Mirrors
without images:
Mimesis and
recognition in Lacan and Adorno
Au-delà de la grille basse
Qui me sépare de moi même
Qui divise tout sauf mes cendres
Sauf la terreur que j’ai de moi.
Paul Éluard
When it
comes to the history of the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis,
there are two major moments to be considered, that which took place in France
and in Germany. It is widely accepted that these intellectual experiences have
led to completely distinct paths. In
Germany, the confrontation between philosophy and psychoanalysis was carried
out by the Frankfurt School through its strategy of reintroducing Freudian
discoveries within the history of ideas. In France, the philosophical inquire
concerning psychoanalysis permeated
several moments of contemporary French thought. Nevertheless, the main operator
of such confrontation came from the Lacanian reconstruction of the Freudian
metapsychology.
Commonly it is accepted that there
is no sharing of dialogic fields between the Frankfurt School and Jacques
Lacan. The Frankfurt School initially
attempted to build up a kind of archaeology of social bonds and
socialisation processes based on readings of Freud’s theory of drives; an
archaeology capable of guiding both the renovation of the ambitions of social
praxis, as well as the modalities of its critique. Jacques Lacan’s way, on the
other hand, seemed to follow another cartography. It is true that we can find a
kind of Lacanian archaeology of social bonds, mainly if we consider the theory
of the “five” discourses. However, despite
this interest in producing a theory of discourse, Lacan seemed to have
developed a clinic grounded mainly on the recognition of the blockage produced
by the unconscious against self-reflection processes. In this sense, the
Lacanian psychoanalysis would not admit any notion of positive synthesis able
to weave the strands of reconciliation between the emancipatory ambitions of
consciousness and the radical negativity of the unconscious. This would lead us
to understand the end of analysis as a process of subjective destitution. Such
a process would place psychoanalysis in the opposite course of any
possible enlargement of the comprehension field of the consciousness and of any
possible dis-alienation of the subject, blocking the dialogue between Lacan and
the emancipatory aspirations of the Frankfurt School. But perhaps our era is
already entitled to criticise this way of addressing the problem.
Recuperating
the subject… through the object
Certainly, the notion of cure in the Lacanian
clinic is not compatible neither with Erich Fromm’s ideas about processes of
individual development and about culturalism nor with the utopic horizon of
social reconciliation proposed by Marcuse. At the same time, the Lacanian
clinic distances itself from the attemps proposed by Habermas and Honneth to
construct a theory of intersubjectivity that take into accout psychoanalytic
models[1].
However, with Jacques Lacan and Theodor Adorno we witness two contemporary
moments of history of ideas that are very close to one another. It is not the
case here to simply show the interfaces between these authors, but to further
consequences produced by the acknowledgement of the convergence between two
apparently distant programs.
To begin with, we know that both Adorno and
Lacan have worked out their intellectual experiences by means of a project of a
return to Freud. If this movement is
clear in Lacan, we must remember also the major role of Adorno’s reading on
Freud’s thinking - a reading that has influenced in a decisive way his
philosophical project and the structure of his concept of self-criticism of
reason. Adorno’s
materialist stance becomes simply incomprehensible if we neglect what
psychoanalysis has offered him concerning the genetic of the self, the relation
between drive and the structuring of thought, the role of identifications in
the determination of the self-identity and the strength of narcissism in the
colonisation of social life forms. The psychonalytic core of Adorno’s theory is
so evident that some commentators, e.g. Honneth, see in it the cause for a
certain “sociological deficit” present in the fact that it would be not
possible for Adorno to produce a true reflection on the social modes of organisation of society[2].
However, when it comes to a possible confluence
between Lacan and Adorno, we can say that its core becomes visible if we recall
that both – in opposition to the major trends of contemporary thought - seeked to renew the
ways to sustain the subjectivity principle starting from an absolutely
converging strategy. Instead of assuming the discourse of the subject’s
death or the return to the immanence of being, both of them were willing to
sustain the principle of subjectivity, although devoided of a thought of identity.
For these authors the subject is no
longer a substantial entity on which self-determination processes are based on;
rather, it becomes the locus of non-identity and of splitting. This
operation gains legibility if we recall that the common Hegelian roots of
Lacan’s and Adorno’s thought allowed them to develop an articulation between
subject and negation that indicates a major strategy to sustain the figure of
the subject in the present time. The result was that non-identity, understood
as a non retrievable negativity that is fundamental to the structuring of a
subjectivity that does not vanish within
the universal medium of language, could become the Adornian utopical horizon in
the same way that it will represent
what needs to be recognised by the subject at the end of Lacanian analysis.
This idea of the subject as locus
of non-identity may become clearer
if we recall how the two thinkers – once again contrary to the major trends of
contemporary thought – sustained the importance of confronting experiences
between subject and object. Lacan and Adorno have not abandoned the
subject/object dialectic since there is
an experience of decentering that is fundamental for the determination
of subjectivity and only given by a
certain regime of identification between subject and object.
Such regime should not be understood
based on the mechanisms of projection of the I onto the world of
objects, or of assimilation of the object through a recollection that is
capable of internalising splittings produced by the consciousness. Rather, this
is about taking the subject to recognize that he “have an objective core”[3]
(einen Kern von Objekt) that is not reducible to the processes of
individuation and reflexive appropriation. That is why subjectivity should no
longer be recognised exclusively through its remission to the intersubjective
ground that structures the symbolical field of social interaction processes,
but in the restoring of confrontations that characterise the dialectics between
subject and object.
