This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
Postmodern Identities IV
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The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)
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从本节课中
Postmodern Identities
We examine short pieces by Judith Butler and Slavjo Zizek to understand how identities get formed (and performed) in a world without foundations.
与讲师见面
Michael S. Roth
So you have this what this, obscene father, that is the, the, and of course
it's just, this a symbol of lots of other things, that, under the guise of
permissiveness we are going to tell you what to feel, and what to think.
See this all the time in contemporary American society.
Where we say, we want you to be tolerant, we want you to be free, we want you to be
accepting of everyone, and so we're going to train you how to do so.
Where going to show you training, matters what kind of language to use, what kind
of, what kind of behavior to have with other people.
We are going to actually make by giving you more tolerance, we're going to also
impose on you a code of politically correct speech, politically correct
action, so you have politically correct desires.
this is what Zizek finds so intriguing about contemporary, postmodern society.
he talks about the pleasures of obedience.
For psychoanalysis, Zizek writes, the perversion of the human libidinal economy
is what follows from the prohibition of some pleasurable activity.
Not a life led in strict obedience to the law and deprived of all pleasure, but a
life in which exercising the law provides a pleasure of its own.
That's really important for Zizek . It's not just that we're fighting against
the law. It's just that, the law becomes a form of
pleasure on its own. A life in which performance of the ritual
destined to keep illicit temptation at bay, becomes the source of libidinal
satisfaction. That is, the very act of prohibiting
other people from getting pleasure becomes our pleasure.
That's what interests Zizek. it's re-, too simple to say well, what I
really want to do is go out and have a wild party.
what, you know, and I'm being a, I, I'm not allowed to do that because of the
mean old law. the mean old rule, that's not interesting
for Zizek, what's interesting for Zizek is the way in which exercising the rules,
exercising the prohibition becomes its own kind of pleasure, becomes its own
game of, of, of erotics. so he talks on pages seven to eight, of
about erotic repression, erotic repression.
Regulatory power mechanisms, he writes, and procedures become reflexively
eroticised. Although repression first emerges as an
attempt to regulate any desire considered illicit by the predominant socio-symbolic
order as the first kind of repression. It can only survive in the psychic
economy if the desire for regulation is there.
This is really the key. That, not, not that we fight against
regulation, but we have a desire for regulation.
The very activity of regulation becomes libidinally invested and turns into a
source of satisfaction. We get off on the rules for Zizek.
It's not about freeing ourselves from the rules, it's about the rules becoming
their own source of enjoyment and how that can be perversely put into the
polity into the society. so he says, the trick performed by the
superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, in the case of that ex, of
the obscene or postmodern father, remember that.
in that situation the trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the
child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice
at all. Worse than that, he is being given an
order and told to smile at the same time. Not only, you must visit your grandma,
whatever you feel, but, you must visit your grandma and you must be glad to do
it. The superego orders you to enjoy doing
what you have to do. Find pleasure in work, find pleasure in
obedience. This, for Zizek, is the true perversion,
because it insists on a different kind of, of conformity, while it, under the
guise of tolerance. Under the guise of tolerance.
>> One of the weaker approaches to psychoanalysis is, that it's only a
theory of individual pathological disturbances and that applying
psychoanalysis to other cultural or social phenomena is theoretically
illegitimize. It asks in what way you as an individual
have to relate to social field, not just in the sense of other people, but in the
sense of the anonymous social as such to exist as a person.
You are under quotation marks, normal individual person only being able to
relate to some anonymous social field. What is to be interpreted and what not,
is that everything is to be interpreted, that is to say, when Freud says[FOREIGN]
he expresses discontent, or more literally, the uneasiness in culture.
In respect, it's not just that most of us as normal, we socialize ourselves
normally. Some idiots didn't make it, they fall
out. Oh, they have to be normalized.
No, culture is such in order to establish itself as normal.
What, what, what appears as normal involves a whole series of pathological
taps distortions and so on, and so on. That is again a kind of uh,[FOREIGN]
uneasiness. We are out of joint not at home, and
culture is such which means again that there is no normal culture.
Culture as such has to be interpreted. >> So he says, our post-modern society
has a kind of rule saturation. She says on page ten, our post-modern
reflexive society which seems hedonistic and permissive is actually saturated with
rules and regulations, which are intended to serve our well-being.
