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Prof: So today we're still focused on individual
consciousness.
"Why?" you might ask.
Well, we can speak of the psychogenesis of the text or
film as the site or model for symbolic patterning of one sort
or another, perhaps in the case certainly
of Žižek, to some extent also of Deleuze.
Therefore we can still understand today's readings,
unlike Thursday's readings, as belonging to the
psychological emphasis in our syllabus.
This is actually our farewell to the psychological emphasis,
and it is so arranged because there are intimations in today's
authors that there are political stakes.
That is to say, in one way or another we are to
understand their argument about the way in which the psyche
functions as having political implications.
Žižek is fascinating, it seems to me,
in his brilliant reading of The Crying Game at the
very end of your essay, in the moment when he says in
effect, "Look.
This isn't just a kind of abdication from responsibility
for the Irish Republican Revolution.
The soldier has not merely walked away from his role in
revolutionary activity; he has discovered in his
private life--that is to say, in the *** dimension of his
consciousness--the need for revolution from within.
He has necessarily disrupted his own thinking in ways equally
radical to and closely parallel to the disruption of thinking
that's required to understand one's relationship with the
emerging Republican status of Ireland.
And so," says Žižek in effect,
"there are political implications for the upheaval in
consciousness that an ultimately tragic encounter with the Big
Other entails.
I should say in passing also about Žižek that --
and your editor, I think, goes into this a
little bit in the italicized preface--
that there are temptations, political temptations,
entailed in this fascination with an obscure or even perhaps
transcendent object of desire for the individual,
but also for the social psyche.
In religious terms, there is a perhaps surprising
or counterintuitive friendliness toward religion in Žižek's
work on the grounds that faith or the struggle for faith,
after, all does constitute an effort to enter into some kind
of meaningful relationship with that which one desires yet at
the same time can't have.
By the same token--and this is where,
in certain moments, he confesses to a kind of
instability in his political thinking,
even though he is by and large on the left and partly needs to
be understood as a disciple of Marx--
nevertheless, he recognizes that in politics
there is a kind of excitement but also,
perhaps, potential danger in fascination with a big idea.
It could be, of course, some form of
progressive collectivity.
It could, on the other hand, be the kind of big idea that
countenances the rise of fascism.
Žižek acknowledges this-- that public identification with
a kind of almost, or completely,
inaccessible otherness, either as a political idea or
as a charismatic political leader,
can, after all, open up a vertigo of dangerous
possibilities.
I use the word "vertigo"
advisedly because I'm going to be coming back to Hitchcock's
Vertigo in just a minute, but in the meantime there are
also obviously political stakes in Deleuze.
Deleuze, of course, presents to us in this first
chapter of his book, A Thousand Plateaus,
he presents to us a kind of thought experiment,
both as something recommended to the reader--
see if you can think in this new, radically innovative way--
but also providing a model for thinking of this kind in the
style and organization and composition of the chapter
itself.
So in making a thought experiment,
once again, Deleuze has to perform in thought what you
might call a revolution from within,
but the implications once again in politics,
as indeed also for Žižek, are somewhat ambiguous.
That is to say, the rhizomatic mode of
thinking-- and we'll come back to the
rhizomatic mode of thinking as we go along--
which is radically de-centering and which lends itself to
identification with, as it were, the mass movement
of collectivity, can plainly be progressively
democratic: that is to say, democratic beyond even what our
social and cultural hierarchies accommodate.
But at the same time it can once again be fascistic,
because the organization of fascistic culture,
while nevertheless a kind of top-down arrangement with a
fervor involved as the mass is mobilized,
nevertheless is, in this mobilization,
rhizomatic.
Deleuze is careful to point out that rhizomes are,
and rhizomatic thinking is, as he says repeatedly,
both for the best and worst.
>
Rats are rhizomes.
Crabgrass is a rhizome.
In other words, everything which organizes
itself in this fashion is rhizomatic;
much of it, though, as I'll be coming back to try
to explain with a little more care, is for the good in
Deleuze's view.