Adorno called mimesis this mode of
recognition that is fundamentally connected with the figure of the subject
regarded as locus of non-identity. This article aims to show how
the Adornian problem of mimesis is
not a mere symptom of a repressed tendency of the Adornian text to entify the
recourse to Naturphilosophie.
Actually, mimesis would be the fundamental piece for a reorientation of the
discussions about the modes of recognition available to the subjects, as we can
see from the following seminal statement:
If
speculation on the state of reconciliation were permitted neither the
undistinguished unity of subject and object nor their antithetical hostility
would be conceivable in it; rather the communication of what was distinguished (Kommunikation des
Unterschiedenen). Not
until then would the concept of communication, as an objective concept, come
into its own, The present one is so infamous because the best there is, the
potential of an agreement between people and things, is betrayed to an
interchange (Mitteilung) between
subjects according to the requirements of subjective reason.[4]
One often sees in this statement the
symptom of a philosophy that persists in considering the relationship
subject/world exclusively as a confrontation between subject and object – a
confrontation proper to the philosophy of consciousness – while neglecting the
intersubjective structure that would determine the relationship with the
object. This could explain, for example, the necessity to rescue a blurring
concept of mimesis as promise of an agreement
between people and things, in spite of the reflexive
processes of understanding already present in daily communication.
We must nevertheless insist that
such reading inverts the poles and sees as “negligence” what is in fact the
result of a critique. What we have here is a critique against the annulation of
all ontological dignity of what appears as resistance
and opacity of the object to the intersubjective scheme of signification.
On the other hand, we have also a critique against the annulation of all
ontological dignity of the irreducibility
of what, in the subject, does not accede to the positive determinations of
the shared word in uses of language in ordinary life. Thus, a “communication of
what was distinguished” must be sensible to this chiasme by means of
which the subject encounters in the
object the same opacity that he find in certain modes of relationship to
himself. This search for an alternative communication concept molded out of
the confrontation between subject and object brings Adorno and Lacan nearer to
each other.
In relation to Lacan, it is accepted
that the theme of recognition is linked to an initial moment of his thought
still marked by a certain French Hegelianism. But this attempt to reconstruct the rationality of
analytic praxis by means of intersubjective desire recognition processes would
have been abandoned by Lacan when his
intellectual experience reached maturity. In its place, he endeavored an attempt to defend the pure
singularities that go beyond any universalist demand of recognition. This would
have led him to statements as “There is no universal that doesn’t contain an
existence that denies it”[5].
As it seems, Lacan would have performed
a typically post-structuralist turn in his intellectual experience, moreover if
we recall how the themes of the irreducibility of pure difference or of non-structured
multiplicities influenced the discussions of philosophers such as Derrida and
Deleuze.
This defense of pure singularities,
despite the sustentation of the recognition processes in clinic, seemed to have
set Lacanian psychoanalysis on the route of return to a pre-reflexive immanence
of being. As Lacan seemed to have abandoned the universalising aspiration of
recognition, this immanence of being was
to be conjugated in the particular and would admit only a soundless, monologic jouissance
that did not hide its proximity to psychosis. It is somewhat as if Lacan would
succumb to the temptation of “closing the individual over himself”[6],
as has been pointed out by Gilles Gaston-Granger.
However, as we must insist, from the
moment psychoanalysis tries to move away from the reflexibility intrinsic to a
subject marked by the desire of being recognized, the criteria to establish the
truth of what is given in the field of experience is lost. This is, unless we
return, in a somewhat subterraneous manner, to a simplified notion of subjective
certainty which has no need of the Other to become legitimated. It is
therefore necessary to show that the cure in Lacanian clinic is inseparable
from a movement of subjectivation
that necessarily leads to self-objectivation
of the subject in a structured field – demonstrating the impossibility of
thinking a clinic devoid of recognition procedures. The core question
encompasses the recognition regime that is able to respond to the imperatives
of self-objectivation that are specific to the decentered Lacanian subject and
to the opacity of the drive, of the sexual and of the body.
Let us be reminded that
psychoanalysis has to cope with a double claim. It has to be a critique of
knowledge through the comprehension of consciousness as synonym of alienation.
In this, it is a discourse of discordance and splitting between knowledge and
truth. However, by its opposition to the immediate self-identity of
consciousness, psychoanalysis cannot transform itself in the hypostasis of
difference, of non-savoir and of a discourse of disintegration of the
subject. Within the analytic frame, this disintegration could produce nothing,
but psychosis and foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, that is, a
fragmentation of identity characteristic to the paranoid deliriums of President
Schreber. Then, the true challenge of Lacanian psychoanalysis is not to
postulate the disintegration of the subject, but to find the strength of cure
peculiar to these experiences of nonidentity which break up both the circle of
narcissistic certitudes of the I as well as the previously structured and
controlled frame of intersubjective exchanges. Nevertheless, when we speak of
an experience that is not a spiritual
ascesis, we necessarily assume a formal horizon of recognition that is
available to the subject. In the
Lacanian case, this recognition is not totally carried out in the
intersubjective field of language. On the contrary, it is dependent on the
confrontation of the subject with the opacity of an object that causes his
desire and that is not completely assimilable by the symbolic inscription in
the signifier.
