Read My Desire

Lacan Against the Historicists

Joan Copjec

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781781688885
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781688908
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines-psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is "literate in desire," and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.

1

Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets

In May 1968, an angry French student scrawled across the blackboard of one of the classrooms at the Sorbonne a sentence that immediately became a slogan for student discontent: “Structures don’t march in the streets.” A modern equivalent of the Wordsworthian “Up, up, my friends and quit your books,” the French phrase was accompanied by none of the ambivalence that surrounded its predecessor and targeted a specific, indigenous form of intellectualism—structuralism—which seemed to these students to be wholly dead and thus completely incapable of rising to the theoretical challenge posed by the urgent and chaotic events in whose midst they now found themselves. Structuralism was denounced for its universalizing program and for its adherence to empty, moribund forms, conceived at all times to be always already in place, sedimented. The dynamics of this student revolt were such that it unreflectively led to the celebration of precisely that which structuralism seemed designed to exclude: not simply the particular, but the particular in its most spontaneous and concrete form.

In the post-1968 years, celebration solidified into a number of concepts, one of which, that of the “pleb,” has had a substantial influence on a certain strain of political discourse, up to and including the present, where, under the banner of “multiculturalism” or “political correctness,” it sometimes returns. Proposed first by André Glucksmann, this concept named some pure instance of particularity that had the potential to undermine all the universalizing structures of power. The “pleb,” as she or he was embodied in workers, students, immigrants, all those made poor, sorry, worthless, or marginal by the society in place, was conceived as endowed with “the immediacy of a knowledge (connaissance) which springs from the realities of suffering and resistance.”¹ Following this definition, any discourse that “originated” with the pleb was thought to have a political value and correctness that was automatically foreclosed to discourses “originating” with those in positions of power.

Glucksmann developed his concept of the pleb with liberal borrowings from Michel Foucault, and Foucault, in turn, incorporated Glucksmann’s concept into his own thinking. But not without reservations. Interviewed by the Révoltes Logiques collective, Foucault uttered this warning regarding the pleb, which he described as “the constant and constantly silent target for the apparatuses of power”:

Without doubt the “pleb” must not be conceived of as the permanent foundation of history … the never totally extinct hearth of every revolt. The “pleb” undoubtedly has no sociological reality. But there is indeed always something which in some way escapes the relations of power; something in the social body, in the classes, in the groups, in the individuals themselves which is not at all the more or less docile or reactive raw material, but which is the centrifugal movement, the inverse energy, that which escapes. “The” pleb, undoubtedly, does not exist; but there is “plebness.” … This measure of plebness is not so much that which is outside relations of power as it is their limit.… Taking this point of view of the pleb … I do not think that [it] may be confused in any way with some neo-populism which substantifies the pleb, or some neo-liberalism which harps on the themes of its basic rights.²

One may want to quarrel with the final dismissive remark regarding the theme of rights, from which it seems clear that Foucault accepts without argument a neopopulist definition of rights, according to which their declaration is understood simply as the issuing of demands by egoistic and autonomous individuals who know, and who have reason to know better than anyone else, just what it is they want. We will simply note for the moment that there is another way to consider the question of rights³ and move on to a consideration of the rest of the passage. What strikes us first here is the judiciousness and intelligence with which the notion of the pleb is desubstantialized. No longer an individual or class of individuals with a special knowledge or history to which the larger social whole has little or no access, the pleb is now conceived as something totally devoid of content and thus as structurally unknowable, unthinkable, finally, of course, as nonhistoricizable. The resistance offered by the pleb does not come from some external point but is instead the very limit of the system of power, and as such not absorbable by it.

What strikes us next about Foucault’s account of resistance is the dialect in which it is spoken: “ ‘The’ pleb does not exist; but there is ‘plebness.’ ” Do your ears not detect the Lacanian inflection? Can you not hear the murmur of the famous Lacanian formulations “ ‘The’ woman does not exist [La femme n’existe pas]” and “There is some of One [Il y a d’l’Un]” behind Foucault’s phrases? What’s common to both the Lacanian and Foucauldian statements is a distinction between two sorts of existence, one implied by the verb exister and the other by the phrase il y a. The existence implied by the first is subject to a predicative judgment as well as to a judgment of existence; that is, it is an existence whose character or quality can be described. The existence implied by the second is subject only to a judgment of existence; we can say only that it does or does not exist, without being able to say what it is, to describe it in any way. If, as Foucault says, there is “plebness,” we are nevertheless unable to say what it is—the truth of “plebness” will therefore always be located outside knowledge, anyone’s knowledge, including that which is possessed by what we can no longer call “the” pleb him- or herself.

