Prof: So today we're
still focused on individual
consciousness.
 
"Why?" you might ask.
 
Well, we can speak of the
psychogenesis of the text or
film as the site or model for
symbolic patterning of one sort
or another,
perhaps in the case certainly
of Žižek,
to some extent also of Deleuze.
Therefore we can still
understand today's readings,
unlike Thursday's readings,
as belonging to the
psychological emphasis in our
syllabus.
This is actually our farewell
to the psychological emphasis,
and it is so arranged because
there are intimations in today's
authors that there are political
stakes.
That is to say,
in one way or another we are to
understand their argument about
the way in which the psyche
functions as having political
implications.
Žižek is fascinating,
it seems to me,
in his brilliant reading of
The Crying Game at the
very end of your essay,
in the moment when he says in
effect,
"Look.
This isn't just a kind of
abdication from responsibility
for the Irish Republican
Revolution.
The soldier has not merely
walked away from his role in
revolutionary activity;
he has discovered in his
private life--that is to say,
in the erotic dimension of his
consciousness--the need for
revolution from within.
He has necessarily disrupted
his own thinking in ways equally
radical to and closely parallel
to the disruption of thinking
that's required to understand
one's relationship with the
emerging Republican status of
Ireland.
And so,"
says Žižek in effect,
"there are political
implications for the upheaval in
consciousness that an ultimately
tragic encounter with the Big
Other entails.
 
I should say in passing also
about Žižek that --
and your editor,
I think, goes into this a
little bit in the italicized
preface--
that there are temptations,
political temptations,
entailed in this fascination
with an obscure or even perhaps
transcendent object of desire
for the individual,
but also for the social psyche.
 
In religious terms,
there is a perhaps surprising
or counterintuitive friendliness
toward religion in Žižek's
work on the grounds that faith
or the struggle for faith,
after, all does constitute an
effort to enter into some kind
of meaningful relationship with
that which one desires yet at
the same time can't have.
 
By the same token--and this is
where,
in certain moments,
he confesses to a kind of
instability in his political
thinking,
even though he is by and large
on the left and partly needs to
be understood as a disciple of
Marx--
nevertheless,
he recognizes that in politics
there is a kind of excitement
but also,
perhaps, potential danger in
fascination with a big idea.
It could be,
of course, some form of
progressive collectivity.
 
It could, on the other hand,
be the kind of big idea that
countenances the rise of
fascism.
Žižek acknowledges this--
that public identification with
a kind of almost,
or completely,
inaccessible otherness,
either as a political idea or
as a charismatic political
leader,
can, after all,
open up a vertigo of dangerous
possibilities.
 
I use the word
"vertigo"
advisedly because I'm going to
be coming back to Hitchcock's
Vertigo in just a minute,
but in the meantime there are
also obviously political stakes
in Deleuze.
Deleuze, of course,
presents to us in this first
chapter of his book,
A Thousand Plateaus,
he presents to us a kind of
thought experiment,
both as something recommended
to the reader--
see if you can think in this
new, radically innovative way--
but also providing a model for
thinking of this kind in the
style and organization and
composition of the chapter
itself.
 
So in making a thought
experiment,
once again, Deleuze has to
perform in thought what you
might call a revolution from
within,
but the implications once again
in politics,
as indeed also for Žižek,
are somewhat ambiguous.
That is to say,
the rhizomatic mode of
thinking--
and we'll come back to the
rhizomatic mode of thinking as
we go along--
which is radically de-centering
and which lends itself to
identification with,
as it were, the mass movement
of collectivity,
can plainly be progressively
democratic: that is to say,
democratic beyond even what our
social and cultural hierarchies
accommodate.
But at the same time it can
once again be fascistic,
because the organization of
fascistic culture,
while nevertheless a kind of
top-down arrangement with a
fervor involved as the mass is
mobilized,
nevertheless is,
in this mobilization,
rhizomatic.
 
Deleuze is careful to point out
that rhizomes are,
and rhizomatic thinking is,
as he says repeatedly,
both for the best and
worst.
>
 
Rats are rhizomes.
 
Crabgrass is a rhizome.
 
In other words,
everything which organizes
itself in this fashion is
rhizomatic;
much of it, though,
as I'll be coming back to try
to explain with a little more
care, is for the good in
Deleuze's view.
 
By the way, I say
"Deleuze"
in the same way I said
"Wimsatt."
Guattari is an important
colleague and ally.
They wrote many books together
including one that I'll mention
later.
 
