Where Lacan Starts To Go Wrong

This is cool but I wonder how much of this is beating on an open door. The mirror stage, qua stage, is for Lacan marked by failure from the beginning - the integration never truly happens, which is why the subject is then further propelled, as it were, into the symbolic, where there is some measure of compensation for the failure of identification at the level of the imaginary. The conditional that Sloterdijk lays out - "If it were genuinely the case that one could always find a self-blinding imaginary element of this type at the bottom of a self, it would at least explain why the subject in a Lacanian universe only finds wellbeing, or at least order, in the symbolic" - is, as far as I can tell, granted by Lacan.

Anthony Wilden puts it well when he notes that the ego that emerges at the level of the imaginary is "an essentially paranoid construct", one that is "founded on the OPPOSITION and IDENTITY between self and other. The ego involves the purely dual, either/or, relationship of master and slave. In a genetic sense, then, the child is born as an undifferentiated 'a-subjective' being. According to Lacan, the child's first discovery is that of DIFFERENCE: the difference between self and world. Through the Imaginary relationship to others, this difference will become an opposition. The child cannot become a subject until he or she can say 'I', but in learning to say 'I', the child will always begin by meaning 'he' or 'she'.

So long as the child lives in the dual Imaginary relationship with the mother (whom Lacan calls the real Other, as opposed to the father, who represents, but who is not, the symbolic Other), the child is trapped in a short-circuit. It is through the oedipus complex, in which each apex of the family triangle comes to mediate the dual relationship between the other two, that the child passes into the 'normality' (one uses the word with reservations) of a three-way, Symbolic relationship, in which opposition is mediated by difference. In the Symbolic, the subject can say 'I': he or she has passed from the subject-object, object-object relationships of the Imaginary into what the phenomenologists would call the INTERSUBJECTIVITY of the Symbolic" (System and Structure, capitals in the original).

Quoting StreetlightX

This is cool but I wonder how much of this is beating on an open door. The mirror stage, qua stage, is for Lacan marked by failure from the beginning - the integration never truly happens, which is why the subject is then further propelled, as it were, into the symbolic, where there is some measure of compensation for the failure of identification at the level of the imaginary. The conditional that Sloterdijk lays out - "If it were genuinely the case that one could always find a self-blinding imaginary element of this type at the bottom of a self, it would at least explain why the subject in a Lacanian universe only finds wellbeing, or at least order, in the symbolic" - is, as far as I can tell, granted by Lacan.

Oh yeah, I agree that Lacan would allow it. & Sloterdijk would agree. It makes sense Lacan would grant that; the quote wouldn't make sense if you supposed he wouldn't. Sloterdijk is talking about what Lacan offers of his own volition, what he thinks is the case.

The conditional that you quote is operating like this: If you accept Lacan's premises, his conclusions follow. The throughline here is Sloterdijk suggesting that Lacan's premises are an illegitimate universalization by a hurt person of his particular hurt. The key to understanding that 'if' is the sentence before it: 'For every ego formation that took place in this way via a flight to the visual illusion of intactness, one could indeed predict that paranoid instability that Lacan, based on his self-analysis, sought to present as a general characteristic of the psyche in the cultures of all periods."

The idea is something like this: It's only from a paranoid ego's perspective that everything of itself outside its imaginary identification is just undifferentiated chaos. The paranoid ego that thinks like this is a particularly embattled psyche. (The chapters leading up to this are a very persuasive (imo) model of a 'subject's' genesis. The guiding light is attachment theory. ) If you spend time with kids from infancy to birth (oldest brother of five, here!), it's clear and simple that there is a continuity and growth that builds on itself all the way up through and that you don't need a dialectics of failure to ensure integration in an intersubjective order. However it's also the case that disrupted continuity and growth (disrupted attachment, at essence) will lead to over-reliance on the type of rigid psychological developments Wilder is talking about.)

Reply to csalisbury I think that's pretty fair. My own speculative take on it is that imaginary identification does not preceed symbolic identification but in fact proceeds it. That is, the mastery of relations comes first, and then the identification of "things" comes after. The imaginary is the rigidification, and not the condition, of the symbolic. The order of psychogenesis needs to be jiggled around a bit.

Freud, perhaps interestingly, had a somewhat more irenic account of ego-formation, with his notion of the originary 'oceanic feeling' which is then gradually whittled away.

I think we might be close to the same page. I added a bunch of edits above just as you were posting. Sloterdijk is interesting in this way: he doesn't seem to ground his positive approach by reaching toward unity in the full oceanic sense. It's differentiation all the way down for him. Or more accurately: metamorphoses in spatial (and also acoustic!) webs of relations. He traces psychological development as a cascade of differentiation founded on attachment theory (or: 'intimacy') throughout Bubbles (with a lot of tongue-in-cheek-but-simultaneously-reverent riffs on Heideggerean being-in stuff)

Reply to csalisbury So I went and read the excursus on Lacan. Loved it.

"For the child’s own mirror image cannot as such add anything to the child’s self”-findings that has not long since been set up within it at the level of vocal, tactile, interfacial and emotional games of resonance and their inner sediments. ... In a sufficiently well-formed biune mental structure, pictorial self-perception occurs in the child—which occasionally notes its reflection in a glass, metallic or watery medium— as an exhilarating, curiosity-inducing additional layer of perception on top of an already dense, encouraging web of resonance experiences; by no means does the image in the mirror appear as the first and all-surpassing information about its own ability to be whole; at most, it makes an initial reference to its own appearance as a coherent body among coherent bodies in the real visual space, but this integral being-an-image-body means almost nothing alongside the pre-imaginary, non-eidetic certainties of sensual-emotional dual integrity."

