Antagonism

Brainstorming the antagonism

There is an identity marker overflowing with negative identification. Objet z, but a kind of reverse objet a.
It is a master-signifier. This means:
1) that its meaning has been overdetermined (in the case of ‘liberal’ as the object of hate). Where language is a relational system in which its position determines any term’s meaning, the master-signifier is different in that it is pure position. It is purely functional and not semantic at all.
2) it forms a role of unifying a field of discourse. Articulated (linked) to other terms it fixes their meaning as well as stabilising the discursive space between them. It ‘evacuates the lack’, bringing fullness to meaning
‘Liberal’ has become an epithet meaning value-free, rootless, elitist, relativist, dangerously progressive, contemptful of tradition. This has become a master-signifier, one that, rather than having its meaning determined by other terms, has a fixed meaning. In the insurgent imaginary, its meaning is
Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and countless smaller conservative outlets have constantly painted climate change as a liberal indulgence. Example. The cumulative effect of these micro-articulations is that at the macro-level climate has been linked to ‘liberal’ master-signifier.  
We need to meditate more on negative affect accruing to the negative master-signifier. We can convince non-Lacanians of it through plenty of examples.
We tend to think that our conceptions of the things we are close to are neutral. But they are actually imbued with a positive slant that is probably undeserved. As if to insulate ourselves from self-doubt, we are constantly refreshing this positivity, constantly affirming the goodness of who we are at all levels. The most powerful way to do this is negatively. We affirm our personal goodness every time we shame somebody else’s actions as indecent, inconsiderate, etc. We affirm our family’s goodness whenever we celebrate a family birthday. We affirm the Good of our social class whenever we engage in political discussion about welfare bums and the victim mentality (or bourgieous morality, capitalist parasites or victim-blaming). We affirm the good of our nation not only in banal actions (banal nationalism, Billig) but through micro-racism, micro-jingoism, and so on.
The negative master-signifier accrues the inverse of our narcissism.

Now think about the cross-over epistemology that happens here.
There is affect even in all of our so-called neutral beliefs. Indeed, any durable belief is held together by affective glue. It is not just that climate is a hoax. It’s a hoax because I hate liberals.Affective rationality.
Reason is affective because affects help prioritise articulations. Thought is time-bound, processual, and therefore any articulation that actually occurs does so at the expense of all the other possible articulations. (More genearlly, language is time-bound, processual, and therefore any occuring articulation does so at the expense of all other possible articulations).
Thought takes from affect its neurological buttressing, while affect takes from thought its spacing.
While thought is spatial-relational, affect is topological, hydraulic.
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The tectonic discursive shifts of the past four decades

The reason everybody was so surprised at the election of Trump was that they hadn't noticed that, under their noses for four decades, the right-wing propaganda campaign was laying the groundwork. Fox News is only the most prominent today, but Rush Limbaugh is arguably the centrepiece of it. And then there are the links to the Republican Party itself. And then there is the demonisation of any dissenting views - the 'poisoning the well' aimed at the 'mainstream media' or 'liberal media'. What you have here is a direct route going from Party to media to the public.

It is difficult to quantify how the right-wing media has shifted the national mood because not everything felt can be empirically analysed. It comes in the form of underlying narratives, interpretive frames, rather than outright speech. It's meta-narrative is that conservatives are virtuous and liberals are evil and want to destroy America. This colours the interpretation of words more than it changes actual words' meanings. Yet it has, for instance, in turning 'liberal' itself into a pejorative. And even where it is speech, its home is the barroom conversations rather than the press.

But this does not mean it's not happening. Far from it. It has been happening for nearly 40 years and the election of Trump is proof that it has been effective.

As a human being, I'm deeply disturbed. As a social scientist, I wish I had the methodological tools to analyse broad-sweep interpretive shifts in the public.

Discourse and mindfulness

Discourse theory can offer a nice explanation of what is going on in mindfulness. First, though, a disclaimer: I owe my understanding of mindfulness to Eckhardt Tolle's The Power of Now - a work that offered me solace and helpful tools for dealing with an acutely painful breakup over 10 years ago, as well as a couple of books by Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn that I read years earlier. So I'm not offering a comprehensive analysis of mindfulness (even if there were a comprehensive thing called mindfulness).

