something more than the morbid fascination with the truly bizarre and the condemnation of heinous acts. And let me say here that the ludic purveyors of hyperbolic assignation love more than anything to attack their opposition from a moral angle. To be sure, something horrible happens when a life is lost. And those who disparage the heaviness of excessive meaning are soon portrayed as making light of a situation that deserves its gravity. We are accused of lacking a moral compass. But this is only another incidence of excess of signification. The feeling of emptiness at the pit of the stomach, the crushing weight of anguish, the sorrow of loss, is no sooner felt than it is wrapped tight in words, in terms and signification, in significance and meaning, and propelled, like a football, into the end zone of whatever cause it is made to serve. Yes, there is a solution, we are told. There is an action which will, if not make it better, allow us to forget it, consoled by the thought that something can be done in order not to feel it again. And so even our own capacity to mourn is turned against us. And the very process by which conservativism arouses moral condemnation into a call for action becomes exemplary of that absence of a moral compass which was the cause with which it began. This is to say, it is never absent, but easily covered over and hidden, misused, and co-opted, and that is precisely the problem.
There is a sense in which the joke is on us. The newspaper tells us that the man joked as he described slaughtering these people, which he did because they were “evil.” There is a way in which his act of murder was itself a joke. He labeled these people as evil for reasons not apparent in the article. Let us assume, only for the sake of argument, that they were invalid. It seems safe to assume that they, too, were jokes. You did X innocent act (the article mentions permissiveness with children). Ergo, you are evil. Ergo, I kill you. It is sort of a sarcastic remark on excesses of signification that take place every day, as part of the necessary functioning of mainstream, i.e. straight, society. I.e. the War in Iraq: You are a patriotic resident of a rogue state, who fights against us in our occupation of your country. Ergo, you are evil. Ergo, we kill you. Yes, this situation is very different, in which American soldiers are being shot at. However, our entire reason for being there is an example of excesses of signification. For example, we are ostensibly there in order to topple a dictator, because democracy is worth doing that. It begins to sound like the ravings of an hysteric, it is so far divorced from reality. For example, a political scientist recently associated democracy with increased violence, as the losing groups struggle to prevail where the ballot box thwarted them. And I have written elsewhere about problems with democracy. Getting back to the murder, it can be seen as a sort of ludic commentary on our own ludic practices, itself also an example of them. It is as if this man had given up trying to hold his own against a ludic society. And so, it is as if he finally joined us in our excesses, something he could only do by mocking us in the very worst possible way, that is, by imitating us.
What is “excess of signification”? Agamben is talking about that process of interpretation whereby this or that comes to have a huge meaning and significance, way out of proportion with what we can call “the reality” and he calls the denotation. It’s about the way that a man looking at a picture of a fully-clothed child playing on a swing is considered an act of pedophilia if the man is considered a pedophile. It’s about the way that people who find children attractive or arousing are lumped together with criminals, far more rare, who rape and kill children. It’s about cognitive errors, such as the way that the acts of mentally ill criminals always making the papers causes us to associate dangerousness with mental illness far in excess of actual propensity for violence. It’s about the craziness and hysteria of society to prefer simple and easy associations to the complicated and ambiguous truth. It’s about assigning a weighty and overbearing “meaning” to this or that innocent fact. It’s about, also, those congealed meanings hidden in and by everyday terms, like “straight” is hidden in “man” and “woman.”
I was listening to a comedian last night at Pirate Cat Radio make fun of the usual arguments of anti-gay inactivists, that men and women biologically fit together, that such unions are natural, etc. I won’t repeat his response, out of respect for his comedic material. There’s plenty wrong with those arguments, but the horrible truth is that men and women do “fit together” socially, a lot better than other couplings. I do not need to remind anyone of the huge cultural edifice that supports and enables heterosexual unions. Heterosexuality is cultural entropy. If you don’t make any effort to resist, it will be assumed that you’re straight, you’ll get shoe-horned into a straight relationship, and before you know it you’ll be married, with children. Great efforts will be made to support your union, to which you will be expected to contribute. Money and status will tend to be be heaped upon you, if you are white and upper-middle-class, to egg you on. It’s like falling off a log.
I also don’t need to mention the importance of conventional sex roles in this process. You will be told, though never explicitly, what to do, think, feel, desire, etc. As an obscure 70’s rock band put it, “Welcome to the machine.” And these messages will be not only dichotomous but opposite and complimentary, depending on your gender.