By the way, I say "Deleuze"
in the same way I said "Wimsatt."
Guattari is an important colleague and ally.
They wrote many books together including one that I'll mention
later.
They also wrote things separately, but
"Deleuze," simply because his oeuvre
is more ample and people feel somehow or another that
he's more central to this work, is a synecdoche for
"Deleuze and Guattari."
So I'll be saying "Deleuze,"
but I don't mean to slight Guattari.
In any case, so we'll be examining the
Deleuzian rhizome a little bit more closely,
but in the meantime, as to its political
implications-- and we are moving closer to the
political as we begin to think about figures of this kind--
they're really on the admission of both of them somewhat
ambiguous.
In other words, they're introducing new
possibilities of thought and they're very different from each
other, as we'll see.
They're introducing new possibilities of thought,
but they are candid enough to admit that they don't quite know
where these possibilities are going--
that is, what the implications or consequences of successfully
entering the thought world of either one of them might be.
All right.
So yes, they certainly have very different ideas.
I wouldn't blame you for saying, "Why on earth are
we reading these two texts together?"
The overlap isn't altogether clear.
I'm going to suggest what it is in a minute, but in the meantime
they are certainly on about very different things.
Deleuze is concerned with, as I say,
introducing a kind of thought experiment which has to do with
the de-centering of thought, getting away from the tree or
arboresque model of thought-- we'll have more to say about
that; and Žižek,
on the other hand, following Lacan's distinction
between the object, ready to hand,
that you can have if you want, and the object of desire
which--such is the chain of signification--
is perpetually something that exceeds or outdistances our
grasp-- in developing this idea,
and thinking about what the object of desire,
in all of its manifold forms, might be,
he develops this curious idea, which is at the center of his
thinking, of the blot--the element
in narrative form, the element in the way in which
our storytelling capacities are organized,
which really can't be narrated, which really can't lend itself
to meaning.
That sort of meaning is, of course, concrete,
specific meaning, that which can be tied down to
an accessible object.
So the central idea that Žižek is attempting to develop
in his essay has to do with this notion of the relationship
between the Big Other and the blot,
as we'll see.
So these strike one as being extremely different ideas,
and as I say I wouldn't blame you for wondering just what
overlap there can be.
Well, at the same time I would think that as you read the
somewhat bouncy and frantic prose of both of these texts,
you did see that they had a kind of mood,
stance, or orientation toward the critical and theoretical
project in common.
They seem, in other words, to be of the same moment.
Even though their ideas seem to be so very different--
that is, the basic ideas they're trying to get across
seem to be so very different-- you could perhaps imagine these
two texts as being written, if it was just a question of
considering their style, by the same person.
Actually, I think that's not quite true,
but at the same time the kind of high-energy,
too-caffeinated feeling that you get from the prose of both
is something that might give you pause and make you wonder:
well, just what moment does this
belong to?
The answer is important and, in a way, obvious.
I'm sure all of you are ready to tell me what moment it
belongs to.
It belongs to Postmodernism.
These are two exemplars of what is by far the most slippery--if
one likes it, one wants to say versatile,
>
and if one doesn't like it, one wants to say
murky--concepts to which we have been exposed in the last twenty
or thirty years.
I think that, in a way, we can bring both
essays into focus as a pair a little bit if we pause somewhat,
simply over the concept "Postmodernism."
Maybe that's one of the things you wanted to learn in taking a
course like this, so I'm just providing a
service.
>
So Postmodernism.
What is Postmodernism?
I think we know what it is in artistic expression.
We have encountered enough examples of it.
We have, perhaps, even taken courses in which,
in the context of artistic form and expression,
it has come up.
Postmodernism in artistic expression--
particularly in the visual arts, but I think this is true
of certain movements in both narrative and poetry as well--
postmodernism is an eclectic orientation to the past.
In a certain sense, it's a return to the past;
it's an opening up of textual possibility to traditions and
historical moments of expression which Modernism had tended to
suppose obsolete and to have set aside;
so that in artistic expression, as I say, Postmodernism is an
eclectic return to possibilities thrown up by the history of art
and literature; in architecture,
many examples are quite extraordinary and many,
unfortunately, are also hideous.