Really nice. What I would go on to further emphasize though, is the necessity of appending to all this a 'materialist' analysis of all this: i.e. the 'primacy' of the one or the other (imaginary or symbolic) should be thought not just in ideal, stadial-teleological terms, but also with respect to the conditions which 'bring out', as it were, the one of the other in a sociological setting. To use a too-obvious example, 'identity politics' is precisely what happens when imaginary identification becomes the primary mode of political practice, say. Wilden also has some incredible stuff on how money functions in the imaginary mode:

"The special characteristic of commodities, however, is that one particular commodity of the original circulation of use value (in which objects are simply different from each other) is thrown out of the system to become the Marxian "general equivalent of exchange": this is gold or silver or shells, or some such similar commodity. There is no such general equivalent in Symbolic exchange, although there is exchange value. The general equivalent is characteristic only of Imaginary exchange. The general characteristic of exchange value is that it is the SIGN OF A RELATION (as in language). But in imaginary exchange, the general equivalent turns all exchange value into the SIGN OF A THING ... In our culture, money does not represent a relation between people as does the 'symbolic object'. As the valorization of an ENTITY, money under capitalism represents Imaginary relations between things, and the 'things' it represents are the 'clear and distinct' people who are exchanged - as alienated objects - in the system".

This is the kind of stuff I love.

Hey, cool, glad you found & liked it. It does work as a quick, stand-alone little piece.

Quoting StreetlightX

Really nice. What I would go on to further emphasize though, is the necessity of appending to all this a 'materialist' analysis of all this: i.e. the 'primacy' of the one or the other (imaginary or symbolic) should be thought not just in ideal, stadial-teleological terms, but also with respect to the conditions which 'bring out', as it were, the one of the other in a sociological setting. To use a too-obvious example, 'identity politics' is precisely what happens when imaginary identification becomes the primary mode of political practice, say. Wilden also has some incredible stuff on how money functions in the imaginary mode:

"The special characteristic of commodities, however, is that one particular commodity of the original circulation of use value (in which objects are simply different from each other) is thrown out of the system to become the Marxian "general equivalent of exchange": this is gold or silver or shells, or some such similar commodity. There is no such general equivalent in Symbolic exchange, although there is exchange value. The general equivalent is characteristic only of Imaginary exchange. The general characteristic of exchange value is that it is the SIGN OF A RELATION (as in language). But in imaginary exchange, the general equivalent turns all exchange value into the SIGN OF A THING ... In our culture, money does not represent a relation between people as does the 'symbolic object'. As the valorization of an ENTITY, money under capitalism represents Imaginary relations between things, and the 'things' it represents are the 'clear and distinct' people who are exchanged - as alienated objects - in the system".

This is the kind of stuff I love.

Right, this is the thing.

For me, the temperature changes notably when 'the necessity of appending to all this' & 'should be thought' and similar ways of speaking enter in.]Necessary why? Should be thought, according to whom and for what reason?

What's being got at in that Wilden quote is something I'd describe as 'the structure of fascination.' Fascination is a gravitational force : it pulls you toward one thing at the expense of all other things. Fascination is also an enervating force. It saps your capacity for action in order to sustain itself as fascination.Something seems charged with a mysterious power. It seems important to keep your attention focused on it, to trace its contours, to hum it like a kind of refrain. It's something you always feel like you almost get, but are possibly in danger of losing so you keep returning back to it. You have to trace its outlines again and again to remind yourself of what it is. It's definitely what's important and it's always tip of your tongue. Sometimes you get it for a second, but then it slips away. You know for sure you had it, and you still feel like you almost have it, so you return to it again, wherever you see its form crop up, to retrace it.

I think the most subtle form that fascination can take is fascination with the story of becoming-fascinated.

If you draw your attention away for a second then a kind of thought pops up: 'remember it's important and necessary to pay attention to the story of how one become fascinated'.

I think another key indicator that a particular thing is happening here are weird inversions, where there is a tendency to say the opposite of what you're doing. How is the necessity packaging itself? As the avoidance of teleological and 'stadial' ways of thinking. But, having got its foot in the door (via the identity politics reference) what happens next? A teleological and stadial account that moves toward 'our culture', where 'our culture' = a ripened form of fascination.

It feels like the anthropological marxist stuff is here a backdrop for a staging of the 'story of fascination' (can also be staged in a Lacanian psychoanalytic setting, in a linguistic setting, in a systems setting etc) but its always the same story: fascination exerting fascination by describing a movement toward becoming-fascinated. It's rather ingenious, there's a kind of devious cleverness to it.

A simple, but useful metaphor. If you don't toss your ring in Mount Doom (If you can't bring yourself to offer a meaningful sacrifice) then as the years and decades move on, you slowly become gollumized.

Of course tossing the ring, means you can no longer become invisible to the things chasing you, you have to confront them.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Reply to StreetlightX @csalisbury
Quoting StreetlightX

I would go on to further emphasize though, is the necessity of appending to all this a 'materialist' analysis of all this: i.e. the 'primacy' of the one or the other (imaginary or symbolic) should be thought not just in ideal, stadial-teleological terms, but also with respect to the conditions which 'bring out', as it were, the one of the other in a sociological setting.

Nathan Widder has recently developed this line of argumentation. He tries to
reinterpret Lacan's scheme of a child's subjectivation via Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual framework of the faciality machine. Accordingly, instead of being the product of universal psychological and social determinants, the mirror stage becomes a result of particular machinic and power operations. By Lacan, the Other's voice is one of the stage's necessary operators, ensuring the completion of the process of identifying and a child's entry into the symbolic world. However, this voice acts differently: "The mirror stage is precipitated by and imbued with what Deleuze and Guattari call 'order-words,' which link acts – here the infant's recognition– to statements and serve as redundancies for significance and subjectivity (ATP 79). Order-words effect' incorporeal transformations', which change nothing of the physicality of a body but everything about its sense and meaningfulness: 'that's you!' – the order-word that transforms the infant and paves the way for later stratification by the signifier and the subject."
(Nathan Widder, 'A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy').
Quoting StreetlightX

by no means does the image in the mirror appear as the first and all-surpassing information about its own ability to be whole; at most, it makes an initial reference to its own appearance as a coherent body among coherent bodies in the real visual space, but this integral being-an-image-body means almost nothing alongside the pre-imaginary, non-eidetic certainties of sensual-emotional dual integrity."