Meanwhile, left behind somewhere in the darkness, are the realities of the situation: the reality, documented by the very mainstream Hite report, that around 60% of all women are not orgasmic about (i.e. don’t really like) penis-vagina fucking. They’ve learned to fake the orgasms just like they fake 90% of everything else that passes for appropriate female behavior, to keep the family together, to support the father in his efforts to materially support the family, for the children, for their parents, etc., etc. And that’s not to say that maleness has an enormous pricetag of its own, in the form of loneliness (your intimate partner – your only real friend – tells you almost nothing but lies), overwork, associated health problems, etc., all that orgasmic penis-vagina fucking notwithstanding.
It’s not as simple as just choosing to be gay as an act of resistance. I don’t need to remind anyone of the punishment that awaits those who deviate, that is advertised every day in the nation’s newspapers, but I’d like to point out the subtle, deep, and treacherous ice that lies beneath the surface, as opposed to those comparatively distant, ostensible and visible tips of the icebergs. For instance, we’d all like to think that the therapists are on our side. We want to believe that pathologizing homosexuality was just an epiphenomenon, an anomaly, the hallmark of a bygone era. Who would want to raise that ugly issue again? But look a little more closely. Austen-Riggs, a swank, east-coast psychoanalytically-based mental hospital, touts the restoration of meaning to human lives, as its cornerstone. We’re right back to Agamben, with his “excess of signification” that was at the start of this whole mess. In the very etiology of schizophrenia, “ego-weakness” is at the core. What is ego-weakness? It’s weakness of interpretation. In other words, “weakness” in the assignation of meaning. “Weakness” in exactly those excesses of signification that are the problem. The message is clear: If you won’t play the game – i.e., if you won’t whitewash a complicated, ambiguous reality with a ready and easy (and ultimately dismissive) interpretation – then get off of the field (stand in the nut box over there), because you’re in the way of those of us who will.
Psychiatry has been criticized for this over and over again. Jacques Lacan, famous critic of psychoanalysis now revered equally with its founders, but also grouped with Lévi-Strauss under the aegis of structualism, was conscious of the part played by meaning, or “excesses of signification” in the “sickness” of his patients. The patient confronts an overwhelming weight of cultural and societal meaning, he wrote, amongst which her own voice is very easily lost. The job of the analyst is to restore and strengthen that voice. But this project ends up subverting itself. The patient must use the language passed onto her by society, and ultimately this amounts to affirming the patrifamilialism which generated the language (per the groundbreaking work of ueber-structualist Lévi-Strauss), the system of meanings, to perpetuate itself. If the ideal of recovery is ready assignation of societal meanings, then a toll must be paid to the origin of those meanings outside the patient. Ultimately, this amounts to constraining one’s possibilities to a contrived deviancy, a parsimonious, provisional deviation.
The signs of gayness-as-provisional deviation are upon us. A month or two ago, on Swirl, a queer radio show on KGRN 960 AM, the host condemned bestiality as unacceptable, as a whole. Here, we have a prime example of a lumping-together and disparagement of entire realms of human and nonhuman interaction and behavior into a single block, that is summarily dismissed, the very hallmark of the “excess of signification” that is our topic. It sounded eerily familiar. It sounded just like a right-wing talk show bashing homosexuality might sound, by identifying it with promiscuity and moral decay, except that some of the words had been changed. Astonished I was to learn that the very passages in Leviticus that condemn homosexuality also condemn bestiality in the same breath, with the same tone, on adjacent lines. Ironic, it seems, that anyone would put themselves on a more moralistic and moralizing ground than Leviticus, at the level of a sort of hyper-bible, more biblical than the mere bible. For that is what one needs to do in order to say that one line of Leviticus represents true morality, morality accurately judged, and that the very next one represents error, folly, mistake, etc., i.e. deviation. I.e. that the bible itself is deviant when compared to a sort of ueber-bible, a hypermorality. Is it possible to pick and choose certain lines of the bible, and not others? Isn’t one open to the charge that one is just using the bible where it supports one’s position and condemning it where it isn’t? Much more seriously, isn’t one affirming the whole biblical project when one should be critical of it? Isn’t the better part of wisdom to criticize the entire bible, as it were, from below? As a moralistic and moralizing system? And look at how that system works and supports meanings and consequent oppression? (This work has been undertaken with interesting results by Eileen Scarry in The Body in Pain.)