You know that there was a certain point fifteen or twenty
years ago when every strip mall, every shopping mall,
was redecorated or-- what's the word I
want?--renovated.
Every shopping mall was renovated, and how did they
renovate it?
They'd been flat.
They'd been sort of Mies van der Rohe, sort of sixties-modern
before then.
They just sat there flat, and so the renovators came
along and put little gables on the shopping mall so that each
little shop in the mall now has a gable,
and this is postmodern.
The most awful things were done with suburban houses,
also in the name of a kind of blind,
completely tasteless return to the neoclassical and certain
other aspects of tradition.
So the postmodern in what you might call suburban culture has
been pretty awful, but at the same time it has
entailed a great deal of interesting work in painting.
All of a sudden, the New York scene isn't just
one school, and that's the sign of it.
It's not just a certain kind of abstraction.
It's not just a wholesale return, agreed on by everyone,
to Realism.
It's a mixture of everything.
Artists are always just completely obsessed with their
place in art history, but it's not just groups of
artists together wanting to identify a certain place for
themselves in art history.
It's every artist in a kind of anarchic independence from the
thinking of other artists coming to terms with art history in his
or her own way so that the scene--
the art scenes of New York and Berlin and Los Angeles and so
on-- the scene isn't something that
you can identify as having a certain character anymore.
It's postmodern precisely in that it's gone global,
it has a million influences and sources,
and there is very little agreement among artists about
how to amalgamate and put these sources together;
so that in terms of artistic expression,
the postmodern moment--after Modernism,
in other words--the postmodern moment presents itself,
and I put it deliberately, as a medical symptom,
the bipolar way the postmodern moment presents itself in
artistic expression.
Now philosophically, Postmodernism can be understood
as doubt not just about the grounds of knowledge or the
widespread sorts of doubt which we have been talking about more
or less continuously in this course,
but as doubt in particular about the relationship between
or among parts and wholes.
In other words, can I be sure that my leg is
part of my body when plainly it is at the same time a whole with
respect to my foot?
How is it that I know in any stable way what a part or a
whole is?
To take a more interesting example--
this is in Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations-- there is the flag,
the French flag, which is called the tricolor,
right?
Now the tricolor is made up of three strips of color:
white, blue, and red.
I'm sorry if I've gotten the order wrong.
In fact, I am almost positive that I have,
>
but there are those three strips of color existing in
relation to each other, and plainly those three strips
of color are parts of the flag, and they have a certain
symbolic value.
That is to say, each color represents something
and enters into the symbolic understanding of what the flag
is.
But at the same time red, white, and blue--sorry--yes,
red, white, and blue aren't confined to this piece of cloth.
The little strip of white is obviously part of whiteness.
It can't be understood simply in and of itelf.
These strips of color are parts of other things as well;
and what's more, if you look at the tricolor
without knowing what you're looking at, how can you say that
it's the part of a whole?
You say, "Well, they're just parts,"
or "They're wholes unto themselves which somebody
happens to have laid side by side."
By the same token, if you look at the part of the
tricolor which is white and you say,
"White," well, obviously with respect to the
vast universalizing concept "white,"
a little flag is simply a kind of metonymic relationship with
that sense of white.
But, in short, to concretize this idea of the
problematic relationship between part and whole in a different
way, why are we so confident about
what we see?
As most of you know, I'm sure, philosophical
thinking tends to be tyrannized by metaphors of vision.
We assume that we understand reality because--
not altogether as consciously metaphorically in speaking about
this as perhaps we might be-- we say that we can see it;
but how do you see it?
You see it because of the lensing or focusing capacities
of the eye, which exercise a certain tyranny over the nature
of what you see.
If you look too closely at something, all you can see is
dots.
If you look at something and close your eyes,
that, too, becomes a kind of vast retinal Mark Tobey
painting.
It has a relation to what you see but is at the same time
something very different.