We may have a better understanding
of this point if we remember that in order to socialize himself in the
intersubjective field of language the subject has to lose his symbiotic bonds
with the objects of partial auto-erotic drives (or objects a). This is a
major theme of psychoanalytic literature: initially, the baby lives in a state
of symbiotic undifferentiation, which has to be broken up to allow the
socialization processes to operate. However, this breaking up implies losing
the confrontation with which, in the subject, is not submitted to individuation
by the image of the corps propre and by the insertion in the
socialization field of language. One of the characteristics of Lacanian clinic
consists in defending the necessity of the subject to confront himself again
with these objects (which will continue to cause his desire), thus recovering
what is “non-subjective in the subject”. Therefore, the self-objectivation of
the subject, according to Lacan, is not connected to the position of expressive
dimensions of socialised individuals. It is connected to the subject’s
self-recognition in an object that bears neither
his image nor the marks of his individuation.
With this in mind, we should approach the problem of the relation
between mimesis and recognition in Lacan and Adorno.
Critique of intersubjectivity
What makes this strategy of self-objectivation
necessary it is the fact that Lacan has converged the mechanisms of socialization and the processes of alienation. This strict convergence is
supported by a “totalizing critique of reification of ordinary language” which
can be found in Lacan and Adorno due to relatively convergent reasons. In both
cases, ordinary language becomes the major space of reification and alienation.
This will lead both Lacan and Adorno to sustain that there is an irreducible
tension between certain dimensions of subjectivity and the intersubjective
linguistic field. This follows from the assertion of the impossibility of the
subject’s self-objectivation inside the alienated reality of modern societies.
Lacan even comes near to outlining a critique
of instrumental rationality by showing that the empty speech of reificated
language produces a communication that is submitted “to the enormous
objectivation constituted by science, and it will allow the subject to forget
his subjectivity”[7]. This
objectivation of the instrumental discourse leads to “the most profound alienation of the subject in our scientific
civilization”[8]. Within
this instrumental dimension and context, Lacan speaks of language as of a
“wall” that hinders the subject to establish authentically intersubjective
relationships. The consequences of this way of thinking become clear when Lacan
abandons his sociohistorical statements to simply affirm:
The
signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the
subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce
the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the
subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak,
as subject[9].
That is to say, even the intersubjective field of the signifying
chain can only take the subject to speak by petrifying and dividing it,
since: “if it appears at on one side as meaning, produced by the signifier, it
appears at the other as aphanisis”[10].
The subject appears at the other side
as something non objectifiable, as aphanisis, indicating a fundamental relation
of inadequacy between subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
Adorno, in his turn, will insist
that the subject of our time would face a reality mutilated by the identitary
thought of the logic of equivalents intrinsic to the commodity form. This
identitary thought takes us necessarily in the direction of a reificated
language, where “not only the qualities are dissolved in thought, but men are
brought to actual conformity”[11].
This submission to the phantasmatic objectivity of fetishist abstraction
establishes an inadequacy between the singularity aspirations and the
intersubjective field of language:
when
public opinion has reached a state in which thought inevitably becomes a
commodity, and language the means of promoting that commodity, then the attempt
to trace the course of such depravation has to deny any allegiance to current
linguistic and conceptual conventions, lest their world-historical consequences
thwart it entirely[12].
Nevertheless, it seems that the
directions of Lacan and Adorno would not be convergent, since the Adornian
diagnosis of language reification would be the result of a historical
assessment coupled with the development modes of capitalism, while the Lacanian
diagnosis would be a structural one. We must however insist in a certain problematic historicism peculiar to the
Adornian critique of reification. Adorno is the first to sustain that the disqualification of the sensible, which
appears as the major result of a reificated language submitted to instrumental
rationality, is a phenomenon that is indistinguishable from western reason:
“Unity is the slogan from Parmenides to Russell. The destruction of gods and qualities
alike is insisted upon”[13].
We know the passages of the Dialectic
of Enlightenment devoted to this kind of consideration. Axel Honneth had
already pointed to a certain “inversion” of the classic Marxist perspective in
Adorno and Horkheimer, since “in the totalizing view of the Dialectic of Enlightenment commodity
exchange is merely the historically developed form of instrumental rationality”[14].
The roots of this rationality are to be found (and here Adorno could not be
more Freudian) in the human process of self-preservation in face of the dangers
of nature, and in the humanization of the drives. That is to say that the
historical coordinates of the critique of political economy are submitted to a
large-scale philosophy of history with a kind of structural weight. With this
in mind, we can try to think some problems concerning mimesis.
We
know a certain “hegemonic” interpretation of the problem of mimesis in Adorno,
produced above all by Habermas, Wellmer and Honneth. Understood as recuperation
of a non-conceptual affinity that would escape the conception of a relation
between subject and object determined by the cognitive-instrumental mode, the
Adornian mimesis would promise a
reconciliation between subject and nature. This reconciliation would be able to
go beyond the submission of the diversity of sensible experience by the
categorical structure of reason. However, thinking of reconciliations based on
nonconceptual affinities seems to be ascribed to a perspective of return “to
the origins by means of which one seeks to return below the rupture between
culture and nature”[15].