Mindfulness is a spiritual, or at least psychological practice, in the way most people understand it. It's not verbal - in fact it's about quieting the mind. It's not social. If anything it's deeply psychologistic. So what could discourse theory possibly have to say about mindfulness?

Quite a lot, actually.

As I understand it, to be mindful is to be aware of the present externally and internally. To be observing without judging. The mindful state is one in which thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and the environment are simply observed without being indulged. You create a quiet, still place in your head that is separate to what is going on externally, and in your mind. It simply watches, silently.

Thoughts that normally drag you hither and thither are nullified, as are external irritants, whether that's the neighbour's dog, the inconsiderate housemate, or the despicable abuses of the Israeli state. They lose their power over you.

There's empirical evidence that mindfulness reduces stress, anxiety and depression. I've found it helps win back a sense of control.

So what is really going on with mindfulness?

I believe the main thing going on is that you are investing in a new subject position, one that stands at some remove from what we often think of as our conscious minds, i.e. the flow of thoughts, sensations, experiences.

You are disidentifying with the Cartesian cogito, the I think therefore I am. But you are re-identifying with the I observe myself thinking therefore I am. You're creating a new subject, one less affected - while still aware of - by the flow of inner and and outer sensations.

So what you are doing is augmenting your usual sense of self with an additional one - and whenever you practice mindfulness, you're shifting into, investing into, the additional subject position.

Now, this is quite apart from the other issues a lot of leftists have with mindfulness and its Buddhist origins. It preaches acceptance of unjust social arrangements, it teaches you to detach from your passions. Yet, in my opinion, mindfulness is a corrective rather than an absolute doctrine. It's a psychological (or, discursive!) tool to have in your kit. Especially if, like me, you're prone to stress, anxiety, insomnia and frequently find yourself overloaded.

I'm sure there's other things discourse theory can say about mindfulness. But that'll have to wait for another time.

Autism Spectrum Discourse (ASD)

I’ve been exploring the possibility that I am on the autism spectrum. It’s something that came out of the blue, in a discussion with a close friend about her break-up, and the trouble her boyfriend had in relating to her on a human level. His lack of empathy, in particular. We fancifully speculated that the Jewish relation to autism is marked because of circumcision. And that, later, led me down the rabbit-hole of investigation to see if there was any truth to it.

Turns out there is a paper or two claiming a relation. But there are many opponents of those studies. Yet in all my investigations I came to find more and more signs that I may well be on the spectrum myself. While I had investigated previously, I think I had dismissed the likelihood because I am clearly not a low-functioning autistic person. I’ve never had the need to be cared for or have somebody handle some of my basic life functions. That said, I have struggled with many things.

The most crucial grounds for believing I may be on the spectrum is that in my teens and 20s, especially, I undertook massive self-directed study into how to become more social. I was a an uber-nerd pre-puberty, with computer programming, astronomy, and music composition my prime interests. I wouldn’t read fiction, seeing it as a waste of valuable time that could be spent learning about ‘the world’.

Later, turning to graduate studies, it was cultural studies and especially semiotics that captured my imagination. Through these fields I believed, with great excitement, that I had discovered a vast and valuable key that could unlock the mysteries of the social world. I literally believed I now had tools to access the ‘hidden codes’ that govern the world of meaning – and thus of the social. Structuralism appears ready-made for autistics, as it is an advanced intellectual way of processing what for many people is learned intuitively: the norms of the social-emotional.

And I distinctly modelled myself on individuals who were at ease, and successful, in the social world. This has helped me a great deal. To most people I apparently seem very at ease myself in the social world. Even the world of small-talk and around the more elusive codes of social interaction. I may even have developed a certain charm.

Yet all is not as it seems, perhaps. And underneath, the cost of this is that often I don’t really know how I feel or what I really think about something. I may show great empathy, but how much of this is authentic, and how much is an act because I believe, more intellectually than affectively, that the other person is owed empathy. I do it not spontaneously, but because to not do it would challenge my own self-belief as a socially successful person.