And if you get too far away from objects,
they dissolve.
What you thought was an object dissolves into a much vaster,
greater space which seems to have another objective nature.
If you're in a jet and you're looking down,
what you're seeing certainly looks like it has form and
structure, but the form and structure is
not at all what you're seeing if you're standing on the ground
looking at exactly the same, shall we say,
square footage insofar as you can.
You're simply seeing different things,
and if you recognize what might be called the tyranny of focus
in the way in which we orient ourselves to the world,
you can see this perpetual dissolve and refocus
constituting objects perpetually in new ways.
This happens, too, in the history of science.
The relationship between subatomic particles sometimes
turns itself inside out, and the particle that you
thought was the fundamental unit turns out,
in fact, to have within it a fundamental unit of which it is
a part.
I'm just referring to what happened during the golden age
of the linear accelerator when all sorts of remarkable sorts of
inversions of what's taken to be fundamental seemed to be made
available by the experimental data;
so that in all of these ways, ranging from scientific to the
most subjectively visual ways of understanding the world,
there are possibilities of doubt that can be raised about
part-whole relations.
What is a whole?
How do we define a unity?
Should we be preoccupied with the nature of reality as a set
of unities?
Obviously, Deleuze is extremely upset about this.
He doesn't want anything to do with unity.
The whole function of his thought experiment is the
de-centering of things such that one can no longer talk about
units or wholes or isolated entities.
It's the being together, merging together,
flying apart, reuniting, and kinesis or
movement of entities, if they can even be called
entities, that Deleuze is concerned with.
Now another aspect of the postmodern is what the
postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard,
in particular, has called "the
inhuman" or the process of the
dehumanization of the human.
Now this is a weird term to choose because it's not at all
anti-humanistic.
It's really a new way of thinking about the human.
Deleuze, you'll notice, talks--not just here in this
excerpt, but repeatedly throughout his
work, which is why he has so little
to say about it here that's explanatory--
about "bodies without organs."
That might have brought you up short, but what it suggests is
that we are, as Deleuze would put it, machinic rather than
organic.
If the problem with centered thought is that it thinks of
everything as arboreal, as a tree, that problem has to
do with the fact that a tree is understood in its symbolic
extensions to have organs.
The roots are muscles and circulation;
the blossoms are genital in nature;
the crown or canopy of leaves is the mind of the tree reaching
up to the sky, the mentality of the tree.
By the same token, if we think of our own bodies
as arboreal, we think of certain parts of
those bodies as cognitive, other parts of those bodies as
having agency, as doing things.
If that's the case, then we think of a centered and
ultimately genital or genetic understanding of the body as
being productive.
Deleuze wants to understand the body as being interactive,
as being polymorphous perverse, among other things.
He wants to understand it as being everywhere and nowhere,
an un-situated body among other bodies.
In order for this to happen, its interface with other things
has to be without agency and also without cognitive intention
on the model of "I think, therefore I am;
the world comes into being because I think,"
without any of this in play.
In other words, the dehumanization of the
postmodern has to do not at all with denying the importance of
the human but with this radical way of rethinking the human
among other bodies and things.
Plainly, this emphasis involves a kind of dissolving into
otherness, a continuity between subject
and object in which the difference,
ultimately, between what is inside me,
what is authentic or integral to my being me,
and what's outside me become completely permeable and
interchangeable.
The late nineteenth-century author and aesthetic philosopher
Walter Pater, in the conclusion to a famous
book of his called The Renaissance, had a
wonderful way of putting this: he said in effect,
"We are too used to thinking that we're in here and
everything else is out there and that,
somehow or another, our perspective on everything
out there is a kind of saving isolation enabling our power of
objectivity."
Then Pater says, paraphrased,
"How can this be, because we're made up of the
same things that are out there?
We, too, are molecular, in other words.
What is in us ‘rusts iron and ripens corn' [his words].
There is a continuousness between the inside feeling we
have about ourselves and the exteriority with which we are
constantly coming in contact."