Such interpretation presume a
concept of nature in Adorno as a sign of
authenticity. However, this is
against any possibility of a dialectic
thought of nature, a thought in which nature is neither considered as a
positive horizon of sense nor as a simple
reificated discursive construct. Nevertheless, it seems that this is the
direction of Adorno’s thought. If mediation is a universal process, it is
simply impossible that nature appears as locus
of the origin. On the contrary, if “the nature of which art seeks the image
doesn’t yet exist”, it is not because Adorno is engaging in a negative
theology, but because nature is defined precisely as that which hinders the integral indexation of existence by a
concept. Nature is a figure of the
negative, which is not strange to someone like Adorno, who articulates
outer and inner nature and read the problem of inner nature from the
perspective of Freud’s theory of drives.
Starting from this context, we can
understand the configuration of Adorno’s
notion of mimesis. However, to grasp the specificity of this concept it
is necessary to recall that mimesis aims to cope with four different
problems: the problem of the truth content of analogical thinking which
sustains magical practices and rituals; the drive tendency to regress to
“nature”; the animal mimicry; and the contemporary aesthetic experience of
confrontation with reificated materials.
We know how modern reason refuses to assign any cognitive content to
mimesis, analogy and similarity, since “magical” thinking would be precisely
the thought still imprisoned in participation chains. But Adorno believes that
the mimetic character of magical thinking has a content of truth, which however
does not mean ignoring the rupture between nature and culture. It only means
that the magical thought is capable of positing certain identifying processes
that are repressed by a reason reduced to its instrumental condition. These
processes concern above all the manner in which self-identity recognises itself
as a moment of difference. Lacan has shown this in a clear way in his comment
on the nature of “iterative identification” of the Bororo Indian who says “I am
an ara”:
Only the anti-dialectic mentality of a culture which dominated by
objectifying ends, tends to reduce all subjective activity to the ego´s being,
can justify Van den Steinen’s astonishment when confronted by a Bororo who
said: “I am an ara”. All the “primitive mind” sociologists scurry about trying
to fathom this profession of identity, which is no more surprising upon
reflection than declaring, “I’m a doctor” or “I’m a citizen of the French
Republic”, and certainly presents fewer logical difficulties than claiming “I’m
a man”, which at most can mean no more than “I’m like the person who, in recognizing him to be a
man, I constitute as someone who can recognize me as a man”. In the final
analysis, these various formulations can be understood only in reference to the
truth of “I is an other” less dazzling to the poet’s intuition than it is
obvious from the psychoanalyst’s viewpoint[16]
This quotation shows that the self-identity’s
affirmation of the Bororo through identification with the other - an affirmation
that, in this context, is necessarily a mimetic identification - reveals what
is proper to modern individuation. If “I’m an ara” has the same value as “I’m a
citizen of the French Republic” and “I is an other”, it is because in the three
cases the reference-to-oneself only occurs through the mediation with the
otherness. But if the “antidialectic mentality” is surprised by the affinities
between the subject and an object of the world, this is because the identity of
the modern I is based precisely on the denegation
of the constitutive role of the mimetic identification with otherness. The I of
the modern man is based on the simple negation of the constitutive role of
opposition in determining identity.
These observations are absolutely
convergent with the major problems of the Adornian thought. In the first place,
we have to remember the way in which the problem of truth content of magical
thought presents itself to Adorno. If rational thought needs to deny all
cognitive force of mimesis, it is because what is sustained is “the identity of
the self that cannot disappear through identification with another, but takes
possession of itself once and for all as an impenetrable mask”[17].
The identity of the self would therefore be dependent on the entification of a
fixed system of identities and categorical differences.
On the other hand, if the mimetic
rationality of magical thinking could set the multiple affinities between what
exists, it is because magical thinking is more open to recognize the
constitutive nature of identification. We could even say that magical thinking
allows us to see how the fixed identity of objects is dissolved when thought
takes into account the constitutive nature of the opposing relations (and, in
this context, opposition has the value of an identification that has not yet
been posed).
However, if Adorno seeks in magical
thinking the position of the identification structure that supports the
determination of identities and the production of individuations, he will be
able to abandon every positive concept of nature present herein. The
assimilation of the I in the object through mimetism is not to be understood as
a promise of return to the immanence of the archaic. This can explain why
Adorno had been looking for a concept of nature, among others, in Freud’s
theory of drives. In this sense, let us follow, for instance, a canonic
affirmation about mimesis. Mimesis would be the index of :
the trend to lose oneself in the environment (Umwelt), instead of
playing an active role in it, a tendency to let oneself go and sink back to
nature. Freud called it the death drive (Todestrieb). Caillois, le mimetisme[18].
If Adorno sees in the death drive
the coordinates of reconciliation with nature, there are several effects that
we have to consider. The Freudian death drive exposes the libidinous economy
that takes the subject to connect itself to a nature understood as an inorganic
space, the major figure of the material opacity regarding the reflection
processes. In fact, Freud talks about a self-destruction of the person proper
to the satisfaction of the death drive. However, person has to be understood here as the identity of the subject in the realm of a structured
symbolic universe. This death related to the drive is therefore the
phenomenological operator that designates the suspension of the symbolic regime
of production of identities. It marks the dissolution of the organising power of the structures of
socialization, which takes us to the rupture of the I as synthetic formation. This rupture is what Lacan called
“second death” or “symbolic death”. It was the Lacanian way to save the
strength of the negative as an opening to what is real in the subject beyond
any Imaginary of the I[19].