The thesis of this book is that, despite the insights advanced in the passage previously cited, Foucault can be charged with putting forth other arguments that run counter to, and thus exclude the possibility of, the very interpretation of “plebness” he gives here. Each of the following chapters focuses on some concept or phenomenon within the Foucauldian problematic—that is, a concept or phenomenon to which Foucault or his pupils have devoted some theoretical attention—in order to delineate more precisely what these “other arguments” are and to show how they subvert the argument articulated in the Révoltes Logiques interview. The name Foucault, then, does not designate in these chapters all the writings or arguments of that author, but primarily those that motivate the unfortunate turning away from the notion that subtends his argument regarding “plebness,” that is, the notion of an existence without predicate, or, to put it differently, of a surplus existence that cannot be caught up in the positivity of the social. The arguments I will critique are not dispersed throughout Foucault’s works but are limited to Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, and essays and interviews of the mid to late 1970s, when Foucault reversed his position with respect to linguistic and psychoanalytic theory. Whereas he began, like many of his intellectual contemporaries, by interpreting social facts in light of semiotic structures defined by structuralism and psychical structures defined by psychoanalysis, he not only abandoned but also fiercely opposed the terms of these two disciplines in the period that concerns us. Foucault gives a summary statement of this reversal in an interview conducted during this period: “I believe that it is not to the great model of signs and language that reference should be made, but to war and battle. The history which bears and determines us is war-like, not language-like. Relations of power, not relations of sense.”⁴ By this he declares, in effect, a kind of solidarity with the student dissidents who also turned their backs on structuralism. Not the ivory-tower structures of linguistics, the arid formalism of a self-reflexive semiotics, but the structures of war and power, streetwise structures: structures that march in the streets; this is what Foucault appears to be advocating.

The intent is not to trivialize Foucault’s rejection of linguistic or psychoanalytic models of analysis by reducing it to a mere rhetorical strategy. Rather, the point is first of all to underline the actual parallels in the discontent expressed by the students and by Foucault, known perhaps above all for his constructive dismissal of the universal intellectual in favor of the “specific” intellectual, who would define his labor as the analysis of particular institutions of power rather than of some overarching structure of domination. There is nothing wrong in this—the turn toward specificity is unquestionably sound. And if any suspicion lingers that through his emphasis on the particular he is in any way complicit in the emergence of the new populism he rightly condemns, this suspicion is easily dispersed by recalling that Foucault is concerned not with the “little people” that macrohistories overlooked, but with the microworkings of small-scale systems of power relations that produce these people. While he may always be focused on details, the minimal unit of his investigations is never simply an isolatable point, whether this be a person or a position, but always a relation.

This brings us to our second point. While the Foucauldian focus on relations of power and knowledge is widely hailed as a necessary corrective to more naive political theories that saw these as discrete entities, we will contend that his reduction of society to these relations is problematic. In opposition to those sociological theories that sought to explain a given social phenomenon by referring to the system of power that intervened in it, directing and distorting the phenomenon from the outside, Foucault analyzed the internal regime of power that circulated through the phenomenon itself. The various scientific texts, for example, that began in the eighteenth century to codify the myriad forms of sexual perversity and to council parents, educators, administrators, and physicians about how to protect their charges against them are read not as the edicts of a repressive power bent on putting an end to these private behaviors but as themselves part of a network of power that multiplied the points of contact or forms of relation between individuals by constructing sex as the secret core of the self. In other words, power was no longer conceived by Foucault as an external force that exerted itself on society, but as immanent within society, the “fine, differentiated, continuous” network of uneven relations that constituted the very matter of the social. Society now neatly coincided with a regime of power relations, and the former was thus conceived to structure itself by itself rather than to be structured by an external power.

Now, it is this notion of immanence, this conception of a cause that is immanent within the field of its effects, with which this book quarrels and repeatedly condemns as historicist. Since no attempt is made at a concise definition of historicism in the chapters that follow (the hope being that a more flexible definition will emerge from the various contexts provided in the discussions), it might be appropriate to hazard one here: we are calling historicist the reduction of society to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge.