Deleuze and Guattari, of course, have their own
excited, jumpy way of putting these
things, but it's not really a new idea that we exaggerate the
isolation of consciousness from its surroundings.
There is a permeability of inside and outside that this
kind of rhizomic, or de-centered,
thinking is meant to focus on.
Now you could say that what Deleuze is interested in--
if you go back to our coordinates that we kept when we
were talking about the formalists,
Saussure through structuralism, through deconstruction--
if you go back to those coordinates,
you could say that what Deleuze is interested in,
like so many others we've read, is a rendering virtual,
or possibly even eliminating, of the vertical axis:
in other words, of that center or head or crown
of the tree which constitutes everything that unfolds on the
horizontal axis-- be it language,
be it the unconscious structured like a language,
be it whatever it might be.
You could say that the project of Deleuze, too,
is the undoing or rendering virtual of this vertical axis.
Well, in a way, I think that's true,
but then what is the horizontal axis?
That is where the relation of Deleuze to, let's say,
deconstruction becomes a little problematic and where we can
actually see a difference.
I'm going to compare him in this one respect with Lacan,
but I want to hasten to point out, as I will in a minute,
a divergence from Lacan as well.
You remember that in Lacan's "Agency of the Letter"
essay, he doesn't just talk
about the axis of combination as a series of concentric circles,
each one of which is made up of little concentric circles.
He doesn't just talk about that.
He also talks about the way in which the combinatory powers of
the imaginary in language, or desire in language,
take place is like a musical staff,
so that the organization of signs, in their contiguity with
each other, can be either melodic or
harmonic; but in any case,
you can't just think of the axis of combination as a
complete linearity.
It has dimensionality of different kinds.
That's why Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of
plateau.
The book in which your excerpt appears is called A Thousand
Plateaus.
Ultimately, the concept of plateau is even more important
to them than the concept of rhizome,
but when they introduce the concept of plateau they're doing
exactly the same thing.
They are saying, "We jump from sign cluster
to sign cluster and not all sign clusters are linear and
uniform."
This is where there is perhaps a difference from
deconstruction.
Deleuze and Guattari are interested in "multiplicity
of coding," as they put it.
They're interested in the way in which when I think,
I'm not just thinking in language, I'm not just thinking
pictorially, and I'm not just thinking
musically, but I am leaping around among
codes so that the actual thought process is eclectic in this way.
Now you could say that this is something actually anticipated
also by Lacan.
You remember also in the "Agency" essay
that Lacan reminds us, true inheritor of Freud which
he takes himself to be, that at the beginning of The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud said that the decoding
of the dream work is like figuring out the puzzle of a
rebus-- a rebus being one of those
trick sentences which are made up not exclusively of words but
of the odd syllable or of pictures: for example,
"I 'heart' New York."
"I 'heart' New York" is a rebus.
The dream work functions constantly, in Freud's view,
as a rebus.
So you could say that Lacan already introduces for Deleuze
the possibility of thinking of a multiple coding that needs to be
decoded on a variety of plateaus if it's going to make any sense.
Now Deleuze's relationship with all the figures we have been
reading is rather problematic, really.
The book preceding A Thousand Plateaus was called
Anti-Oedipus, and it is a continuous
systematic attack on-- he always calls Freud "the
General"-- the idea that Freud feels that
the whole of our psychic lives is completely saturated and
dominated by the Oedipus complex.
Deleuze with his idea of de-centered thinking,
of the rhizome, sets out to show in a variety
of ways how limiting and how unfortunate for the legacy of
psychoanalysis this kind of focus on a particular issue
turns out to be-- this is Deleuze's critique of
Freud, not mine.
You would think that Deleuze, then,
would be a lot closer to Lacan just for the reasons that I have
just described, but Lacan, too--at the very
bottom of page 034 in your copy center reader,
on the right-hand column--he says: "…[I]t is not
surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of
linguistics…" Now it's impossible to say--
I think quite by design--it's impossible to say whether
Deleuze is referring to Freud or Lacan in saying that,
because it's Lacan who claims that Freud said it:
in other words, that The Interpretation of
Dreams is the text in which we discover that the unconscious
is structured like a language; but at the same time,
posterity has taken Lacan's focus on linguistics to be a
massive, perhaps inappropriate revision
of Freud and to be a very different matter.