Restrictions on smoking and eating, rules against sexual harassment.
So these, all of these rules become their own form of of pleasure.
at, even as they control us more and more.
Zizek is fast ahead, for example of, of how we we create things that we that
create objects of desire. which have evacuated from them all the
things that made them desirable. [LAUGH] Okay so you want caf, you want
decaffeinated coffee. You can have decaffeinated coffee.
You want you want light beer it you know without or light beer without alcohol.
or as a whole range of things that, that we, we, you still get to have the, the
label over the object. But all the things in the object that
were bad for us, which is what made them desirable are, are, are gone.
Here's a, here's a, we'll give you a clip here of Zizek on on chocolate laxatives,
which he thinks of an, as the, the perfect example, of this kind of
regulation as an, and production of pleasure.
So, for Zizek, duty becomes a pleasure the superficial opposition, he writes,
between pleasure and duty is overcome in two different ways.
Totalitarian power goes even further than traditional authoritarian power.
What it says, in effect, is, do your duty, I don't care whether you like it or
not. Totalitarian power says in effect, not,
do your duty, I don't care whether you like it, but, you must do your duty, and
you must enjoy doing it. This is how totalitarian democracy works.
It is not enough for the people to follow their leader, they must love the leader.
Duty becomes pleasure and then pleasure becomes duty.
He says, the obverse paradox is that pleasure becomes duty in a permissive
society. Subjects experience the need to have a
good time to enjoy themselves as a kind of duty.
Consequently feeling guilty for failing to be happy.
This is you see this in the happiness psychology movement over the last 15
years or so. People are measuring happiness all over
the world. And if you're not happy, there's some,
thing wrong, there's something wrong. You have to be happier.
You, you should feel bad about not being happy.
You have to, you should feel guilty if you're not happy.
Happiness has become the, the new command, if you're, if you're not happy
you must be worried. You must me neurotic or pathological.
how many times do people come up to me in my job which they imagine is intense, and
they say, are you still having fun? And of course, the only answer you can
give, if you'll say are you still having fun?
You're supposed to say, yes. Nobody really wants to hear it, if you
say no I really hate it they, they embarrassed don't know what to say, it's
like a confession, a confession of some sexual perversion.
I'm doing my job because I'm paid. Oh no that's bad, you should do your job
because you love it. It should be your passion, right, you
should do your job because, it, you love it.
Because the only thing we should do are things that give us pleasure.
For Zizek, this is a totalitarian democracy.
Under the guise of being nice, we want you to enjoy yourself, we want you to be
happy. What they're really saying to you is we,
you must love what you are told to do, just like the kid going to grandma's
house. >> In all, happiness is for me, a very
conformist category. It doesn't enter, it doesn't enter the
frame. You have a serious ideological deviation
at the very beginning of famous proclamation of independence, you know
pursuit of happiness. There is a point in psychoanalysis it is
that people do not really want or desire happiness.
And I think it's good that it is like that.
For example, let's be serious, when you are in a creative endeavor, in that
wonderful fever, my god, I understand some things, and so on.
Happiness doesn't enter, you are ready to suffer.
Sometimes scientists, I read history of one from physics or earlier of radiation,
were even ready to, to take into account the possibility that they will die
because of some radiation and so on. You know, happiness for me, an unethical
category. And also, we don't really want to get
what we think that we want. The classical story that I like.
The traditional male chauvinist scenario. I'm married to a wife, relations with her
are gold, and I have a mistress. And all the time I dream, oh my god, if
my wife were to disappear, I'm not a murderer but let us say well, they drop
me, it will open up new life for me with the mistress.
You know what every psychoanalyst will tell you?
Quite often it happens, that then, for some reason, wife goes away, you lose the
mistress also. You thought, this is all I want, when you
have it there. It turned out that it was a much more
complex situation where, what you want is not really to live with the mistress, but
to keep her as a distance as an object of desire about which you dream, and this is
not just an excessive situation. I think this is how things function.
We don't really want what we think we desire.
>> so pleasure, becomes a duty. so, what are the possibilities for
transgression in such a situation? This is a hard question for Zizek.
It may be that, actually performing the most old fashion rituals of, of
oppression become new forms of transgression against the, the soft
permissive oppression of post-modern, what he calls, totalitarian democracies.