Looking over past decades, there seems to be a pattern and a danger. It is as if there were a fixed quantity of moral opprobrium, and all that has changed is its distribution. After the feminist 80’s and the gay 90’s, we are left with greater liberties for women and the LGBT community, but apparently at a cost. “The family”, whether gay or straight, is upheld with still greater energy than before. Psychiatry is posing ever-more-exacting limits on what is acceptable. Psychiatric drugs are selling in amounts vastly in excess of historical norms, such that one in five women in the United States is now taking them. Antipsychotics alone are now a $17B/year industry, with rampant, double-digit growth. It’s as if, complimentary backsliding taken into account, we haven’t gained anything at all. It’s as if, in order to move gayness closer to acceptability, we’ve had to cut ties and distance ourselves greatly from all other forms of deviance, such as mental illness, such as bestiality, etc. In order to make gayness not only acceptable but respectable, clean of all untoward associations, it now must disparage moral scum. It’s like the kid who, previously accepting of gender-ambiguous peers, learns that gay-bashing will gain him acceptance and popularity in an exclusive group, learns to do it. (More sinisterly, he may learn to do it in order to survive, i.e. not get beaten to a pulp for his own, other form of deviance.) Now, as gays wanting to be accepted in mainstream society, we are learning to bash bestiality, bash mental illness, bash all kinds of things, for the acceptance that may be tendered to us as a reward. Yes, we will eventually be able to marry, etc., but how will we live with the lingering possibility that it may only be because enough straight people witnessed our bashing of bestiality, etc., on Swirl and other forums of GLBT community, that they allowed us to join the club? And how much more intense will the oppression of bestiophiles, et al., be as a result? We will get our liberation, I am confident, but I shudder at the cost.
We all know the sticks with which we are beaten to accept these stories, these “excesses of signification.” Just as the woman who visits a women’s health clinic is identified, through some ludic, hyperbolic, and irresponsible process, with a perpetrator of infanticide, schizophrenics are identified, i.e. in David Harvey’s otherwise-commendable The Condition of Postmodernity, with a man who baked his children into charcoal with an industrial metallurgy ladle. Ironically, this wasn’t done just to condemn the mentally ill (i.e. those who wish to “remain” mentally ill through their resistance to treatment), which would only have been comparable to the ludic identification of millions of women with a handful of freak infant killers. No, Harvey went even farther. This was done to condemn the work of Deleuze and Guattari, prominent postmodernists, who were critics of the very “excesses of signification” in psychoanalysis, ergo critics of psychiatry, ergo letting the mad run in the streets, ergo allowing this one of them to do an act so bizarre that it threatens to escape condemnation for all of its strangeness. Ergo, ergo, ergo = excess of signification. D & G now have a significance they lacked before, ironic because the very process they criticized so well had been used against them so skilllessly. And so we have also The Insanity Offense by E. Fuller Torrey, who has created a nonprofit from which he draws a six-figure salary, whose main occupation seems to be the collection of newspaper clippings of every mental-health-related violent offense in the country in order to create a veritable avalanche of signification upon anyone who would dare oppose psychiatric authority and the gargantuan psychopharmaceutical industry that accompanies it. Much can be said about that, but I will wait for a more opportune moment. And of course, there’s 9/11. Those people were undoubtedly crazy as well. Of course, no reasonable person can condone terrorist acts, and so a loss of unnecessary civil liberties is entirely warranted. Excess of signification once again, and incidentally very close to the topic of Agamben’s book.
I needn’t mention all the ways that gay society has been criticized for borrowing from straight society. What else are we to do? And so, instead of fucking vaginas, we fuck anuses. The same lack of imagination bemoaned in Adnrea Dworkin’s Intercourse applies, and much that follows it. We are allowed this modicum of deviance, but don’t forget to take your meds. Don’t forget to attend twelve-step meetings, and psychotherapy, in order to deal with your oppression and make sure it doesn’t manifest into neurosis. Yes, you now require extra scrutiny. But the same “excess of signification” is at work. All the cultural baggage, the fucking as result-oriented, orgasm-centered, genitally-focused sex, the masculinity, the striving for symbols of conventional success, is still there. We’ve just interchanged one term in the system. In a sense, we have to limit ourselves to this, in order to make our deviance intelligible. “Gay” signifies this very specific substitution. Everything is the same, except for the gender of one party. And we work for a world in which this is in fact true, in the name of equality. But how many other forms of deviance are possible, and desirable, and what are their cost? What if we could sacrifice intelligibility?
Myself, I struggle with these excesses of signification every day. I attempt to do volunteer work for a nonprofit. I say “attempt” because they do not direct my work. I would welcome such direction, within certain limits, but precisely those limits set everything off from their possible direction, because the work I do is scientific. So it is up to me to sell the value of my work by example. I do substantial work through a kind of “hit-or-miss” approach, hoping that I will hit upon something that strikes their fancy. But actually, it is only the CEO of this organization with whom I have dealings. In order to minimize the feeling they may have of being “shown up” in some way (excess of signification), I have had to cut all other ties with the organization, even though it was never my objective to diminish or incapacitate anyone through my work. Even so, I face formidable difficulties. My work seldom even engenders a reply. Lacking a sexual partner (itself something of a calcified role with tiresome programs and scripts, about which far more ambiguity could be desired), I feel that I must take extra precautions not to be seen as (excess of signification) trying to endear the CEO to me through overly zealous volunteer work, through a sort of Freudian sexualization of everything, even though this has never been my intention. Even when it is not my intention, psychoanalysis licenses everyone to suspect subconscious intentions. Foucault railed against this, Dreyfus and Rabinow reading it in his work as “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (Michel Foucault: Beyond Structualism and Hermeneutics). All society believes it is pursuing the truth through these overbearing glosses on everything, through which they become all the more weighty, but it is all the more a production of truth, and of truth-effects. A great deal of my effort appears necessarily directed toward objectives of impression management, so much so that the actual work, the impression of which is ever to be managed (of which this essay is even part of that management), despairs of eventual completion. And this is only one “fold” in a veritable thicket of binds and double-binds.