It is possible to show that all essential Lacanian elements of the mirror stage were present at an earlier stage of child development, namely during breastfeeding. Here, the infant's initial gestalt of the human face occurs and consolidates. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that 'maternal power operating through the face during nursing' is as open to the entire social field as any Lacanian development stage.

Quoting csalisbury

Necessary why? Should be thought, according to whom and for what reason?

Necessary because the fortunes of our concepts are derivitave of the fortunes of the world at large, and without tracking the latter you can't track the purchase that concepts have on it. Concepts like the imaginary and the symbolic and so on have their own degree of consistency and autonomy from the real, and the way in which they track the world can't be taken for granted. The historicization and 'anthropologization' of concepts - especially 'developmental' ones - is necessary make them more than speculative thought experiments or just-so stories.

Reply to Number2018
I see what you're saying, but what do these theoretical models and terms add here. How does it enrich?

The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship. The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing. It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways. As with anything. But the 'you' was already prepared in an exchange of attention. Just a mom and a kid paying attention to one another in a particular way.

Isn't this enough? What do we gain in understanding by adding the rest?

Quoting Number2018

Nathan Widder, 'A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy

From the essay collection? I've a couple of articles in there, but not that one. Sounds interesting.

Quoting StreetlightX

Necessary because the fortunes of our concepts are derivitave of the fortunes of the world at large, and without tracking the latter you can't track the purchase that concepts have on it. Concepts like the imaginary and the symbolic and so on have their own degree of consistency and autonomy from the real, and the way in which they track the world can't be taken for granted. The historicization and 'anthropologization' of concepts - especially 'developmental' ones - is necessary make them more than speculative thought experiments or just-so stories.

Eh, can you spell it out for me though? This feels very just-so. Like what's a good example? I think an example would really help here.

Reply to csalisbury Wilden and identity politics?

Reply to StreetlightX Hey I'm not gonna push. If you feel that was a satisfying answer, fair enough. I've registered my response to it.

Regarding the mirror stage - what about people who're born blind, though? If seeing your own reflection is a necessary event in the formation of a distinction between self and world/other etc.

Reply to StreetlightX Quoting StreetlightX

Nathan Widder, 'A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy
— Number2018

From the essay collection? I've a couple of articles in there, but not that one. Sounds interesting.

https://www.amazon.ca/Thousand-Plateaus-Philosophy-Henry-Somers-Hall/dp/0748697284/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=a+thousand+plateaus+and+philosophy&qid=1606745798&sr=8-3

There is essay #7, “Year zero: faciality”

Reply to csalisbury Quoting csalisbury

The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship. The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing. It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways. As with anything. But the 'you' was already prepared in an exchange of attention. Just a mom and a kid paying attention to one another in a particular way.

Isn't this enough? What do we gain in understanding by adding the rest?

You articulate here 'a common sense' psychology. It reaffirms a 'natural understanding' of a child development, but it can help neither understand our society better nor treat various mental disorders. On the contrary,
Lacan offers both: his model lays the ground for psychoanalyses, theories
of subjectivation, discourses' functioning, and even principles of neoliberal capitalism.
(Zizek, https://www.amazon.ca/Incontinence-Void-Economico-Philosophical-Slavoj-Žižek/dp/0262537060/ref=sr_1_27?dchild=1&keywords=zizek&qid=1606753980&sr=8-27. )
Lacanianism has become the influential source of authority and knowledge. So, I would reformulate your question 'where Lacan starts to go wrong.'
(by the way, it can become an enormous task, considering the scope of what Lacan left). The question could be: why should we reject Lacanianism? Does it reinforce inferiority and the sense of guilt? Should one submit herself to a psychoanalytical treatment? Should she reaffirm her particular self-understanding?
Should she trust the validity of knowledge applied, as well as the authoritative status of a psychoanalyst?
Quoting csalisbury

I see what you're saying, but what do these theoretical models and terms add here. How does it enrich?

If we need to challenge the self-sufficiency and truth of Lacanianism, we should seek models that allow one to understand oneself in a broader social context. I am not sure that Sloterdjic’s critic of the mirror stage (according to your quote)
is sufficient enough. Deleuze and Guattari offer up a set of concept-tools for undoing certain habitual ways of being in the world, and constructing our lives, producing our own subjectivity. They aim to dismantle and then reconstruct Lacanian models of production of subjectivity as well as the most prosaic modes of our life. Their paradigmatic example is the bouncing balls from Kafka’s ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’. The proposed model lays the ground for the apprehension of the constitutive subjective split of the mirror stage and the case of ‘Blomfield’.

Quoting fdrake

Regarding the mirror stage - what about people who're born blind, though? If seeing your own reflection is a necessary event in the formation of a distinction between self and world/other etc.

It's a knock-down argument if Lacan is taken literally, but

(And I have to be honest and say I don't know him inside and out, only mostly through Zizek, though I do own a few Lacan books I've read a couple parts of)

but I I feel like the rebuttal is that Lacan didn't mean literally a mirror* (and, if he did mean it literally, it can be recuperated & he knew all along & either recuperated it himself or waited for commentators to recuperate it) but what he meant was some unified 'thing' that the inchoate infant projects wholeness onto and says 'this is me.' As Number2018 was saying, this could be a 'me' or a 'you' or an 'i' -- all the stuff we can associate with what Althusser calls 'interpellation.'

My feeling is that what's being talked about in 'the mirror stage' or 'interpellation' is really close to what James C Scott in Seeing Like a State calls 'legibility,' i.e. the clearing away of noise to get at a nice, digitally pristine, identity. But there's something wrong about bringing that level into early development. It brings it too deep.

