Analysing the Cultural Unconscious

Science of the Signifier

Lilian Munk Rösing, Henrik Jøker Bjerre, Brian Benjamin Hansen, Kirsten Hyldgaard, Jakob Rosendal, Lilian Munk Rösing, Henrik Jøker Bjerre, Brian Benjamin Hansen, Kirsten Hyldgaard, Jakob Rosendal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350262287
• eBook ISBN: 9781350088382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

What are we doing when taking psychoanalysis from the couch to the analysis of society, culture, and arts? How is it possible to do so? How is it possible to move from singular experiences to universal structures detected in culture and society? Could psychoanalysis applied to art works become more sensitive to their aesthetics form? Psychoanalysis is often disclaimed as non-scientific, since its main object – the unconscious – has no positive existence. This book, however, proposes psychoanalysis to be a "science of the signifier". It takes as its object the signifier – the signifying part of the sign – insisting that it always says more (or less) than intended, because its very materiality carries unintended messages. By defining the object of psychoanalysis as the signifier, this volume argues that we can speak of psychoanalysis as a science, even if it is closer to semiotics than biology. Analysing the Cultural Unconscious builds on this idea by arguing that the analysis of the signifier is the way to understand not only the individual unconscious, but also the cultural one. Replacing a person's monologue on the couch with ideology criticism or a piece of art, applied psychoanalysis allows us to analyse culture and the arts in a new way, uncovering the cultural unconscious.

Part One

Science and the Signifier

1

The Cunning of the Signifier

Henrik Jøker Bjerre

It is no unfamiliar thought to the history of philosophy that the actions of human beings contain something more, a kind of surplus of meaning, than what is clear to the humans themselves, something that escapes the consciousness of the subject(s) producing it. Mostly, though, such a conception has been relying on a notion of foresight, providence, or a spiritual power that “wants something” with history, such that its course gradually unfolds on the back of its subjects, making use of their actions and intentions as the material content of history, but developing beyond what they intended or could even imagine. What I want to do in this chapter is to suggest that there is an interesting line of thought to be found particularly in Leibniz, Smith, and Hegel that might inspire the scientists of the signifier in this regard, and, furthermore, that the great advantage of the science of the signifier is that it relies less on a conception of divine intent than they do.

Invisible forces

In Leibniz, we find the thought of a surplus of meaning to human actions (not in so many words, but by implication) in the idea of the best possible world. Leibniz’s theodicy includes a magnificent vision of all the infinitely many possible worlds that God scrolled through before creating the world—and of the least flawed one that he would allow to come into existence. The argument for the world being the “best possible” is strictly logical: Out of love God wanted to create a world, but he could only create it on condition of it not being perfect, for if it was, it would be identical to himself (for only God is perfect), and so nothing would have been created at all. Having seen all the ways in which such a world could turn out, God then chose the best possible path, the one closest to perfection. Thus, the actual course of the world we live in, with all its events and actions, is the best possible that could have been, given its necessary imperfection, and if we think that something shouldn’t have happened, it is only because we cannot see the bigger picture.

One must judge the works of God as wisely as Socrates judged those of Heraclitus in these words: What I have understood thereof pleases me; I think that the rest would please me no less if I understood it. (Leibniz 1990: 215)

If, for example, I experience loss, it is only because any alternative world without my loss would have included even greater suffering for me or someone else. If I hadn’t spilled coffee, maybe I would have walked into a door and hit my nose. If there were no storms and earthquakes, maybe there would be no fertile land either, and people would starve.¹ God has seen the other possible world, and he has seen that it is worse than this one. On a strict reading of Leibniz, I think we can extend this even to actions that appear to be unmoral: If I make mistakes or damage something, this action contains a kind of moral value nonetheless, although unknown to me, because it is literally the lesser evil. My action contributes to a general development that is overall better than it would have been, if I hadn’t acted so. A mistake or an evil is to Leibniz therefore always what we might call a wrong step in the right direction. We secretly contribute to a better world, even when we do something wrong. (This, of course, has very intricate implications for the concept of freedom, but I will have to leave those aside here.)