I will write more about this at a later point. Suffice to say, I am ‘dialectically’ interpreting my possible relationship to autism. That is, while I have become utterly convinced that I am an adult with high-functioning autism or what used to be known as Asperger’s, I am continually subjecting that interpretation to scrutiny.

The trickiest part about the interpretation or diagnosis is that it is a spectrum, and not exactly a linear spectrum either. There are no signature symptoms unique to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A diagnosis, according to Tony Attwood, is approached by identifying a significant number of symptoms from a wide range. And while it may be genetic, with around 50% of direct family members being affected, not all family members have the same symptoms. They might have very different diagnostic profiles, yet it makes sense. Diagnosing an individual is a family-resemblance (of symptoms) and also involves a family-resemblance cross-checking with other members of that individual’s family. So it’s clear how easy it could be to make a premature diagnosis. Just as it’s clear how easy it might be to miss a diagnosis (as Tony Attwood did with his own son).

Upon becoming convinced I am on the spectrum, I became energised profoundly. It made just so much sense. But also, it relieved me of a lot of self-imposed guilt. It showed me that my failings are not moral, but neurological. In discursive terms, I was developing a new discourse of self-identity that offered a new subject position.

This is always going to be an affectively intense process. Stepping into the ASD discourse energises me because it offers a new explanation/understanding of who I am, where I’ve come from, and where I’m going. It articulates my identity, my subject-position, in a new way. Especially compared to the former way. So, it stops seeing me as lazy and weak-willed and hedonistic, and re-articulates my challenges as medical rather than moral. It offers hope. It comes with a new objet z (a new blocking element) which is the disorder itself (as well as my ignorance of my affliction). In turn, it offers a new objet a (the captivating object of desire blocked by the objet z).  [These terms are adopted from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan].

Here, then, is an account of my normal discourse of self-identity, and then the emergent Asperger's discourse:

Discourse 1 

I am a talented genius, underachiever due to drug and alcohol use. I have discovered exciting discourse theories and my analyses can help propel progressive movements. I will be successful, but I am saddled by guilt for underachieving. Success is defined as recognition, international travel, transcendence, social esteem and sexual/romantic fulfilment. There is – or has been – a puritanical vision of a healthy, sober me. The vision is oriented around a ‘return’ to the blessed, pure, innocent young kid I was. Everything would change if I could only give up the weekend binges. Which I simultaneously will - it's inevitable - but cannot. This narrative structure is classic objet a: you'll inevitably return to the primordial fullness but cannot.

The primary affects here are guilt but also a manic thrill when feeling confident. It's not avoidance that sends me to the bottle. It's celebration. It's my brimming confidence that I am indeed on the path to realising my vision.

The fantasy at the heart of the discourse is that the world will be changed entirely by my contribution. I may have been placed here by God. My life is necessary.

The ontological ground of this discourse is personal, spiritual journey.

Discourse 2 

I am talented, but it is an Asperger’s talent. That is, a talent for non-social and the unambiguous. My sense of contribution and talent has been an arrogance and fantasy based way of coping with my ASD way of feeling different, not fitting in, not being recognised in the way I should be. Drugs have been a way of making socialising easier, managing anxiety, and are a symptom of ASD. They do hold me back, but they are not my primary blocker. They are a response to my primary blocker, the objet z of this discourse: the cognitive and emotional traits associated with ASD. My objet a in this discourse is not just achieving career success (now that I've worked out what's been holding me back), but full health and a vibrant social life too. I need to incorporate my ASD self with my modelled self, and find a fruitful blend.

Primary affects in Discourse 2 are stabilisation and renewed hope.

The fantasy of this discourse is one of total reconciliation, but especially reconciliation of identity, self-recognition. Total vision. Total identity. No more vague or slippery sense of who I am. The Asperger's knowledge, combined with my existing self-understanding, produces total self-enlightenment.

The ontological ground of this discourse is neuroscience and psychology: it it the very material brain (my brain, an Asperger's brain) that undergirds these assertions.