And who hasn’t struggled with the sorts of ambiguities of desire, of their failure to fit a socially intelligible form? Among heterosexuals, affection is a precursor to penis-vagina fucking, the “quintessential male quest.” I’ve found in myself a longing for aim-inhibited sex, itself a term from psychiatry, identified and pathologized as a form of deviance, precisely as a tool with which to subvert this overbearing, noxious and offensive syntagmatic force (but at the same time honored, as in the polymorphous perversity of Freud). The urge is so irresistible to “complete,” as it were, “the sentence,” (with its proper punctilious puncture/punctuation) that resisting it, deflecting it, subverting it, becomes the whole of desire (while I also wish to remain mindful of the sort of reversal it went through in Tolstoy’s lamentable treatment of his wife).
I close with the newspaper article, lying open on a table at Pirate Cat. A man had been sentenced to death for the senseless killing of two innocent people. He conducted his own defense, and cracked jokes all the while. The jury took just 45 minutes to condemn him. The article took turns with the people it quoted, to comment on the monsterousness of this man, in both his acts and his accounts thereof. There needn’t have been any mention of mental illness, of moral decrepitude as such, of deviance, because it was so everywhere apparent that no psychiatrist would, I imagine, be able to do substantially more than point out the obvious. (And none were needed, as no pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI), incompetent to stand trial (IST) nor guilty but mentally ill (GBMI) were entered.)
Looking more closely, however, one sees something more than the morbid fascination with the truly bizarre and the condemnation of heinous acts. And let me say here that the ludic purveyors of hyperbolic assignation love more than anything to attack their opposition from a moral angle. To be sure, something horrible happens when a life is lost. And those who disparage the heaviness of excessive meaning are soon portrayed as making light of a situation that deserves its gravity. We are accused of lacking a moral compass. But this is only another incidence of excess of signification. The feeling of emptiness at the pit of the stomach, the crushing weight of anguish, the sorrow of loss, is no sooner felt than it is wrapped tight in words, in terms and signification, in significance and meaning, and propelled, like a football, into the end zone of whatever cause it is made to serve. Yes, there is a solution, we are told. There is an action which will, if not make it better, allow us to forget it, consoled by the thought that something can be done in order not to feel it again. And so even our own capacity to mourn is turned against us. And the very process by which conservativism arouses moral condemnation into a call for action becomes exemplary of that absence of a moral compass which was the cause with which it began. This is to say, it is never absent, but easily covered over and hidden, misused, and co-opted, and that is precisely the problem.
There is a sense in which the joke is on us. The newspaper tells us that the man joked as he described slaughtering these people, which he did because they were “evil.” There is a way in which his act of murder was itself a joke. He labeled these people as evil for reasons not apparent in the article. Let us assume, only for the sake of argument, that they were invalid. It seems safe to assume that they, too, were jokes. You did X innocent act (the article mentions permissiveness with children). Ergo, you are evil. Ergo, I kill you. It is sort of a sarcastic remark on excesses of signification that take place every day, as part of the necessary functioning of mainstream, i.e. straight, society. I.e. the War in Iraq: You are a patriotic resident of a rogue state, who fights against us in our occupation of your country. Ergo, you are evil. Ergo, we kill you. Yes, this situation is very different, in which American soldiers are being shot at. However, our entire reason for being there is an example of excesses of signification. For example, we are ostensibly there in order to topple a dictator, because democracy is worth doing that. It begins to sound like the ravings of an hysteric, it is so far divorced from reality. For example, a political scientist recently associated democracy with increased violence, as the losing groups struggle to prevail where the ballot box thwarted them. And I have written elsewhere about problems with democracy. Getting back to the murder, it can be seen as a sort of ludic commentary on our own ludic practices, itself also an example of them. It is as if this man had given up trying to hold his own against a ludic society. And so, it is as if he finally joined us in our excesses, something he could only do by mocking us in the very worst possible way, that is, by imitating us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)