In Adam Smith, there is less metaphysical grandeur, but still a well-known case of silent workings behind our backs. The infamous concept of an “invisible hand” guiding our economical behavior toward the best interest of all relies precisely on some surplus meaning that works best, when we remain completely unconscious of it. Smith does not have a vision of the infinite totality of all possible worlds that God saw before creation, but he does offer a theological justification of the current state of affairs, or more precisely of the distribution of wealth. Following his own interest in industry, the producer is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which is no part of his intention,” as it is called in the Wealth of Nations from 1776 (Smith 2012: 445). Already in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), we are told that the rich naturally share their wealth with the poor, because they employ them to further other, more abstract aims than their own immediate needs. The rich are thus “led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society” (Smith 2009: 215). Although the invisible hand can to some extent be explained in “scientific terms” by the secondary effects of individual consumption (even the rich can only eat so much), Smith does in fact invoke nothing less than “Providence” to explain why this is so, or maybe rather to reassure us that it is so: “When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces” (Smith 2009: 215).

It is a curious fact that Smith here actually himself seems to be saying more than he intends. In his History of Astronomy, which was published posthumously in 1795, but was written some time before 1759, that is, before the Theory of Moral Sentiments, he uses the concept of an invisible hand ironically to mock those superstitious explanations of nature that assume some inscrutable force behind phenomena that we do not immediately understand. No one ever apprehended “the invisible hand of Jupiter” as an explanation of natural phenomena, as he puts it (Smith 1795: 25). But only a few years later, it is as if this ironic concept slips into his pen, when he seeks to explain how the generation of wealth somehow must come to benefit all—a deus ex machina much like the one he himself ridiculed in the realm of astronomy.

The problem with the invisible hand, however, is not that it relies on explanations that go beyond that which can immediately be observed. Rather, it is that it is a bad theory about that which goes beyond what can immediately be observed. In spite of its speculative justification of inequality, I think there is something right about Adam Smith’s slip: Obviously, the significance of an economic transaction cannot be reduced to the conscious intention an actor has for doing it. Such reductionism would invalidate the Marxist analysis of surplus value as well, or Bourdieu’s conception of classes, etc. There is in a way an invisible hand guiding our economic behavior, or there are a number of hands, probably pulling in various directions. The problem is the unification of these hands into one hand belonging to a benevolent free market deity. (As Mladen Dolar has elegantly put it, the invisible hand turned out to be a fist performing an uppercut.)

But it is in Hegel that we find the most systematic and integrated conception of a surplus of meaning in human behavior that contains effects beyond what the subject itself had imagined or intended. In his lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel is very explicit about this, and even at times, he seems quite cynical about the endeavors of human subjects. They tend to think of themselves as masters of their own conduct much more than they really are. True, “nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion” (Hegel 2004: 23), and it is clearly the passion and engagement of individuals that have pushed history forward, but the direction of history, its true significance and thereby also the significance of those passionate individual actions, is nonetheless progressing unbeknownst to the actors themselves. The famous concept of the “cunning of reason” says precisely this:

The special interest of passion is thus inseparable from the active development of a general principle: for it is from the special and determinate and from its negation, that the Universal results…. It is not the general idea that is implicated in opposition and combat, and that is exposed to danger. It remains in the background, untouched and uninjured. This may be called the cunning of reason—that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays the penalty and suffers the loss. (Hegel 2004: 32–3)

It is this view that led to the remarkable statement that the great merit of the Peloponnesian War was that it gave occasion to the wonderful historical account given by Thucydides (“his immortal work is the absolute gain which humanity has derived from that contest” (Hegel 2004: 266)).

Hegel’s conception of history, like that of Leibniz and Smith, relies on a divine necessity or self-realization (“God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World” (Hegel 2004: 36)), but unlike his predecessors, he insists on the scientific investigation of the structure and movement of this plan and refrains from installing “inscrutable” forces that mysteriously fill out the gaps of our understanding.

The plan, which is carried out, is the realization of freedom, and Hegel shows how the consciousness of freedom has developed throughout human history to its culmination in German thought (and in the German state); in the early Eastern cultures, One was free; in Greece and Rome, some were free; but only in Germany, all are free. This is the idea, which establishes the fundamental structure of history, while human intentions and passions make the content. In a striking metaphor, Hegel describes the idea as “the warp” and the human passions as the “woof” in “the vast arras-web of Universal History” (Hegel 2004: 23). Human passions are thus woven into an already pre-established structure. There is no history without them, but they are not occurring in an empty space; they are always already placed in a web that gradually unfolds and gets its shape from the repeated “Einschlag” and from the idea that is there to be woven in.