So it's interesting that Deleuze quite ambiguously seems
to suppose that Freud and Lacan are part and parcel of each
other.
The reason he can do that is that he is interested in a form
of thinking about language which no linguistics has successfully
accommodated, as far as he's concerned.
In other words, he keeps talking about Chomsky.
Chomsky seems to be, in a way, the villain of your
essay.
But I think, in a way, that's just a way of
evading talking about Saussure, because you wouldn't want to
get in trouble with all those structuralists;
because the problem with Saussure, too,
is that there is a certain tyranny or arboresque tendency
in Saussurean thinking to be focused on the binary--
that is, the relationship between the signified and
signifier as fixed, as inflexible,
and as lacking in what Derrida would call "free play"
and therefore, too ,a kind of tyranny.
So, very quickly, on the rhizome.
How do we know a rhizome when we see it?
Whatever frustrations Deleuze's essay puts in your path,
I think probably in the long run you're pretty clear on what
a rhizome is, but if there is any lingering
doubt just think about the flu.
There is what Deleuze calls "rhizomatic flu."
That's something we get from other people,
the circulation of disease.
As we all come down with it around midterm period,
the circulation of disease is rhizomatic.
It's a perfect example of--to use another instance from
Deleuze--the relationship between the wasp and the orchid.
The wasp, like the virus, sort of flits about from
blossom to blossom, descends, and then constitutes
the flu.
By contrast there is hereditary disease--
that is, that which is lurking in us because we're programmed
for it, we're hard-wired for it,
and it is genetically in our nature.
This Deleuze associates with the arboresque.
It comes from an origin.
It is something that is a cause within us or a cause standing
behind us, as opposed to something coming
out of left field in an arbitrary and unpredictable
fashion and descending on us-- perhaps this is also not unlike
Tynjanov's distinction between modification and evolution.
The arboresque evolves; the rhizomatic is modification.
The give and take of tensions among entities--
the rats tumbling over each other, the maze of the burrow,
the spreading of crabgrass--all of this has a kind of randomness
and unpredictability.
The power of linkage at all conceivable points without any
predictability--all of this is entailed in the rhizomatic.
Now as to what's being attacked--and again,
the value system surrounding these things is not absolute,
Deleuze is not going so far as to say "arboresque bad,
rhizomatic good."
He's coming pretty close to it, but he acknowledges the perils,
as I say, of the rhizomatic--but in the meantime
just one point in passing-- because I'm running out of time
to talk about Žižek-- just one point in passing about
the arboresque.
There are actually, in the first pages of your
essay, two forms of it.
One is what he calls the "root book,"
the traditional classical book which presents to you a theme:
"I am going to write about so-and-so,
and I'm going to do so systematically,
one thing at a time in a series of chapters."
That's the root book.
Then there is what he calls the "fascicle book,"
a book which consists of complicated offshoots of roots
but nevertheless entailing a tap root.
This is what he associates with Modernism, precisely,
in your text.
He says in effect: "The fascicle book is like
Joyce's Ulysses.
Everything including the kitchen sink is in it.
It looks as though it were totally rhizomatic,
but it is, of course, controlled by,
unified by, and brought into coherence by a single focusing
authorial consciousness so that it is not truly rhizomatic;
it's a fascicle book."
And here, now, A Thousand Plateaus is
going to be a rhizomatic book.
So you have not just two kinds of books in this idea but three.
All right then, very quickly about Žižek.
I think he can help us understand Lacan.
I hope you agree with this in having read it,
but I think in a way, it also takes us back to,
or allows us to revisit, Peter Brooks.
The best example, it seems to me,
of the way in which the tension of desire in narrative works for
Žižek is-- although these are splendid
examples and I think largely self-explanatory--
the best example is actually in another book by Žižek called
Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to
Ask Hitchcock.
