>Maybe this will help: "Today a radical change has happened in the subject's
>identification with the symbolic order, the so-called big Other. In
>postmodern
>society, people no longer belive in the fiction of the big Other as they
>did in
>modern or pre-modern society. But disbelief in the big Other does not simply
>bring liberation for the subject; it also triggers regression into various
>forms of violence... these practices... [are] in accordance with the idea
>that
>today everything is changeable and that life resembles a computer screen on
>which the subject can randomly choose his or her identity... The return to
>[violence] is to be understood as a specific way in which the contemporary
>subject deals with his or her lack, as will as with the lack in the Other...
>[as] a symptom of the radical change that has affected subjectivity." -
>Renata
>Salecl, (Per)Versions of Love and Hate [from the intro].
disbelief in big Others seems to me like a fundamentally good thing what on earth is the 'return to violence'? was i blinking while we weren't violent?
>"Both modernism and postmodernism conceive of interpretation as inherent
>to its
>object: without it we do not have access to the work of art - the traditional
>paradise where, irrespective of his/her versatility in the artifice of
>interpreting, everybody can enjoy the work of art, is irreparably lost. The
>break between modernism and postmodernism is thus to be located within this
>inherent relationship between the text and its commentary. A modernist
>work of
>art is by definition 'incomprensible' - it functions as a shock, as the
>irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily
>routine and
>resists being integrated into the symbolic universe of the prevailing
>ideology;
>thereupon, after this first encounter, interpretation enters the stage and
>enables us to integrate this shock - it informs us, say, that this trauma
>registers and points towards the shocking depravity of our very 'normal'
>everday lives... In this sense, interpretaiton is the conclusive moment of
>the
>very act of reception... What postmodernism does, however, is the very
>opposite: its objects par excellence are products with a distinctive mass
>appeal (films like Blade Runner, Terminator or Blue Velvet) - it is for the
>interpreter to detect in them an exemplification of the most esoteric
>theoretical finesses of Lacan, Derrida or Foucault. If, then, the pleasure of
>the modernist interpretation consists in the effect of recognition which
>'gentrifies' the disquieting uncanniness of its object ('Aha, now I see the
>point of this apparent mess!'), the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to
>estrange its very initial homeliness: 'You think what you see is a simple
>melodrama even your senile granny would have no difficulties in following?
>Yet
>without taking into account ... / the difference bewteen sytmptom and
>sinthom;
>the structure of the Borromean knot; the fact that Woman is one of the
>Names-of-the-Father; etc., etc./ you've totally missed the point!" - Slavoj
>Zizek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid
>to ask
>Hitchcock) [intro].
I recall the general sense of the quote from the Lacan book, and I have no problem with it at all -- it's a very useful mode of distinguishing between certain forms of modernist and postmodernist art (although I want to qualify that the shock of modernist art can certainly also be popular, such as the flapper novels and films, or cinema more or less in general, or cars). Nevertheless I agree about the difference of interpretative imperative. But what does this have to do with claims that in 'postmodern society' people 'feel/think' in such and such ways. Nor do I really get how this meshes with the 'radical evil' thesis at all. What do they have to do with each other? I gather your answer is something like the following:
>Basically, postmodernism, for Zizek (and Salecl) consists not in
>demonstrating
>that a "game" works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a
>central abscence, but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing
>it to
>make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary chracter... so the pomo
>version
>is the 'high-tech' The Haunting where the special f/x are plastered all over
>the place. There is nothing to fear - we see it all! Contrast this with the
>b&w version, were there is everything to fear, because we see nothing! In
>short, postmodernism lacks nothing, because it has everything ("It's all
>crap,
>I can believe or disbelieve as I please.")
yes I'm with you to here I guess, except that as Baudrillard's silliness demonstrates this abundance is also about what is missing -- didn't Zizek mention Bladerunner? Special effects are not the display of everything, they're just a different regime of what is seen and not, known and not, allowed and not
>whereas modernism operates within
>the realm of belief - "The world, and all of us people in it, can be
>reconciled, even though the ego and id will *never* get along!" (see, it
>doesn't make any sense - this is the distinction between Adorno and
>Horkheimer,
>and Marcuse [for instance] and the disenchanted transgressive Foucault [who
>isn't limited to disenchantment and trasgression but but bear with the
>stereotyping]).
I do not get this at all. How is this statement summary of modernism? I think you mean it to be summary of a certain quite particular kind of modernist theory. This investment in reconciliation seems to me to be an Enlightenment platform, which modernism sometimes deployed (though with a difference, yes) and in which it sometimes intervened. I don't know what you are saying is *the* difference between A&H/M and F -- I'm not sure I would even know where to start.