This becomes even clearer if we seriously consider the use by Adorno to Roger
Caillois’s notion of mimetisme. This use helps us to understand better
what is this “trend to lose oneself in the environment”.
We should bear in mind that with his
concept of legendary psychastenia,
Caillois tried to demonstrate that animal mimicry was not to be understood as a
defense system, but as a “tendency to transform itself in space” that implied
disturbances of the “feelings of personality, considering as the organism’s
feeling of distinction from its surroundings (milieu)”[20].
Speaking about this intrinsic mimetic tendency to get lost in the environment,
Caillois affirms:
To
these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues
them, encircles them, digest them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by
replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual
breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He
tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself
becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not
similar to something, but just similar[21].
This dark space
where we cannot put things (since it is not a categorizable space, the
transcendental condition for the constitution of a state of things) is a space
that hinders us from being similar to something determined.
Thus, the
mimetic imperative of self-recognition in death regarded as negation of the
organising power of socialisation structures (Freud) and in the exterior void
of concept (Caillois) indicates where the subject needs to recognize itself in
order to affirm his nonidentity. Such an
articulation between Freud and Caillois, therefore, implies the identification
with a negativity that comes from the object regarded as motor of decentering.
The problem of mimesis clarifies how the object is what marks the point in
which the I no longer recognises its image, a point in which the subject sees
himself faced with a sensuous that is “materiality without image”. Mimesis is
thus regarded as recognition of the subject in the opacity of what only offers
itself as negation. And it is mimesis that can indicate how to fulfill this
promise of recognition, which Adorno so surprisingly has expressed, highlighted
as follows:
Men are human only where they do not
act, let alone posit (setzen) themselves as persons; the diffuseness of nature
in which they are not persons resembles the lineamentation of an intelligible
essence (Wesen), a Self that would be released from the “I” (jenes Selbst, das
vom Ich erlöst wäre). Contemporary art suggests something of this kind[22].
The
recognition of subjects is dependent on their capacity of positing themselves,
of identifying themselves with that which no longer submits itself to
self-identical outlines of an I. If we think of mimesis as an identification
operation with a nature regarded as a figure of the negative, we can understand
how this recognition is articulated. Here we should introduce some
considerations about the recourse to mimesis in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.
This can explain how contemporary art may suggest something of this “Self” thet
would be released from the “I”.
An exhaustive analysis of the problem of
mimesis in the Adornian aesthetics, and mainly in his philosophy of music,
would demand another article. However, it is worthwhile to stress a major
peculiarity of the Adornian recourse to mimesis on the aesthetic field. In the
Adornian aesthetics, mimesis is not directly connected to the imperative of
reconciliation with the positive image of nature, as we could expect from a
traditional reflection about mimesis in art. Adorno is extremely critical in
relation to these projects that tried to restore something of
this traditional reflection – for example the John Cage’s program of
reconstruing the musical rationality upon mimetic affinities with the non
structured facticity of the sonorous.
Actually, the Adornian demand goes through the
necessity of art to posit its mimetic affinity with what is most dead and
ruined in the social reality. We must take to the utmost consequences
statements as: “modern works relinquish themselves mimetically to reification, their principle of
death”[23].
This is a strange statement, since the
hegemonic trend tends to define modern art by a refusal of all mimetic affinity
with the reificated society. On the other hand, elevating to an aesthetic
program the demand that the subject must posit what concern expression by means
of a confrontation with reificated materials could seem to be an absolutely
strange idea of reconciliation. A reconciliation with what is dead. However, it
is this demand that animates what Adorno once called “communication of what was
distinguished”, the grounds for the understanding between people and things.
For:
If the subject is no longer able to
speak directly, their at least it should – in accord with a modernism that has
not pledge itself to absolute construction --
speak through things (Dinge), through their alienated and mutilated form
(Gestalt)[24].
The
subject can only speak through the alienated and mutilated form of things
because the silence of the sensuous appears as resistance of the material
against reification. This has nothing to do with some kind of return to the
archaic or origin, as if there were an experience of pre-discursive spontaneity
still not marked by fetishist abstraction. This is merely about exploring the
disruptive potential of experiences in which the subject sees himself in
identification with objects that, beyond its condition of phantasmatic support
of the commodity form, are only opaque materiality in which the I is no longer
capable to project his image and his categorical structures. This could perhaps
explain why:
Those who regard the
thingly (Dinghafte) as what is radically evil; who would
like to dynamize everything, which is, into pure contemporaneity, tend to be
hostile towards the other, the alien (Fremde), whose name does not
resound in alienation (Entfremdung) for nothing[25].
In Adorno’s view, this was the
lesson of Schoenberg. Oftenly, when one speaks of the musical aesthetic of
Adorno, one asserts that it was the last radical defense of rationality of the
dodecaphonic technique. Adorno’s Hegelianism would have spoken loud in his
aesthetics, by his sustaining of a possible experience of functional organicity
of the artworks grounded on the primacy of the series and on the critique of
the autonomy of particular moments and materials, a critique that appears
through the problem of the fetishism of music.