In that book, of course, you get a lot of
attention paid to Vertigo.
Just think about Vertigo as an instance of the kind
of plot Žižek is talking about.
There is that--I've forgotten her name--really nice woman.
You remember, the painter,
and Jimmy Stewart just pays absolutely no attention to her.
She's right there.
She's available.
She's in love with him.
He doesn't even see her except as a confidante:
"Oh yes, you;
I'm so glad you're here."
But he is, on the other hand, obsessed with a woman whose
identity he can't even be sure of.
It's not just that she's inaccessible for some reason or
that she's a distant object of desire.
Her identity and the question of whether or not she's being
play-acted by somebody else remains completely unclear--
unclear for many spectators even as they watch the ending of
the film, completely unclear.
That is an obscure, not just a distant but an
obscure object of desire.
Of course, the premise of her inaccessibility is what drives
the plot.
Now I think that it's interesting to think about the
relationship between the element of detour and delay,
as Žižek implies it, in understanding narrative and
what Peter Brooks is talking about.
Peter Brooks is talking about the way in which middles in
plots protract themselves through episodes,
all of which manifest some sort of imbalance or need for further
repetition in a new key.
Much of this--because the characteristic plot of the kind
of fiction Brooks is mainly thinking about is the marriage
plot-- much of this has to do with
inappropriate object choice.
That indeed can also in many cases, à
la what I began by mentioning in Žižek,
lead to inappropriate political object choice.
Think, for example, about the plot of Henry James'
Princess Casamassima in that regard.
Poor Hyacinth Robinson strikes out on both counts in rather
completely parallel ways.
He ends up on the wrong side of politics, and he ends up on the
wrong side of love.
In a way, the Princess Casamassima is an
exploration of these two sides of the issue.
So in any case, for Brooks the resolution of
the plot is a way in which closure can be achieved.
It is a final moment of equilibrium,
as one might say, or quiet or reduction of
excitation, such that the Freudian death
wish can be realized, as we know, in the way we want
it to be realized, as opposed to our being
afflicted by something from the outside.
So in Brooks, whose closest ties are to
structuralism, there is an achieved sense of
closure which is an important aspect of what's admirable in
fiction.
Žižek is more postmodern.
Žižek sees, following Lacan,
the object of desire as asymptotic, as being ultimately
and always inaccessible; or if it becomes
accessible-- as, for example,
on page 1193 in the right-hand column--
or one might say, almost accessible,
this gives rise to as many problems as it seems to
eliminate.
At the bottom right-hand column, page 1193,
Žižek says: … [P]erhaps,
in courtly love itself, the long-awaited moment of
highest fulfillment, when the Lady renders
Gnada, mercy, to her servant is not
the Lady's surrender, her consent to the *** act,
nor some mysterious rite of initiation,
but simply a sign of love on the part of the Lady,
the "miracle" that the Object answered,
stretching its hand out towards the supplicant.
The object, in other words, has become subject.
In this moment of exchange, mutuality of recognition,
or becoming human on the part of the lady--
whom of course Žižek has associated with the dominatrix
in a sadistic relationship-- in this moment of becoming
human and of offering love, the object becomes more
accessible.
That is to say, there is now the possibility of
some form of mutuality, but in her becoming more
accessible, the energy of desire is
threatened with dissolution.
In other words, closure in Žižek is a threat
to the energy of desire.
Desire is something which inheres in our very language,
according to Žižek, and which, were it to be
understood as brought to closure,
the lady--Žižek gives lots of examples of the lady,
after all of this sort of seeming inaccessibility--
the lady says, "Sure, why not?
Of course."
The person is completely upset and then refuses the act because
there's nothing more to desire.
All of a sudden, the whole structure of that
energy that drives language and consciousness comes tumbling to
the ground, and desire has become need.
It's become merely a matter of gratification through what's
ready-to-hand and no longer a question of sustaining a dream.
This, generally speaking, is what Žižek wants to focus
on in talking about these plots.