>Ironically, from this perspective Habermas appears quite
>postmodern, given that his theory ditches the irreconciliation of Freud's
>notion of the unconscious and loses out on its potentially subversive
>character, opting for a quasi-transcendental reading of language, and moving
>two steps toward a "domesticated" critical theory (see Whitebook, Perversion
>and Utopia, Zizek, Looking Awry for curiousities).
Nor do I understand this. Freud is not about reconciliation -- I agree. Habermas is -- yes. Why does this make Habermas seem postmodern? Adorno is (however sceptically) about reconciliation. At least if I understand correctly what you mean by this. So is Heidegger. Foucault is not, Lacan is not. These seem to me to be quite clearly and as they all more or less expressly stated, positions on Enlightenment narratives, in which modernism tends to allow for reconciliation in spite of everything because of its investment in the (however split/alienated) Subject. Maybe I just don't follow you here. I have the flu, and it could be my brain.
>In the intro to Sublime Object, he outlines a difference between mod,
>postmod and poststruc... as I recall (end of the intro in a point
>summary). In
>Looking Awry he notes that deconstruction is a modernist strategy... along
>with
>the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
And I agree completely. Deconstruction is a new French formalism. I still don't see how this leads... well I guess I've made that point.
> > Ok you got me -- why is Adorno unmasking reason through reason...?
>
>To clarify that reason isn't divine liberation (the entwinment of myth and
>enlightenment) - reason becomes barbaric... to reiterate the dialectic of
>enlightenment.
I guess so.
> > But... Derrida's a post-structuralist but how he is 'postmodern'.
>
>JD's mostmodern, not postmodern (that was actually a freudian slip I noticed
>and altered in retrospection)(anyone who preserves an antagonsistic yet
>thematic distinction between science and literature is mod in my books). Does
>JD actually claim to be post-structuralist? I just read an article by Rainer
>Nagele from '79 (The Provocation of Jacques Lacan: New German Critique no.
>16)
>who seems to think that poststructuralism is a strange term, and opts for
>deconstructionist instead. Doesn't matter, not really.
Well I think structure sign and play is a manifesto for a formalist mode of post-structuralism. And there are plenty of other texts which follow along those lines. Post-structuralist is a description of method after all -- it doesn't mean something is productive or effective necessarily.
> > Leaving that aside (please) what does this have to do with
> hystericization.
>What exactly are you convinced of?
>
>Zizek's "impressionistic" style, laughing from one topic to the next, is
>aimed
>at the traumatization of something familiar... which isn't all that
>dissimilar
>to Adorno. To take something nice and neat and packaged, and mess with it so
>it makes a little less sense... so he's trying to "hystericize" the subject
Does Z use the phrase hystericise? I find this a bit dodgy, though in general I have nothing against the very familiar tactic of making the familiar strange.
> > >In neurosis, the subject is always screwed up and questioning, reflective
>(hysteric and so on).
>
> > Hang on, I thought it was unreflective... or neurosis is not postmodern?
> > How is this useful? productive? what if I don't think there is any such
> > thing as the unconscious at all or don't see access to the unconscious as
> > being anything very important to seek after?
>
>Postmodernism for Zizek is psychotic, modernism is neurotic. If you don't
>think
>there is anything like the unconscious, then none of this will make a damn
>bit
>of sense. The positivists make the same argument against the Marxists -
>there
>is no such thing as self-reflection (or reflection at all). The worse of the
>worse... a positivistic Marxist - not only is there no place for reflection,
>there's no place for the unconscious either! (yikes!).
why is the unconscious such an important thing to have? why would it be so scary/awful to say it was just a useful theoretical intervention, not a description of how people are or have to be? I'm not sure what the reference to positivism means in terms of my question. It's probably a criticism, so you better clarify for me.
> > So why is such certainty about everyone everywhere being applied to the
>'postmodern'?
>
>Because uncertainty would be modern. Yes, it's a tautology. That's the
>frustrating point.
Really? *That* is the point? Aren't we surrounded by uncertainty? Permeated by it? Isn't Bladerunner uncertain? Homeopathy? Those 'dot com' stocks? Wasn't Nazi fascism certain? D.H.Lawrence? Just because CNN or homeshopping is certain doesn't really mean 'postmodern society' -- whatever, really I mean it, the hell that is -- produces only certainty. I know it's not just the drugs ... I really don't get it.
Next week I'll be reading Zizek. I did think there were some really interesting things in the books I've read -- though Lacan always infuriates me -- but they were never about this grand perspective on contemporary psychology.
Catherine
[Kelley -- hi. I don't know that I have the energy for 'pulp' at present. I've just finished a book and now I feel really ill. But I'll take a look if you like. Cat]