I want to say it confuses 'initiation in the tribe' with 'having a sense of who you are' which occurs much earlier. And a proper 'initiation into the tribe' weds 'a sense of who you are' to 'symbolic participant in the community.'

If you read between the lines, theres an aporia here. Or something. But It's not just capitalism. Huh. That's what I got for now.

-----
* all of what follows is tongue-in-cheek, in some ways, iimo Lacan was a malignant narcisssist, who instinctively made use of the infinite potential for reinterpretation

Reply to csalisbury
I think the self is an organizing idea. It's an aspect of rationality which can emerge really early for some people and late for others. I think the distinction between "me" and "not-me" goes hand in hand with other distinctions like between real and not-real. It's long been accompanied by the idea of a double image where one side of the self is critical or narcissistic about the other side. But that's just the seed of the distinction.

It gets fleshed out more fully by all the little signals we emit and receive about who we are in the community, and then who the community is, which is usually about morality, either heroic or downtrodden.

Quoting frank

I think the self is an organizing idea. It's an aspect of rationality which can emerge really early for some people and late for others. I think the distinction between "me" and "not-me" goes hand in hand with other distinctions like between real and not-real. It's long been accompanied by the idea of a double image where one side of the self is critical or narcissistic about the other side. But that's just the seed of the distinction.

It gets fleshed out more fully by all the little signals we emit and receive about who we are in the community, and then who the community is, which is usually about morality, either heroic or downtrodden.

Even before the birth of the rational-self, everyone has an instinctive sense of how their presence changes the vibe of a room, or an intuitive understanding of who (which friends and family), when you move toward them with this or that feeling, will result in a change of emotional landscape. Like, if you think back to being a kid around your parents, around your grandparents, on the playground etc. You're *modulating* yourself, first and foremost, in order to try to find a kind of emotional harmony. There's still a self here, and its pre-rational, at least in some sense.

This is along the lines of the exchange of little signals you're talking about. I want to say that theyre felt almost musically at first, as modulations in the environment. Only later do you sort of sit back and make a risk-aware portfolio, always diversifying, taking into account what actions, on average, elicit what responses.

The rational 'self' seems like a little icefloe floating on top of the earlier stuff. Its sort of a risk-management thing. I think of the self as a universal, default self-presentation. Even then, its always contextual: we show different aspects in different situations (we diversify, we hedge.) But so much of what we're building on, at this level, is blackbox for rational self-understanding. The self has at least one foot in something that precedes x/not-x.

Quoting Number2018

If we need to challenge the self-sufficiency and truth of Lacanianism, we should seek models that allow one to understand oneself in a broader social context. I am not sure that Sloterdjic’s critic of the mirror stage (according to your quote)
is sufficient enough. Deleuze and Guattari offer up a set of concept-tools for undoing certain habitual ways of being in the world, and constructing our lives, producing our own subjectivity. They aim to dismantle and then reconstruct Lacanian models of production of subjectivity as well as the most prosaic modes of our life. Their paradigmatic example is the bouncing balls from Kafka’s ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’. The proposed model lays the ground for the apprehension of the constitutive subjective split of the mirror stage and the case of ‘Blomfield’.

Deleuze & Guattari have all sorts of useful stuff, much of which I love, but they also have a self-consciously radical tone, which, as in a manifesto, loves to play 'this is absolutely bad, this is absolutely good' games... & this is perfectly calibrated, whether intentionally or not, to tap into the psyches of people very hungry for maps of good vs. bad ways of thinking/being/living. The upshot of that is, partially, absurd stuff like Chomsky's linguistics being assimilated gloopily to other idee fixes of the authors, so that his technical analysis is read as an emanation of whatever malignant metaphysical power also emanates the centralized french state. But it comes out in all sorts of ways. Just as Deleuze read old thinkers against themselves, it may be helpful to read deleuze against deleuze, especially when he's paired with guattari.

All the militant stuff is unneccessary, and if being militant is necessary in your life, or community, then seeking necessity in philosophers is almost certainly a way of delaying confrontation with that real necessity.

Reply to csalisbury Quoting csalisbury

Deleuze & Guattari have all sorts of useful stuff, much of which I love, but they also have a self-consciously radical tone, which, as in a manifesto, loves to play 'this is absolutely bad, this is absolutely good' games... & this is perfectly calibrated, whether intentionally or not, to tap into the psyches of people very hungry for maps of good vs. bad ways of thinking/being/living.

I agree with you; their style is too militant. Yet, they have offered the
the most comprehensive critique of the Lacanian theory.I want to get back to your account:
Quoting csalisbury

The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship.

So far, primarily, you are right. But when you write:
Quoting csalisbury

The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing.

,
a Lacanian would completely disagree. For Lacan, when the kid enters into the symbolic world,
there is an ultimate and traumatic transformation of a whole system of her relationship with herself and her immediate environment. The transcendent Lacanian scheme manages and directs what
Quoting csalisbury

It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways.

Therefore, for Lacan, there is no spontaneous and 'natural' process of learning and development, but the realization of the rigorous transcendent model of production of subjectivity.
Deleuze and Guattari do not merely reject the Lacanian model. They maintain that
it owes its efficiency and workability to broader immanent social determinants.
For example, they claim that wherever we find what can be recognized as a working Oedipal complex, the actual ground is not a failure of 'normal' Lacanian interiorization. It results from the particular 'capitalistic' process of production of subjectivity and organization of desire, responsible for both psychological dis functionality and habitual ways of being in the world. Indeed, the whole complex of the infant's relationship with his mom and various manifestations of our lives follow clear, repeatable patterns.
If they are not governed by transcendent models or 'traditional' cultural determinants, we should seek alternative conceptual frameworks.

between being a birthling & dropping in down into 'a transcendent Lacan', might there be a 'growth regulator' to steer one along & out of dreaded dysfunctionalities? I'm just asking. abe

Quoting Number2018

'The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship.'