However, one constantly forgets
that, owing to an interversion always visible to a dialectic thought, the
rationality proper to the dodecaphonic totality is criticized from the moment
it transforms itself in insensibility to
the material:
It is true that we have given equal
rights to the triton, the major seventh and also to all intervals beyond the
octave, but the price for this was the leveling of all chords, old and new[26].
This insensibility indicates the belief that
operations of meaning would be the strict result of positional plays determined
by the series structure.
If Schoenberg still maintained the motivic and
thematic signature as a principle of expression that escape the primacy of the
series, Webern will take the step in the direction to the fetishism of the series, due to his belief that the construction
would be able to index all meaning occurrences in the artwork.
From the moment in which the composer thinks
that the imagined serial rule has a meaning per se, he fetishizes it. In
Webern’s Variations for solo piano, opus 27, and String Quartet, opus 28, the
fetishism of the series (Fetichismus der Reihe) is evident”[27].
At least
in these cases, Webern fetishizes the totality, since the material appears as
that which can be dominated in a totality of relations. Actually, the material
is transformed in the work’s production system itself. The work no longer
dissimulates, through its aesthetic appearance, its process of meaning
production. Nevertheless, this full visibility is the figure of a domination
principle of the material which Adorno reads as a rationality distorted in
domination of nature.
It is interesting to note that Adorno
criticizes Webern precisely because he attempts to think of an integral
construction of the artwork in which everything is relation and all meaning
incidences are determined by means of positional plays. Because Adorno sees, in
the principle of integral construction, “something purely irrational hidden in
the midst of rationalization”[28],
he sometimes understands dodecaphony as a system of nature domination in music,
a “rationality that comes close to superstition”.
Such discussion demonstrates how the
true problem of the Adornian aesthetic lies not in the loss of the totality and
functional organicity of the artworks, as imagined by Lyotard[29].
Actually, the problem lies in the deposition of all possible resistance of the
musical material. That is why Adorno can say that the radical gesture of
Schoenberg would not be connected to the refusal of tonality due to the primacy
of dodecaphonic series, but to the “strength of forgetting”, which in his last
artworks would have allowed him to return to tonal material, this time
transformed in a mutilated material with no strength to produce an experience
of totality. He returns to fetishised material, but in order to reveal his estrangement.
Due to this libidinal investment in what had become ruins “he dis-solidarizes
himself from this absolute domination of the material he himself had created
(…) The dialectic composer brings
dialectics to a standstill”[30].
The biggest irony here lies in the fact that the tonal material is treated as a
fragmentary exposition of a rest, as a manifestation of nonidentity in the
artwork.
To bring dialects to a standstill is a gesture
that comes at the moment in which the subject recognizes himself in a mutilated
material that has become a kind of opaque rest, which represents the
irreducibility of the non-artistic in arts. Maybe the supreme ruse of
dialectics lies herein, in the act of being able to silence in order to let the
ruins speak. For Adorno, it would be a way to construe object relations that go
beyond the fetishist fascination.
Specularity and opacity
If we return to Lacan, all this discussion
about mimesis will seem very distant. In Lacan there is no visible discussion
whatsoever on the concept of “nature”. However, if we follow the intuition of
Adorno and try to derive a negative
concept of nature (nature as something that resists the reflexibility of the
concept), starting from the theory of drives, we would have a path to tread
within the Lacanian discourse.
However, an initial approach to Lacan’s thought
would lead us to think that it is anti-mimetic par excellence. We should bear in mind that the realm of mimesis in Lacan seems to have a necessary
connection with the dimension of the dual and transitive relations, which in
fact are symptoms of narcissist structures of apprehension of the objects.
A major example here would be what Lacan calls
“the mirror stage”. Before reaching conceptual thinking, the baby orientates
itself by means of mimetic operations. So, in order to guide its desire, the
baby mimetizes an other in the position of an ideal type. Such introjection of
the image of an other is the last stage within a process of rupture with the
symbiotic undifferentiation with the mother and the partial objects. By
rupturing with these partial objects (breasts, excrements, eyes, voice), or
objects a, which are located in the zone of interaction with its mother,
the baby finally gets an image of its corps
propre that is responsible for the organization of a corporal scheme.
However, this mimetic assumption of ideal roles
does not represent a consolidation of a communicational relationship between
subjects. Lacan tried to demonstrate that the figures of aggressivity and
rivalry in the relationship with the other were structural symptoms of the
impossibility of the I to assume the constitutive role of the other in the
determination of his own identity. So, the result of the mimetic assumption of
ideal roles would be the narcissic confusion between the I and the other, a
confusion through which the I constitutes processes of self-reference starting
from the casts of reference-to-the-other, at the same time that the conscience
denies this dependence. This is the reason why Lacan points out that we must
consider narcissism as an imaginary relationship fundamental to the interhuman
relationsip.
But if this is the problem, we could
postulate that the centrality of mimetic
identification with the other must liberate the subject from the identitary illusions
of the I leading him to assume the prior position of intersubjective
relationships in the constitution of socialised subjects. Maybe, the
expectatives located in the mimesis could be achieved when we comprehend
correctly what finally are intersubjective relationships.