To the extent that Foucault defined his project as the establishment of a genealogy, rather than a structure, of historical events, that is, to the extent that he undertook to account for the constitution of domains of objects and knowledges, or the mode of the institution of the social, and could not rest content with a mere analysis of the relations therein, he seems, in intent at least, to escape this charge of historicism. For, like the political philosopher Claude Lefort, Foucault does appear to argue that

society cannot in itself be conceived as a system of relations, no matter how complex we imagine that system to be. On the contrary, it is its overall schema, the particular mode of its institution that makes it possible to conceptualize … the articulation of its dimensions, and the relations established within it between classes, groups and individuals, between practices, beliefs and representations. If we fail to grasp this primordial reference to the mode of the institution of the social, to generative principles or to an overall schema governing both the temporal and spatial configuration of society, we lapse into a positivist fiction.… If, for example, we grant to relations of production or the class struggle the status of reality, we forget that social division can only be defined … insofar as it represents an internal division,… insofar as its terms are determined by relations, but also insofar as those relations are themselves determined by their common inscription within the same space and testify to an awareness of their inscription therein.⁵

The problem, then, is not with the way Foucault formulates his project but with the way he carries it out. For despite the fact that he realizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power’s institution, he cannot avail himself of the means of doing so and thus, by default, ends up limiting that regime to the relations that obtain within it; he becomes, despite himself, a bit of a historicist, as well as—as he himself notes—a bit of a nominalist.

What is it that prevents Foucault from accomplishing his declared task? His disallowance of any reference to a principle or a subject that “transcends” the regime of power he analyzes. He correctly and strongly believes that the principle of a regime’s institution cannot be conceived as a metaprinciple, that is, as a logical observation that is simply added to all the other observations one may make about a particular regime in order to organize, embrace, or comprehend them. The principle of construction or staging cannot occupy a different, a superior, position with respect to the regime it stages. Not wishing to look for it in some exterior realm, Foucault eventually abandons, without actually acknowledging that he is doing so, his attempt to define the very principle he supposedly seeks.⁶

Yet some notion of transcendence is plainly needed if one is to avoid the reduction of social space to the relations that fill it. A rethinking of this notion is foreclosed, however, by Foucault’s substitution of a battle-based model of analysis for the language-based one he inherited from structuralism and which he emphatically rejects for what he takes to be its inherent idealism. In fact the opposite is true; it is the rejection of the linguistic model, properly conceived, that leads to idealism. For the argument behind the adoption of this model—something cannot be claimed to exist unless it can first be stated, articulated in language—is no mere tautology; it is a materialist argument parallel to the rule of science which states that no object can be legitimately posited unless one can also specify the technical means of locating it. The existence of a thing materially depends on its being articulated in language, for only in this case can it be said to have an objective—that is to say, a verifiable—existence, one that can be debated by others.

A corollary of Foucault’s denigration of the supposed idealism of language-based analyses is his complaint that they “flatten out” the phenomena they purport to study, that they place all phenomena on the same plane.⁷ This is certainly true in one sense; a linguistically informed analysis is obliged to forgo the possibility of a metalanguage; the field of phenomena to be analyzed, therefore, cannot be stratified. No phenomenon appearing there my be taken to account for, to interpret, all the others; none stands above the others as the final interpretant, itself beyond interpretation. Yet wouldn’t Foucault himself sanction such a destratification, such a demurral before the assertion of a metaprinciple? And isn’t the linguistic argument against metalanguage an argument, finally, against the notion of an immanent cause, a notion that has, since Hume, been demonstrably unsupportable?

The upshot of all of this is that if Foucault is right (without meaning to be) about language’s “flattening out” of phenomena in this first sense, he is wrong in a second sense. For one of the things he surely does mean is that the linguistic model completely unfolds the whole of the society it analyses, puts the whole thing on the same plane. But if we were to follow out the reasoning begun earlier, we would arrive at the opposite conclusion: an acknowledgment of metalanguage’s impossibility compels us to realize that the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment; no diagram will ever be able to display it fully, once and for all. At the same time this acknowledgment does not compel us to imagine a society that never quite forms, where—as the deconstructionists would have it—events never quite take place, a society about which we can say nothing and do so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets
• 2. The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan
• 3. Cutting Up
• 4. The Sartorial Superego
• 5. Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety
• 6. The Unvermögender Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America
• 7. Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir
• 8. Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason
• Notes