— csalisbury

So far, primarily, you are right. But when you write:

'The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing.'
— csalisbury

a Lacanian would completely disagree. For Lacan, when the kid enters into the symbolic world,
there is an ultimate and traumatic transformation of a whole system of her relationship with herself and her immediate environment. The transcendent Lacanian scheme manages and directs what

'It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways.'
— csalisbury

Oh, I know that Lacan would disagree with what I'm saying & I'm saying further that I think he's just empirically wrong, at least when his model is applied universally. I think that what he's actually describing is something I characterized above, to Street, as 'the structure of fascination.' I don't claim that such a structure (a psychological lobster trap, so to speak) doesn't exist; I myself spent a lot of time there, and occasionally fall back into it. But I also don't think that we can chalk it up to 'capitalism' (Lacan's is one iteration of an ancient structure that far-antedates the late 2nd millennium....you can already find it in the Nag Hammadi) and I think that time spent trying to create a new model to supplant it would be better spent on other things. Certainly most developmental psychologists today aren't operating either within - or in opposition to - Lacan. There's no need for us, in 2020, to approach these matters as though we're living in Paris between 1940-1980.

There is a sort of retro-twilight beauty to gardening old parisian post-structural fads, in the same way a good historical novelist might play with old intellectual tropes (say, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon) but there's no need, at all, to stay here. If you find joy in it, then it is worthwhile; if not, there is no necessity to remain.

Quoting abe

between being a birthling & dropping in down into 'a transcendent Lacan', might there be a 'growth regulator' to steer one along & out of dreaded dysfunctionalities? I'm just asking. abe

I think so, if I follow you. What do you have in mind by 'growth regulator'?

Reply to csalisbury
Quoting csalisbury

What's being got at in that Wilden quote is something I'd describe as 'the structure of fascination.' Fascination is a gravitational force : it pulls you toward one thing at the expense of all other things. Fascination is also an enervating force. It saps your capacity for action in order to sustain itself as fascination.Something seems charged with a mysterious power. It seems important to keep your attention focused on it, to trace its contours, to hum it like a kind of refrain. It's something you always feel like you almost get, but are possibly in danger of losing so you keep returning back to it. You have to trace its outlines again and again to remind yourself of what it is. It's definitely what's important and it's always tip of your tongue. Sometimes you get it for a second, but then it slips away. You know for sure you had it, and you still feel like you almost have it, so you return to it again, wherever you see its form crop up, to retrace it.

I think the most subtle form that fascination can take is fascination with the story of becoming-fascinated.

If you draw your attention away for a second then a kind of thought pops up: 'remember it's important and necessary to pay attention to the story of how one become fascinated'.

It is an excellent phenomenological mapping of our desire. And it resonates with Zizek’s account of our ontological conditions:
” What one should do here is distinguish between the two aspects of objet a clearly discernible in Lacan’s theory: objet a as the void around which desires and/or drives circulate, and objet a as the fascinating element that fills in this void (since, as Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, objet a has no substantial consistency, it is just the positivization of a void).” (Zizek, ‘Incontinence of the void.’) Yet, Zizek does not stop on a mere description or a phenomenological account. Likely, to avoid the lure of the fascinating narcissism, he tries to perform a task of critical analyses.

Quoting csalisbury

I also don't think that we can chalk it up to 'capitalism' (Lacan's is one iteration of an ancient structure that far-antedates the late 2nd millennium.

On the contrary, Zizek deals with ‘capitalism’. He utilizes formidable Lacanian, Marxist, and Hegelian theoretical recourses: “this is how the capitalist discourse functions: a subject enthralled by the superego call to excessive enjoyment, and in search of a Master-Signifier that would constrain his/her enjoyment, provide a proper measure of it, prevent its explosion into a deadly excess (of a drug addict, chain-smoker, alcoholic, and other -holics or addicts)… in order to enact the shift from capitalist to analyst’s discourse, one has merely to break the spell of objet a, to recognize beneath the fascinating agalma, the Grail of desire, the void that it covers.” It is Zizek’s project: to move from ‘capitalistic discourse,’ where we unconsciously follow pre-given and pre-programmed affective patterns, to the analyst’s discourse of critical analyses.

Quoting csalisbury

There is a sort of retro-twilight beauty to gardening old parisian post-structural fads, in the same way a good historical novelist might play with old intellectual tropes (say, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon) but there's no need, at all, to stay here. If you find joy in it, then it is worthwhile; if not, there is no necessity to remain.

No, for me, it is not about the enjoyment (once again, here is the fascinating narcissistic trap!) of being immersed into “old Parisian post-structural fads.” The discord is alive and actual. Zizek, the most influential contemporary Lacanian, has almost depleted the heritage of his teacher. His re-interpretation of objet-a as the fascinating structure brings him to the discovery of the void behind it, of the ultimate lack and negation. He consistently avoids a recourse to Deleuze’s philosophy of desire or Foucault’s pragmatics
of pleasure. They assert that there is no void behind our intimate experiences, fantasies and imagination. They are in mutual interdependence and presupposition with our social reality. Zizek’s account of desire could be replaced by another one, having positive and constructive dimensions.

Quoting csalisbury

but I I feel like the rebuttal is that Lacan didn't mean literally a mirror* (and, if he did mean it literally, it can be recuperated & he knew all along & either recuperated it himself or waited for commentators to recuperate it) but what he meant was some unified 'thing' that the inchoate infant projects wholeness onto and says 'this is me.' As Number2018 was saying, this could be a 'me' or a 'you' or an 'i' -- all the stuff we can associate with what Althusser calls 'interpellation.'

Aye I get that. I was driving at the same thing you've been talking about with my question. Removing the aspects of the theory which look like they should be taken literally makes it just "one interpretive device among others", rather than a structure you'll be compelled to believe by its power to facilitate description of stuff that happens.