They also wrote things
separately, but
"Deleuze,"
simply because his oeuvre
is more ample and people
feel somehow or another that
he's more central to this work,
is a synecdoche for
"Deleuze and
Guattari."
So I'll be saying
"Deleuze,"
but I don't mean to slight
Guattari.
In any case,
so we'll be examining the
Deleuzian rhizome a little bit
more closely,
but in the meantime,
as to its political
implications--
and we are moving closer to the
political as we begin to think
about figures of this kind--
they're really on the admission
of both of them somewhat
ambiguous.
 
In other words,
they're introducing new
possibilities of thought and
they're very different from each
other, as we'll see.
 
They're introducing new
possibilities of thought,
but they are candid enough to
admit that they don't quite know
where these possibilities are
going--
that is, what the implications
or consequences of successfully
entering the thought world of
either one of them might be.
All right.
 
So yes, they certainly have
very different ideas.
I wouldn't blame you for
saying, "Why on earth are
we reading these two texts
together?"
The overlap isn't altogether
clear.
I'm going to suggest what it is
in a minute, but in the meantime
they are certainly on about very
different things.
Deleuze is concerned with,
as I say,
introducing a kind of thought
experiment which has to do with
the de-centering of thought,
getting away from the tree or
arboresque model of thought--
we'll have more to say about
that;
and Žižek,
on the other hand,
following Lacan's distinction
between the object,
ready to hand,
that you can have if you want,
and the object of desire
which--such is the chain of
signification--
is perpetually something that
exceeds or outdistances our
grasp--
in developing this idea,
and thinking about what the
object of desire,
in all of its manifold forms,
might be,
he develops this curious idea,
which is at the center of his
thinking,
of the blot--the element
in narrative form,
the element in the way in which
our storytelling capacities are
organized,
which really can't be narrated,
which really can't lend itself
to meaning.
 
That sort of meaning is,
of course, concrete,
specific meaning,
that which can be tied down to
an accessible object.
 
So the central idea that
Žižek is attempting to develop
in his essay has to do with this
notion of the relationship
between the Big Other and the
blot,
as we'll see.
 
So these strike one as being
extremely different ideas,
and as I say I wouldn't blame
you for wondering just what
overlap there can be.
 
Well, at the same time I would
think that as you read the
somewhat bouncy and frantic
prose of both of these texts,
you did see that they had a
kind of mood,
stance, or orientation toward
the critical and theoretical
project in common.
 
They seem, in other words,
to be of the same moment.
Even though their ideas seem to
be so very different--
that is, the basic ideas
they're trying to get across
seem to be so very different--
you could perhaps imagine these
two texts as being written,
if it was just a question of
considering their style,
by the same person.
Actually, I think that's not
quite true,
but at the same time the kind
of high-energy,
too-caffeinated feeling that
you get from the prose of both
is something that might give you
pause and make you wonder:
well,
just what moment does this
belong to?
 
The answer is important and,
in a way, obvious.
I'm sure all of you are ready
to tell me what moment it
belongs to.
 
It belongs to Postmodernism.
 
These are two exemplars of what
is by far the most slippery--if
one likes it,
one wants to say versatile,
>
 
and if one doesn't like it,
one wants to say
murky--concepts to which we have
been exposed in the last twenty
or thirty years.
 
I think that,
in a way, we can bring both
essays into focus as a pair a
little bit if we pause somewhat,
simply over the concept
"Postmodernism."
Maybe that's one of the things
you wanted to learn in taking a
course like this,
so I'm just providing a
service.
 
>
 
So Postmodernism.
 
What is Postmodernism?
 
I think we know what it is in
artistic expression.
We have encountered enough
examples of it.
We have, perhaps,
even taken courses in which,
in the context of artistic form
and expression,
it has come up.
 
Postmodernism in artistic
expression--
particularly in the visual
arts, but I think this is true
of certain movements in both
narrative and poetry as well--
postmodernism is an eclectic
orientation to the past.
In a certain sense,
it's a return to the past;
it's an opening up of textual
possibility to traditions and
historical moments of expression
which Modernism had tended to
suppose obsolete and to have set
aside;
so that in artistic expression,
as I say, Postmodernism is an
eclectic return to possibilities
thrown up by the history of art
and literature;
in architecture,
many examples are quite
extraordinary and many,
unfortunately,
are also hideous.
You know that there was a
certain point fifteen or twenty
years ago when every strip mall,
every shopping mall,
was redecorated or--
what's the word I
want?--renovated.
 
Every shopping mall was
renovated, and how did they
renovate it?
 
They'd been flat.
 
They'd been sort of Mies van
der Rohe, sort of sixties-modern
before then.
 
