244. Žižek and Foucault
In the preceding item of this blog (243), on Heidegger and Levinas, I
discussed possible ways around finitude, evitable death. Here I discuss
possible ways out from collectivity.
Foucault sinhowed how practices and thought are caught in social systems
(of the prison, clinic, psychiatric ward, etc.) that damage people and are yet
tacitly, implicitly taken for granted, so that even the victims resign
themselves to them.
In earlier items of this blog I discussed the notion of ‘system
tragedy’, where people are ensnared in structures of different levels of
interlocking institutions, positions, roles, practices, prisoner’s dilemma’s
and discourses, guided by ideologies that block their recognition
Žižek, following much of Lacan (though not always faithfully), similarly
talks of the ‘symbolic order’, framed by ideology, which is difficult to escape
or change from within. Instead of recognizing the inevitable imperfections and
prejudices of any.such social order, those are attributed to outside causes or
agents (races, religions, immigrants,…).
Earlier, in items 36 and 37 of this blog, I contrasted democracies with
authoritarian regimes, with the former acknowledging its imperfections, with
elections as a means to weed them out, and the latter projecting an image of
infallibility, hiding or denying failures or attributing them to outside
causes. However, democracies also cannot escape the guidance of ideology, such
as market ideology, that blind liberal democracies to the failures that are
breeding revolt
How to get away from the collectivity, the symbolic order, as an
individual?
In his late work, Foucault ended up proposing to ‘shape the self as a
work of art’, somehow beyond the reach of the system. How can this be done
without falling into solipsism, idiosyncratic isolation? Žižek[i]
proposed that one can only escape by a revolutionary ‘act’ that is blind,
without argument or justification, throwing itself off the cliff of established
order. Being constituted by the symbolic order, in escaping from it one commits
symbolic suicide.
So, how to proceed?
Lacan and Žižek depart from a notion taken from de Saussure that ‘a word
means what others don’t’. Thus, no word has meaning by itself (is ‘empty’, in
one of the hyperboles of Lacan and Žižek), but only as part of the whole of the
symbolic order. That produces the ineluctable system in which one is caught.
Then the only way out is destruction of the whole of that order, or. symbolic
suicide (Žižek), or solipsism (Foucault).
I think that perhaps there is another way out, in the indeterminacy and
open-endedness, the vagueness of meaning. The symbolic order is ‘gappy’. It is
not a closed, rigorous logical order with necessary and sufficient conditions
for something to fall under the ambit of the meaning of a word. For any
definition that you may give of the notion of a ‘chair’, I can give you
counterexample. This indeterminacy of meaning offers scope for deviance and
transformation.
To be more precise and analytical[ii],
I return to the account of meaning in terms of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ that I
used before in this blog. One the one hand we have existing concepts,
‘paradigms’, wrapped in clouds of connotation that are partly idiosyncratic to
the individual, from where words are cobbled together in sentences, ‘syntagm’,
where relevant meanings are picked out from the cloud to fit the context, in
conjunction with those of the other words in that sentence. Novel contexts,
yielding novel and odd looking phrases, may cause a shift of meaning of a
concept used in the sentence, a reshuffling of the set of connotations That
happens most prominently in poetry.
This yields room for freedom within the symbolic order. Perhaps this is
also how one might understand Foucault’s notion of ‘creating your life as a
work of art’. There is room for more or less odd, eccentric shifts of meaning.
And sometimes those are adopted more widely, causing a ripple in the symbolic
order.
Here I recall de Saussure’s distinction , used before in this blog,
between the given, intersubjective linguistic order, in ‘langue’, and the
idiosyncratic living practice of language, in ‘parole’, which may shift the
order in time.
Of course, one will often be left holding an unassimilable oddity that
may never be adopted in the established order. But even then one does not stand
emptyhanded, necessitating Žižek’s blind dive or Foucauldian solipsism. One may
persevere in trying to show how, crazy as it seems, the shift does work in the
novel context.
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