Gesturing towards "a decent analogy is how ideological production produces subjectivities", kinda names the space the phenomenon occurs in, but doesn't pin down an account. And if you want an account that's tied to an event, hollowing out the literal aspects of the theory won't do - at one point you care that it's really happening, at one point it's devolved to a metaphor that plays a role in describing an interpretive device.

Quoting Number2018

On the contrary, Zizek deals with ‘capitalism’. He utilizes formidable Lacanian, Marxist, and Hegelian theoretical recourses: “this is how the capitalist discourse functions: a subject enthralled by the superego call to excessive enjoyment, and in search of a Master-Signifier that would constrain his/her enjoyment, provide a proper measure of it, prevent its explosion into a deadly excess (of a drug addict, chain-smoker, alcoholic, and other -holics or addicts)… in order to enact the shift from capitalist to analyst’s discourse, one has merely to break the spell of objet a, to recognize beneath the fascinating agalma, the Grail of desire, the void that it covers.” It is Zizek’s project: to move from ‘capitalistic discourse,’ where we unconsciously follow pre-given and pre-programmed affective patterns, to the analyst’s discourse of critical analyses.

Oh, I should probably clarify- I've read a good deal of Zizek & Deleuze over the past decade. I was really into both of them, and into trying to synthesize them. So I totally get what you're talking about, and I'm aware that this is how he thinks about things.

But I'm saying: why worry about any of this if it doesn't bring you joy? I've found that, for me, reading Zizek (and many other writers of theory) only led to meta-fascination: fascination with becoming-fascinated. This functions just like any other fascination, but there's a subtle trick to it where, since it makes fascination thematic, it seems to be 'outside' of it, giving you some critical purchase. I think this is pure sleight-of-hand (though I don't think its usually intentionally a sleight of hand, on the authors' part.) People seem to get addicted to the 'discourse', reading about the same cluster of ideas from different angles, never actually changing anything, but going back to the bookshelf again and again and again.

Quoting Number2018

No, for me, it is not about the enjoyment

What is it about?

Quoting fdrake

Aye I get that. I was driving at the same thing you've been talking about with my question. Removing the aspects of the theory which look like they should be taken literally makes it just "one interpretive device among others", rather than a structure you'll be compelled to believe by its power to facilitate description of stuff that happens.

Gesturing towards "a decent analogy is how ideological production produces subjectivities", kinda names the space the phenomenon occurs in, but doesn't pin down an account. And if you want an account that's tied to an event, hollowing out the literal aspects of the theory won't do - at one point you care that it's really happening, at one point it's devolved to a metaphor that plays a role in describing an interpretive device.

Yeah, & I feel like a sufficient account is something as simple as: sometimes people get hurt so bad that its too painful to focus on how hurt they are, and they have to focus on something outside themselves. This has happened throughout all of history, big time. This also happens in capitalism, for many reasons, just as it happened for many reasons throughout the rest of history. People selling things make use of whatever helps them sell things, so they make use of this too.

The mistake, to my mind, is focusing on that (not-focusing-on being very different from ignoring) There is a way in which focusing on it becomes itself a way of doing: 'someone hurt, focusing on something else' and so just perpetuates the whole thing.

Reply to csalisbury
I will try to explain myself. Of course, I like this kind of philosophical stuff. Yet, there are a few more things. Pleasure, all types of enjoyment and self-enjoyment are everywhere. People aspire to achieve happiness through the possession of material goods and ordinary self-affirmation. Many of them experience joy, maybe at least for some while. Unfortunately, for some reason, I am different. Therefore, I try to apply my reading to reconstruct various behavioral models connected to desire theories and then experiment with my situation. For me, there are two significant philosophies of desire: Lacanian and Deleuzian. My self-observation and experience incline me towards Lacan's model. Yet, it does not give any way out since it prioritizes an ultimate traumatic character of desire. Differently, Deleuze asserts the existence of lines of flight towards the unknown and creative connections with the forces from outside. Honestly, sometimes I doubt that either Deleuze or Lacan and Zizek are still relevant to explain what is going on right now. As you said:" There's no need for us, in 2020, to approach these matters as though we're living in Paris between 1940-1980." 'The matters' are dizzily super-fascinating!Quoting csalisbury

I've found that, for me, reading Zizek (and many other writers of theory) only led to meta-fascination: fascination with becoming-fascinated

Quoting csalisbury

People seem to get addicted to the 'discourse', reading about the same cluster of ideas from different angles, never actually changing anything, but going back to the bookshelf again and again and again.

Zizek is right about the link between fascinating objet a and the void. The addictive meta-fascination, going back to the same self-experiencing again, and again, and again indicates the hyper-accelerating motion around the void. But what is this void? It is a mode of death; it is an experience of death or absolute loneliness. Likely, since one cannot find ways out, and since one’s social self-affirmation could fail, one’s self starts to vibrate at the same location forcefully. It could be possible to find here the Lacanian split and doubling of ego, expressed by an intensive inner monologue between the interiorized Other and the imaginary self
of the mirror stage or a similar structure ( Althusser’s interpellation). One becomes governed by some model of death or fear of death. So, it could be about fear and the actualization of the transcendent subjectivation scheme.

Quoting Number2018

I will try to explain myself. Of course, I like this kind of philosophical stuff. Yet, there are a few more things. Pleasure, all types of enjoyment and self-enjoyment are everywhere. People aspire to achieve happiness through the possession of material goods and ordinary self-affirmation. Many of them experience joy, maybe at least for some while. Unfortunately, for some reason, I am different. Therefore, I try to apply my reading to reconstruct various behavioral models connected to desire theories and then experiment with my situation. For me, there are two significant philosophies of desire: Lacanian and Deleuzian. My self-observation and experience incline me towards Lacan's model. Yet, it does not give any way out since it prioritizes an ultimate traumatic character of desire. Differently, Deleuze asserts the existence of lines of flight towards the unknown and creative connections with the forces from outside. Honestly, sometimes I doubt that either Deleuze or Lacan and Zizek are still relevant to explain what is going on right now. As you said:" There's no need for us, in 2020, to approach these matters as though we're living in Paris between 1940-1980." 'The matters' are dizzily super-fascinating!

