“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.