What Zizek is wanting us to understand here, I think, is the way that pleasure
and power get intertwined. he does that, not because he actually has
a recommendation to make about way the way we should liberate ourselves from
this intertwining of pleasure and power. He doesn't have a political program.
He's not asking us to help the poor. He's not asking us to get rid of the
rich. He's not asking us to, to increase
production, of consumer goods or decrease the production of consumer goods.
So what is he doing? What is the value for, of Zizek's , work?
For, from his perspective, is, what he's doing is playing the role, in some ways,
of an analyst, the philosopher as psychoanalyst.
That is, he's asking us. What can we possibly mean by what we are
doing? What can we, what do we think we're up to
when we look at ourselves in these particular ways?
Why are we asking the questions we're asking?
Why are we, framing the world as we are framing it?
This is the task of the philosopher. The philosopher isn't going to feed the
hungry. The philosopher isn't going to clothe the
needy. the philosopher Zizek says in a clip we
can point you to, in , the philosopher's not there to avoid catastrophe.
If you see a catastrophe looming, as he says in one of his interviews, if you see
there's a big comet coming to Earth, don't call a philosopher.
You know, call some nuclear engineer who can blow the thing out of the sky, right?
if you know there , if you, if you want to know what the, what the what the
tsunami's going to do, don't don't ask a philosopher.
>> This I can do it at least traditionally, in two lines, no?
[SOUND].
Philosophy does not solve problems. The duty of philosophy is not to solve
problems, but to redefine problems. To show how what we experience is a
problem is a false problem. If what we experience as a problem is a
true problem then you don't need philosophy.
For example, let's say that now there would be a deadly virus coming from outer
space, so not in any way mediated through our human history, and it would threaten
all of us. We don't need, basically, philosophy
there. We simply need good science, desperately
to find. We will desperately need good science to
find the solution, to stop this virus. We don't need philosophy there.
Because the threat is a real threat directly.
You cannot play philosophical tricks and say, no this is not the.
You know what I mean? It's simply our life would be or okay the
more vulgar even. Simpler science fiction scenario.
It's kind of armageddon or whatever. No deep impact.
A big comet threatening to hit Earth. You don't need philosophy here.
You need, I don't know, to be a little bit naive, I don't know.
Strong atomic bombs to explode, maybe, maybe I think it's maybe too utopian.
But you know what I mean. I mean the threat is there, you see.
In such a situation, you don't need philosophy.
I don't think that philosophers ever provided answers.
But I think this was the greatness of philosophy.
No, not in this common sense that philosophers just ask questions and so
on. What is philosophy?
Philosophy is not what some people think, some crazy exercise in absolute truth,
and then you can adopt this skeptical attitude.
We, through scientists, are dealing with actual measurable, solvable problems.
Philosophers just ask stupid metaphysical questions, and so on, play with absolute
truths, which we all know is inaccessible.
No, I think philiosophy's a very modest discipline.
Philosophy asks a different question, the true philosophy.
How does a philosopher approach the problem of freedom?
It's not, are we free or not? Is there God or not?
It asks a simple question which will be called a hermeneutic question.
What does it mean to be free? So, this is what philosophy basically
does. It just asks when we use certain notions.
When we do certain acts, and so on, and so on.
What is the implicit horizon of understanding?
It doesn't ask these stupid ideal questions.
Is there truth? No, the question is, what do you mean
when you say this is true? So you can see, it's very modest thing
philosophy. Philosophers are not the mad men who
search for some eternal truth and so on, and so on.
>> So what do you ask a philosopher? You ask a philosopher, why are we
concerned with the possibility of catastrophe?
when we, isn't catastrophe all around us already?
Why do we, why do we frame the world the way we do?
Why do we ask the questions the way we do?
Why do we do accept certain kinds of answers in true as true and not others?
How do we manipulate our expectations for freedom and pleasure, in ways that
clearly make us more miserable. These are the kind of questions that the
philosopher doesn't answer, but throws back to us.
Throws back to us because there is no foundation for an answer.
There's no telos for political practice. There's just the possibility of reframing
the way we think about the world by being more aware of the frames that already
exist. Well, that's about all we can talk about
this week. as well the issues are very complex and
there's plenty more to say. but we'll go on to a new set of of ideas
and issues next time. See you then.