I sympathize with that. My base-state since ~13 years old has been anhedonia, punctuated by periods of emotional volatility. For me, also, that was the primary draw to Zizek and Deleuze (plus the romance and challenge of reading them.) I mean, I'm glad I'm read them, I think, or at least I wouldn't change anything if I had to go back and do that period of my life again.

But, in my case, the zizekian/lacanian focus on the tragic aspect of desire justified a kind of defeatism (there's nothing more than to accept the bleakness) while the Deleuzian stuff justified the emotional volatility (wild lines of flight, rhizomatic growth, mad-becomings, etc). And interwoven through all of it was some felt urgency, like, for some reason, I had to understand these guys, or be left out in some sort of metaphysical cold. Now, I'm thinking differently, and I guess part of any change is a period where you hit back at the last stage, and this thread is the tail-end of that transition period. It feels more and more like a fading turbulent relationship.

Quoting Number2018

Zizek is right about the link between fascinating objet a and the void. The addictive meta-fascination, going back to the same self-experiencing again, and again, and again indicates the hyper-accelerating motion around the void. But what is this void? It is a mode of death; it is an experience of death or absolute loneliness. Likely, since one cannot find ways out, and since one’s social self-affirmation could fail, one’s self starts to vibrate at the same location forcefully. It could be possible to find here the Lacanian split and doubling of ego, expressed by an intensive inner monologue between the interiorized Other and the imaginary self
of the mirror stage or a similar structure ( Althusser’s interpellation). One becomes governed by some model of death or fear of death. So, it could be about fear and the actualization of the transcendent subjectivation scheme.

My feeling is that, of the two things you mention, this 'void' is closer to absolute loneliness than death. But I think, at its essence, its an instinctive fear of re-encountering forgotten emotions and memories which are very painful (or a means of delaying encounter with 'pending' emotions built up from things you've lived without fully digesting) . The results of my own self-experimentation lead me to think that the idea of a 'void' is a sort of veil over very complex, differentiated fullnesses. Many of those are complex, differentiated fullnesses of (quite serious) pain. But there are also little pockets of something you might call happiness, or peace, within that pain, and you have to withstand the pain to expand those pockets. Which is often too much, and can lead you to retreat to the same hyper-accelerating around the void stuff. But as it goes on, and you realize you have the capacity to endure the pain (plus the faith that enduring it is meaningfully leading somewhere), it gets a little easer, and you begin to slip up less.

Quoting csalisbury

And interwoven through all of it was some felt urgency, like, for some reason, I had to understand these guys, or be left out in some sort of metaphysical cold.

I can relate to this chase. The thing is always around the corner or hidden in the thicket. The nymph is most alluring when not quite nude. There's no joy in the tavern as on the road thereto. Or occasionally there really is an ecstasy there, for awhile. But the ecstasy is in the transition, in the overcoming of resistance, in the unfastening of the garment.

I think of cats chasing the red dots of laser pointers. Do they know that it's really nothing on some level? But they let themselves believe ?

Quoting Number2018

People aspire to achieve happiness through the possession of material goods and ordinary self-affirmation. Many of them experience joy, maybe at least for some while. Unfortunately, for some reason, I am different.

I don't assume that we are different in the same ways, but I think that critical writers (Lacan, Freud, whoever) appeal to creeps and weirdos. I use those term playfully. A small subset of the population maybe just can't embrace various ordinary pleasures without some kind of self-consciousness that gets in the way. Like Zizek can't dance, because it's 'obscene.'

I could use the example of holidays for myself. Excepting early childhood, they are just meaningless to me. It's all the same one day. Birthday, deathday, whatever. It's zero o' clock in World City, and it's just more ripples in the nothingness. And yet sex and philosophy and music punch through. A few strong-enough signals dominate.

You mention 'ordinary self-affirmation.' For me the critical writers are some kind of violent alternative self-affirmation that also involves continual self-negation. It's like a drug addiction. And part of that self-negation gets around finally to mocking the master of various useless lingos, useless unless and until one is famous or paid, etc. But this self-critique is still part of the game of the playing with more fire than others. Lacan is to me just one of these drug addicts who caught on to become a supplier. Outsiders yawn or feel just enough attraction/envy to complain and attack. (Rival suppliers attack for their own reasons.)

Reply to f64 Quoting f64

I don't assume that we are different in the same ways, but I think that critical writers (Lacan, Freud, whoever) appeal to creeps and weirdos. I use those term playfully. A small subset of the population maybe just can't embrace various ordinary pleasures without some kind of self-consciousness that gets in the way. Like Zizek can't dance, because it's 'obscene.'

Quoting f64

For me the critical writers are some kind of violent alternative self-affirmation that also involves continual self-negation. It's like a drug addiction. And part of that self-negation gets around finally to mocking the master of various useless lingos, useless unless and until one is famous or paid, etc.

You represent a relatively common point of view: all these thinkers are freaks and nuts, having enormous and baseless ambitions. It is understandable and widespread. Yet, this opinion is as old as philosophy itself: Plato has perfectly narrated the story of Socrates.

Reply to csalisbury Quoting csalisbury

My feeling is that, of the two things you mention, this 'void' is closer to absolute loneliness than death. But I think, at its essence, its an instinctive fear of re-encountering forgotten emotions and memories which are very painful (or a means of delaying encounter with 'pending' emotions built up from things you've lived without fully digesting)

Likely, we do have different personal experiences of the void. Nevertheless, to find common ground, our task could be to conceptualize it. For Zizek, it is a crucial part of his project: "in order to enact the shift from capitalist to analyst's discourse, one has merely to break the spell of objet a, to recognize beneath the fascinating agalma, the Grail of desire, the void that it covers" ((Zizek, 'Incontinence of the void'). The first hypothesis is that the void could be a break, a dysfunction, or social bond destruction. It is how Lacanian classical psychoanalysis proceeds: any treatment procedure to the disruption of some refers to socialization's setting (for example, the mirror stage). Accordingly, the hyper-fascinating retaining of self could be understood as a perversive compensatory reaction, expressing the hyper joy of retaining the lost identity.
Quoting csalisbury

The results of my own self-experimentation lead me to think that the idea of a 'void' is a sort of veil over very complex, differentiated fullnesses.