Nevertheless, we should bear in mind
that, if processes of socialisation and of individuation operates initially
through the introjection of the image of an other that gives form to the I,
then the revelation of the dynamics of introjection and projection could only
lead the subject to comprehend socialisation as necessary alienation of himself
in the image of an other. That is, to comprehend that relationships, the
dynamics of desire, as well as broader expectatives of the subject of knowledge,
are formed from the other.
With the socialisation mechanisms regarded as
alienation processes, there would be, broadly
speaking, two ways of taking the subject beyond the narcissistic
confusion with the other. The first would be to insist on a constitutive
transcendence of the subject This transcendence would imply the absence of
every single mimetic affinity between the subject and that which appears on the
empiric field. In Lacan, this strategy appears by taking desire as pure
negativity, as a primordial “lack-of-being” that poses the non-adequacy between
the subject and the empiric objects. To take the subject to recognize himself
in the pure negativity of desire would be a solution to heal him from the
illusions of narcissism and alienation.
It is important to note, however, that Lacan
will relativise this appeal to a transcendence of the subjects. Gradually he will admit that the true
potential of nonidentity will not come from a certain negative transcendence of
desire – even more as Lacan will understand that desire, far from being a
primordial lack (that can be see in the eyes of the Other), will be caused by
these partial objects that had got lost in the processes of socialization and
formation of the corps propre. It is
as if the formation of self-identity never ceases to produce a rest that
persists beyond the socialised desire.
In principle, this second strategy could be
taken as a kind of astute way of returning to the archaic and the amorphous
regarded as a cure protocol - a return animated by the nostalgia of a
pre-discursive state of undifferentiation. After all, Lacan himself sometimes
speaks of the “lost object”, referring to what remains as a “rest” of the
socialisation processes. However, what
is really at stake here is the confirmation that the subjects may put
themselves in something that is not integrally submitted to individuation. This
operation is fundamental in order to allow us how “to use the force of the
subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity”[31].
This is not at all about an operation of return, but about the comprehension of
the subject as a space of tension between the socialisation demands and the
recognition of the irreducibility of the opacity of drive objects that does not
conform to the image of the I.
This implies a way to recuperate levels of mimetic afinity between the
subject and an object that is not just a narcisistic one. As for Adorno, this
affinity signifies disorientation of the identitary structures constitutive of
the I, since the subject recognizes himself in that which, in the body, has the
status of an object opaque to self-reflection identity. Here again the
object is what marks the locus in which the
subject sees himself facing a sensuous that is “materiality without image” and
whose confrontation implies in a perpetual decentering.
By insisting in the
recuperation of the sensuous as materiality without image that Lacan called, at
times, the object a as “flesh”.
Nevertheless, we should ask how Lacan believes that an experience of this nature could operate in the clinic and how it could allow a reconfiguration of relations of recognition among subjects. In this sense, it is important to remark that Lacan organised his notion of analytic progress from the notion of “traversing of the phantasm”. For our context, we could simply state that such traversing is organically related to the question on the status of the category of object. While understanding the object only as a narcissistic projection, the subject will never be able to go beyond the phantasm. However, the phantasm offers the coordinates for the signification of empiric objects, it is the “index of absolute signification”. Then, what appears after the traversing of the phantasm is necessarily emptied of signification that makes it singular, emptied of structural coordinates of value. In summary, it appears as something opaque to the determinations of identity.
An example of this traversing may be the way in
which Lacan recovers a certain “phenomenology of the gaze” presented by Sartre
in Being and Nothingness, that is,
this intersubjective deadlock which for Sartre appears mainly in loving
relationships. For Lacan, it is actually, the phenomenological
description of a typic narcisistic confusion derived from a projective
structure that tends to reduce the object as a support of the phantasm.
We know the structure of this
deadlock described by Sartre. The
lover wants to be the gaze in which the freedom of the other accepts to get
lost in, a gaze under which the other accepts to be transformed in an object.
Thus, as long as I put myself in the position of the subject, I will never have
before me an other desiring gaze, a gaze that personifies the other. I will
only have a reified gaze that is transformed in a narcissic object in which I
see only my own image. I can only have before me a gaze under the condition
that I put myself as object. In this way, the intersubjective recognition of a
being that in Sartre is fundamentally transcendence would so be doomed to
failure. The gaze (of consciousness) always reduces the other to the condition
of an object.
Taking into account the long tradition of the
philosophy of consciousness that makes use of optical metaphors to cope with
the self-reflective processes of consciousness, Lacan can points out that the
gaze is a special object because it is always elided within intersubjective
relationships. “The gaze is specified as unapprehensible” says Lacan[32],
in the sense of being non-objectifiable. This is a way to insist that something
fundamental of the transcendent subject finds no place in the intersubjective
field. But instead of entering in this deadlock connected with operations of a
philosophy of consciousness, Lacan insists on the possibility that something
that finds no place in the relationship between subjects can be posed by means
of a confrontation between subject and object. To achieve this, the subject
needs to have the experience that “on the side of things, there is the gaze”[33].