The object of desire must be not just distant but also
obscure.
I'm going to make two more points.
First of all, as you can no doubt tell,
this is a perfect replica of Hans Holbein's The
Ambassadors.
I'd be amazed if anyone in the room hadn't recognized it,
>
but there it is.
[Gestures to drawing on the board.]
There's two guys.
There's a table between them.
They are negotiating probably over one of Henry the Eighth's
marriages, and this I think is not insignificant.
They are there in the service of Henry the Eighth negotiating
one of those extremely complicated marriages,
possibly even the one that led to the abdication of the
Anglican Church from the Roman Catholic Church--
who knows?
But the lore about the painting is that it has to do with the
negotiation for an object of desire, and that object is
absent.
In other words, it's something really only
implied by the painting.
In the foreground of the painting, notorious to art
historians, there is this thing.
[Gestures to drawing on the board.]
Now this is pretty much what's in the painting.
This is not a replica of the two guys standing there,
granted but this is pretty much what you see when
you look at the foreground of the painting.
If you look sort of from the side, it turns into something
very much like a skull.
Generally speaking, there's a kind of consensus
among scholars that it may be a weirdly distorted shadow or
representation of a skull, although what a skull is doing
in the foreground, of course, causes us to wonder
as well.
Obviously, you can have some ideas on the subject,
but it's still not exactly realist painting we're talking
about if he sticks a skull in the foreground.
Well, it also has a certain resemblance to other things we
could mention, but the main point about it is
that we don't really know what it is.
It is, in other words, something we've already become
familiar with in thinking about Lacan.
It is that signifier, that ultimate signifier,
which is the obscure object of desire called sometimes by Lacan
"the phallus," and it seems simply to be there
before us in this painting.
Now both in the book on Hitchcock,
where he finds something like this in just about every film
Hitchcock ever made, and also in Holbein's painting,
Žižek calls this "the blot."
We have nothing else to call it.
It's a blot.
What's it doing there?
In fiction, we would call it irrelevant detail.
We can find a way of placing formally absolutely everything
in fiction.
The weather, the flowers on the table,
whatever it might be: we can place these formally,
but there may be something in fiction which is simply
unaccountable.
We cannot account for it, and that's the blot for
Žižek.
All right.
Now finally, on desire on language:
there's a part of Žižek's essay which you may have thought
of as a digression.
He's suddenly talking about J.L. Austin's ordinary
language philosophy.
He's suddenly talking about the linguist Ducrot's idea of
predication.
What's important about, in the one case,
the element of performance in any utterance and,
in the other case, the dominance of an entire
sentence by predication-- what's important in both of
those elements is that they take over an aspect of language of
which they were only supposed to be a part.
In other words, in Austin there are both
performatives and constatives; but in the long run,
the argument of How to Do Things with Words suggests
that there are only performatives:
I thought this was a constative,
he says in effect, I thought this was just
straightforward language, but I can now see an element of
performance in it.
That's the way that there's a gradual changing of his own mind
in Austin's book to which Žižek is sensitive.
By the same token, Ducrot talks about the way in
which the predicate element of a subject,
the predicate relation, has a kind of energy of agency
that simply takes over the grammatical subject and
constitutes a kind of performance in the sentence--
performance in both cases meaning "desire."
When I promise to do something, I also desire to fulfill the
promise.
When I predicate something, I'm also evoking a desire that
that something be the case possibly through my own
instrumentality.
This is the argument.
That's what Žižek means by "desire in language,"
by the inescapability of desire in language,
and the way in which it permeates everything we can say
to each other-- most particularly,
the way in which it permeates the plot or,
as they say in film studies, the "diegesis"
of the kinds of film examples that Žižek gives us.
I'd better stop there.
I hope that this somewhat rapid-fire survey of some key
ideas in these texts are helpful.
I think in the long run perhaps, I hope,
mainly that you see these two energetic authors as exemplars
of what we call Postmodernism and see the relevance of the
concept of the postmodern to the study of literary theory.
Thanks.