Zizek proposes a more elaborated model. His void is now the current libido economy, directly incorporated into economic, social, and political systems. In fact, Zizek implicitly accepts and further develops Deleuze and Guattari's position that desire is an integral part of economic and political infrastructure. In this case, the void is the newest 'capitalistic' way of organization of the social.
When Zizek states: “: objet a as the void around which desires and/or drives circulate, and objet a as the fascinating element that fills in this void (since, as Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, objet a has no substantial consistency, it is just the positivization of a void)”, he proposes that the fascinating structure of desire is in mutual presupposition with the whole field of desire, the ‘capitalistic’ organization of libido.
Quoting csalisbury

The results of my own self-experimentation lead me to think that the idea of a 'void' is a sort of veil over very complex, differentiated fullnesses. Many of those are complex, differentiated fullnesses of (quite serious) pain. But there are also little pockets of something you might call happiness, or peace, within that pain, and you have to withstand the pain to expand those pockets.

I understand what you say, but however painful and traumatic our experiences could be, they tend to acquire inertia and become masochistic:
“one should assert its underlying principle: jouissance is suffering, a painful excess of pleasure (pleasure in pain),
and, in this sense, jouissance is in effect masochistic… We thus
have two extremes: on the one hand the enlightened hedonist who
carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting
hurt; on the other hand, the jouisseur proper, ready to consume his very
existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment—or, in terms of our society,
on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected
from all kinds of harassments and other health threats; on the other hand
the drug addict (or smoker, or …) bent on self-destruction”. (Zizek,Incontinence of the void")
Both extremes, poles of the spectrum of desire are the necessary products of our society.
We should be able to relate our experiences to our social reality. Likely, it is easier to say than to perform.That is what Guattari tried to accomplish in his therapeutics.

Quoting Number2018

You represent a relatively common point of view: all these thinkers are freaks and nuts, having enormous and baseless ambitions. It is understandable and widespread. Yet, this opinion is as old as philosophy itself: Plato has perfectly narrated the story of Socrates.

What you are missing (I think?) is that I count myself among them. Socrates is an excellent mention. Lately I'm fascinated with radicalizing his image.

While maybe it's a widespread view that philosophers are wackos, folks like Plato are used symbolically to help hallow institutions like universities. 'Critical thinking' is supposed to be a good thing, but institutions as such have to police their boundaries. These same hallowed institutions are largely gateways to $ in our society. Pay lipservice to some worn-out notion of critical thinking (or head-in-the-clouds transcendence) but really it's about hustling and conforming.

I do wonder how perfectly Plato narrated the story of Socrates. It seems likely enough that he swallowed up a more radical figure in order to cough up yet another story of this-is-how-it-is. We might call it a false assimilation of the negative.

Reply to csalisbury
What I most like about Lacan is that he is only interested in people who are interested in their condition. Like it was something that paying attention to could change.
Otherwise, why bother?

Quoting Valentinus

What I most like about Lacan is that he is only interested in people who are interested in their condition. Like it was something that paying attention to could change.
Otherwise, why bother?

True, but any therapist worth their salt is going to be interested in helping their patient to pay attention to their condition. I think the particular aspect of Lacan that makes him appealing to people into philosophy (like us) is his interest in people who are interested in paying attention to their condition as a way of moving toward intellectually modelling it (what number is saying when he talks about moving to 'the analyst's discourse'.) The end result of Lacanian therapy seems to be very close to 'knowing Lacanian psychoanalysis' (of course you have to keep going to the seminars to download the most recent OS update) And this is interesting, granted, but I don't think it's necessarily therapeutically helpful - at best relating your experience to a model is an auxillary step that helps you avoid psychological traps, at worst its entrenching a particularly recalcitrant defense mechanism (namely, intellectualization.)

I very much agree that paying attention is the crux, but there are different ways of paying attention.

Reply to Number2018 I hear you man. Again, I am familiar with Zizek and Deleuze, and I follow what you're saying. But all those thoughts swarming around a central goal feel to me like expressions of the thing they're describing. They will keep swarming around, tentatively descend, and then rise to swarm around again.

Reply to f64 Quoting f64

What you are missing (I think?) is that I count myself among them.

Sorry, I did not understand.Quoting f64

I do wonder how perfectly Plato narrated the story of Socrates. It seems likely enough that he swallowed up a more radical figure in order to cough up yet another story of this-is-how-it-is. We might call it a false assimilation of the negative.

Maybe you are right about Plato vs. Socrates relations. Even if
Plato’s representation of Socrates’s story was polished and censored, it contained scandalous and shocking elements. Differently, nowadays, we see an enormous augmentation of suppressing mechanisms that are ultimately pushing away any expressions of dissent and disturbance. Many of them are deployed at an undetectable, unconscious level of ordinary social interactions. Others are incorporated within the structures of public institutions and social networks. Likely, the individual unconscious self-censorship and self-control function as the most crucial factor in maintaining our social order.

Reply to csalisbury
Yes, what "paying attention" actually amounts to is the interesting thing.

The modelling element either reveals something kept from view or it does not. I don't know how to approach that side of things. It is easy to become what one opposes.

Quoting Valentinus

The modelling element either reveals something kept from view or it does not. I don't know how to approach that side of things. It is easy to become what one opposes.

Very much so. My go-to is if someone tells you they have the answer, they don't. & If you think you have the answer, then you no longer do (if you ever did)