The issue is: this isn't simply the choosing of a new identity, like one might choose a new outfit. One does not simply step into it; one invests deeply in it. It is cathexis. It is, as Laclau and Mouffe contend, a decision in an undecidable space. There is no reason why the new subjectivity is the right one, but the affective investment is more driven by the failure of the present subjectivity. The present self-discourse is no longer functional - either epistemologically or normatively. It either doesn't explain the present or programatise the future in a way that allows affective circuits to flow through the body in a functional way.

The affective drive towards the new identification is a drive away from the unsatisfactory old identification. In my case, that is due to the frustration I've had not being able to break the cycle of addiction, and the growing signs that this is profoundly holding back my career.

Can this new identity, and the strategies and practices that flow from it prove productive?

I hope so. More to come.... 

Phantasmagoria: Structures of Signification

You arrive back from an extended stay in a non-Western location and the West shouts at you with its postmodern nothingness. All the signs and the intricate conventions surrounding countless little practices seem so contrived and pointless. You think about it and much later you realise that your exposure to a more modern world in China has heightened your awareness of the fragility and brittleness and ultimate meaninglessness that is Western society.

Then you remember that the world is always a world of signs, distinct yet intertwined with the world of nature. And the shallowness in the Western world is only apparent to you because you have, through your absence, extracted yourself from the system of reinforced signifiers that create the phantasmagoria which structure much of the Western sign world. Were it not for the effective operation of these phantasmagoria, the Western world would always appear as shallow as it appears to you now.

Phantasmagoria rely on the structuring principle of absence, which is continually deferred fulfillment. That is to say, phantasmagoria offer a duel promise.
First, the specific promise of the phantasmagoria, which is a phantastic, intense, compressed state - of sexiness, of exotica, of coolness, of bourgeois satisfaction, etc.
Second, the more general promise that there is more. There is something beyond. There is something. There is a thing. That thing is the Other, and it can never be claimed or reconciled or arrived at.

Somewhat paradoxically, this is what in fact enables us to believe that there is a meaningful world, there is a real world, a world worth living for. And it is like a fairy-tale that we believe in mostly because others believe in it. Indeed, it is made real by others gesturing towards it.
They participate in the semiotic economy around a phantasmagorical subsystem and that subsystem becomes real, just as any slice of social reality (money, love, God etc) is made real purely by acting as if it is real.

One might say that phantasmagoria collectively form a cultural substratum responsible for social stability. They may not be real, but in acting as if they are we make them real. They are so powerful as well as so elusive that they rule us and they are beyond reproach and beyond attack.

It is quite easy to forget in the importance, the practical importance of phantasmagoria, if it is not repeated, reinforced at regular intervals. That is why such signifieds are not in fact the product of an individual psyche, but rather of a social network of semiotic relations.

The economy of signs can be conceived of as a weather system, similar in structure to the synoptic charts of atmospheric pressure meteorologists employ. Such a structure, or system, is composed of sub-systems which the meteorologist calls high- and low-pressure systems. These systems are not the weather itself, but rather the pattern of forces which produces the weather.
Likewise, the phantasmagoria and are not signs in themselves, but structuring principles of absence. They are not semiotic destinations to be arrived at, but forces acting upon, guiding the flow of meaning. They promise a destination, yet that destination is never arrived at and the effect is instead continual differment and deferment: differance.

Important phantasamagoria in contemporary Western culture include:

'Cool'
James Dean, Coke, the Fonz, self-satisfaction, desirability, power, control, contentment, extremely solid sense of self and place in reality.

'Malboro Man'
We call him ‘Malboro Man’ now, but part of the explanation for the massive success of Malboro is the way the brand’s marketing harnesses the phantasm of the rugged, independent pioneer spirit which birthed America.

'Working Class'
Springsteen, Jimmy Barnes, overalls, sweat, machines, factories, honour, comaraderie, ‘salt of the earth’. Blue denim. Blue-collar. Westies.

'The Ocean'
Fish, freshness, cleanliness, wildness, sea creatures, fresh air, mystery, primordiality, goodness, Nature, naturalness.

'The City'
The best of everything, the newest, activity, dynamicism, busy-ness, centre, ‘where it’s at’, pinnacle of human achievement.

'The Journalist'
Honour, integrity, truth, the word. Record. History, public service, noble occupation. The scribe, the truth seeker. The vigilence and public service of the New York Times.