I think one can overemphasize the Platonic tendency in these remarks. Marx is of course right (in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) that it sometimes seems that the idea is the subject of history, while (what Marx calls) the “actual subject” is reduced to a predicate to this idea (Marx 1970: 209). But, on the other hand, one might ask, What is a subject without its predicates? “[A] meaningless sound, a mere name,” as Hegel himself puts it in the Phenomenology (Hegel 1977: 12); that is, no concept or idea or substance would be anything without that through which it is something specific. Even God himself is nothing without his self-othering, that is, without the realizing activity made up of human history.² Hegel is clearly presupposing a fundamental rationality that unfolds in history, but he just as much sees the actual unfolding of history as that which makes the rational real or through which alone it “is translated into the domain of objectivity,” as he says (Hegel 2004: 27). Freedom is produced, in other words, and rather than saying that there is freedom, which realizes itself through history, on the back of human suffering, one should say that it is humans themselves who produce freedom, even when they are not aware that this is what they are doing. Or put in another way: What escapes us in the mastery of our own conduct is, paradoxically, not that we are less free than we think or that we cannot realize ourselves as free beings as much as we think, but on the contrary, that we actualize freedom in the course of our actions even more than we are aware of. The “warp” that human action is woven into is thus not a preconceived course of history, like in Leibniz, but much more something like the dialectical ground rules that push development forward through negation of the “special and determinate.”

The connection of events above indicated, involves also the fact, that in history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not indulged in their design. (Hegel 2004: 27)

So, there is something fundamentally right about the intuition in Leibniz, Smith, and Hegel that the conscious intentions of an agent are not enough to explain what it is that he or she is out to achieve, and maybe even that they are not enough to explain what it is that he or she really wants. What they also share, however, is a spiritualized personification of the secret master behind the curtain pulling the strings behind the backs of the (human) agent. There is moral value, utility, or progress beyond the scope of the agent’s intentions, because a divine foresight, providence, or plan is being realized through the medium of historical actions. This is where I think psychoanalysis offers a stricter and more materialist form of explanation. Indeed, what psychoanalysis offers is precisely what Adam Smith himself requested in his History of Astronomy: more “philosophical” and less speculative explanations that connect the gaps in our understanding, which metaphysics or religion fill in with divine intervention or inscrutable forces.

The science of the signifier

Psychoanalysis is closely tied with the acknowledgment of a certain hierarchy and asymmetry between the signifier and the signified. If a sound image were always unequivocally related to a specific and distinct idea, there would be a lot less ambiguity, insecurity, and openness of meaning, and probably also less neurotic problems. One would imagine, for example, that children were initiated into the broad field of language by gradually taking in more and more signs, calmly relating each signifier to an appropriate signified. Any question could be answered with a precise definition: “X is called… ” or “Y means….” Maybe in some cases confusion could arise, when certain signifiers obtained several possible meanings, but such confusion could then be sorted out and clarified. Some people would of course still mess up things and confuse categories or meanings, because they were stressed or had experienced something traumatic, or because they were just stupid, but it would be clear to a competent language user that this was what they were doing.

Of course a lot of language does function more or less unproblematically, and one could certainly argue that for the normal and reasonably smooth functioning of culture, it is necessary that most of us most of the time behave as if there really was no problem between the signifiers and the signifieds. But there is, and the question is not really whether or not we pretend that there isn’t, but rather how we pretend that there isn’t, and how well this strategy works to keep the problem at bay. (According to psychoanalysis, there are three basic strategies: repression, disavowal, and foreclosure.)

If we take the ontogenetic route of explanation once again, isn’t it quite literally so that in the beginning there is simply a massive network of signifiers that do not have any clear meaning at all? To the child, there is inevitably a “too muchness”: an overwhelming reality of signifiers that someone seems to intend something with, but which makes no clear sense to the child. They are sounds that are directed at the child, but do not correspond to anything. “What is it that the Other wants?” is a question that comes up as a natural reaction to this presence of a load of signifiers that don’t mean anything or the meaning of which we have to grasp for and cling on to when we seem to have found something that apparently works to satisfy the Other. Therefore, it is the Other who really knows what we mean when we start to speak. I do not have authority over the meaning of the sounds that I utter, and so to every utterance, there is attac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Figures
• About the authors
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Index
• Imprint