To say that on the side of the things, there is the gaze, may appear simply as a blurring form to talk about the necessity of a critique capable to iluminate those relationships between subjects that were reified as relationships between things. Specially if we taking into account that the background of this debate is the intersubjective structure of loving relationships. Nevertheless, Lacan aims to something rather different. For Lacan, the claim that there is a gaze that come from things means to insist that the subject can recognize himself in the dimension of an object that is no longer based on the logic of the narcisistic phantasm. This position is possible for Lacan because the gaze appears, in his metapsychology, precisely as one of those objects a within which the subject was connected in relationships of symbiotic indiferentiation before processes of socialization. Within this context, the gaze is not the source of expression of the desire in its phantasmatic search for a narcissistic object. Rather, the gaze is the non-specular object that is beyond the expressive claims of the I and connected to a drive that is fundamentally death drive. In this sense, it is not surprising that in this moment of Seminar XI dedicated to the discussion on the phenomenology of the gaze, Lacan will refer to Roger Caillois in order to remind us that, as well as in Adorno’s work, the animal mimicry explains how a subject is able to recognize himself as a stain (tache), as a opaque spot; finally, how he is able to see his gaze where representations, with its fixed identities, oscilates[34].
In essence, it is as if Lacan is
commenting a proposition by Merleau-Ponty, other author present in Seminar XI:
Thus since the seer is caught up in what he
sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism in all
vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises also undergoes
from the things, such that, as many painters have said: I feel myself looked at
by the things, my activity is equally passivity – which is the second and more
profound sense of narcissism[35].
That is to say, the second and
deepest sense of narcissism is a certain inversion that makes the object –
formerly submitted to my narcissic image – to appear as the point in which my
gaze returns to myself as something that is strange to me. When I feel looked
by things that previously would seem totally redeemed to narcissistic
protocols, I find myself facing something that doesn’t allow me to hypostasiate
the concept of identity. This experience, that Freud one day called unheimlichkeit,
is essentially constitutive of a
certain redemption of mimesis as a major protocol of for analytic clinic. There
are further aspects to be explored on the sense of experiences like these, but
this was the way in which Lacan and Adorno attempted to use the force of
the subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.
Vladimir Safatle, Professor of Philosophy at Universidade de São
Paulo (Brazil) and author of The passion of negative: Lacan and dialectic (Unesp,
2006 – in portuguese)
Translation: Angelika Kohnke
[1] For a differente point of view, see DEWS,
Peter; Logic of disintegration, London: Verso, 1996
[2] “In the place of the sociological question
concerning the modes of social integration and social conflict there appeared
the question concerning the reciprocal influence of individual psychic drives
and economic reproduction – that is, the possible rapprochement of
psychoanalysis and the analysis of economic system” (HONNETH, Axel, Critique
of power, MIT Press, 1991, p. 101)
[3] ADORNO, Theodor, Subject and object in
The Adorno reader, edited by Brian O’Connor, Oxford: Blackweel, 2000, p. 143
[4] idem, p. 140
[5] LACAN, Autres écrits, Paris : Seuil, 2001, p. 451
[6] GRANGER, Pensée formelle et sciences de l´homme, Paris : Aubier, 1960, p. 192
[7] LACAN, Ecrits : a selection , New
York : W.W Norton and Company, 2002, p. 282
[8] idem, p. 281
[9] LACAN, Seminar XI, New York : W.W.
Norton, 1977, p. 207
[10] LACAN, Seminar XI, p. 211
[11] ADORNO and HORKHEIMER, Dialectic of
enlightment, London : Verso, 1997, p. 12
[12] idem, p. XII
[13] idem, p. 8
[14] HONNETH, The critique of power, Cambridge,
MIT Press, 1991, p. 38
[15] HABERMAS, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt : Suhrkamp, 1995, p. 513
[16] LACAN, Ecrits ; a selection, p. 24
[17] ADORNO and HORKHEIMER, idem, p. 10
[18] Idem, p. 227
[19] Richard Boothby understood this point as follows : « For Lacan, the disintegration force of the death drive is aimed not at the integrity of the biological organism, as Freud had concluded, but rather at the imaginary coherence of the ego » (BOOTHBY, Freud as philosopher : metapsychology after Lacan, New York : Routledge, 2001, p. 151)
[20] CAILLOIS, Roger; Mimicry and
legendary psychastenia, Trans. John Shepley, October, 31 (winter,
1984), see www.generation-online.org/p/focaillois.htm.
[21] idem
[22] ADORNO, Negative Dialectic, New
York : Continuum, 1983, p. 277
[23] ADORNO, Aesthetic Theory, University of
Minnesota, 1997, p. 133
[24]
ADORNO, idem, p. 118
[25] ADORNO, Negative dialectic, p.
191
[26] ADORNO, Philosophie der Neuen Musik in Gesammelte Schriften vol. XII, Frankfurt : Suhrkamp, 1990, p. 76
[27] ADORNO, idem, p. 107
[28] ADORNO, The aging of new music in Essays on
music, University of California Press, 2002, p. 189
[29] LYOTARD, Des dispositifs pulsionnels, Paris : Christian Bourgeois, 1980, p. 114
[30] ADORNO, Philosophie der neuen musik,
p. 133
[31] ADORNO, Negative dialectics, p.
XX
[32] LACAN, Seminar XI, p. 83
[33] idem, p. 109
[34] “Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is
distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind” (LACAN, Seminar
XI, p. 99)
[35] MERLEAU-PONTY, The visible and the
invisible, Nortwestern University Press, 1968, p. 139