They just sat there flat,
and so the renovators came
along and put little gables on
the shopping mall so that each
little shop in the mall now has
a gable,
and this is postmodern.
 
The most awful things were done
with suburban houses,
also in the name of a kind of
blind,
completely tasteless return to
the neoclassical and certain
other aspects of tradition.
 
So the postmodern in what you
might call suburban culture has
been pretty awful,
but at the same time it has
entailed a great deal of
interesting work in painting.
All of a sudden,
the New York scene isn't just
one school, and that's the sign
of it.
It's not just a certain kind of
abstraction.
It's not just a wholesale
return, agreed on by everyone,
to Realism.
 
It's a mixture of everything.
 
Artists are always just
completely obsessed with their
place in art history,
but it's not just groups of
artists together wanting to
identify a certain place for
themselves in art history.
 
It's every artist in a kind of
anarchic independence from the
thinking of other artists coming
to terms with art history in his
or her own way so that the
scene--
the art scenes of New York and
Berlin and Los Angeles and so
on--
the scene isn't something that
you can identify as having a
certain character anymore.
It's postmodern precisely in
that it's gone global,
it has a million influences and
sources,
and there is very little
agreement among artists about
how to amalgamate and put these
sources together;
so that in terms of artistic
expression,
the postmodern moment--after
Modernism,
in other words--the postmodern
moment presents itself,
and I put it deliberately,
as a medical symptom,
the bipolar way the postmodern
moment presents itself in
artistic expression.
 
Now philosophically,
Postmodernism can be understood
as doubt not just about the
grounds of knowledge or the
widespread sorts of doubt which
we have been talking about more
or less continuously in this
course,
but as doubt in particular
about the relationship between
or among parts and wholes.
 
In other words,
can I be sure that my leg is
part of my body when plainly it
is at the same time a whole with
respect to my foot?
 
How is it that I know in any
stable way what a part or a
whole is?
 
To take a more interesting
example--
this is in Wittgenstein's
Philosophical
Investigations--
there is the flag,
the French flag,
which is called the tricolor,
right?
 
Now the tricolor is made up of
three strips of color:
white, blue,
and red.
I'm sorry if I've gotten the
order wrong.
In fact, I am almost positive
that I have,
>
 
but there are those three
strips of color existing in
relation to each other,
and plainly those three strips
of color are parts of the flag,
and they have a certain
symbolic value.
 
That is to say,
each color represents something
and enters into the symbolic
understanding of what the flag
is.
 
But at the same time red,
white, and blue--sorry--yes,
red, white, and blue aren't
confined to this piece of cloth.
The little strip of white is
obviously part of whiteness.
It can't be understood simply
in and of itelf.
These strips of color are parts
of other things as well;
and what's more,
if you look at the tricolor
without knowing what you're
looking at, how can you say that
it's the part of a whole?
 
You say, "Well,
they're just parts,"
or "They're wholes unto
themselves which somebody
happens to have laid side by
side."
By the same token,
if you look at the part of the
tricolor which is white and you
say,
"White," well,
obviously with respect to the
vast universalizing concept
"white,"
a little flag is simply a kind
of metonymic relationship with
that sense of white.
 
But, in short,
to concretize this idea of the
problematic relationship between
part and whole in a different
way,
why are we so confident about
what we see?
 
As most of you know,
I'm sure, philosophical
thinking tends to be tyrannized
by metaphors of vision.
We assume that we understand
reality because--
not altogether as consciously
metaphorically in speaking about
this as perhaps we might be--
we say that we can see it;
but how do you see it?
 
You see it because of the
lensing or focusing capacities
of the eye, which exercise a
certain tyranny over the nature
of what you see.
 
If you look too closely at
something, all you can see is
dots.
 
If you look at something and
close your eyes,
that, too, becomes a kind of
vast retinal Mark Tobey
painting.
 
It has a relation to what you
see but is at the same time
something very different.
 
And if you get too far away
from objects,
they dissolve.
 
What you thought was an object
dissolves into a much vaster,
greater space which seems to
have another objective nature.
If you're in a jet and you're
looking down,
what you're seeing certainly
looks like it has form and
structure,
but the form and structure is
not at all what you're seeing if
you're standing on the ground
looking at exactly the same,
shall we say,
square footage insofar as you
can.
You're simply seeing different
things,
and if you recognize what might
be called the tyranny of focus
in the way in which we orient
ourselves to the world,
you can see this perpetual
dissolve and refocus
constituting objects perpetually
in new ways.
This happens,
too, in the history of science.
The relationship between
subatomic particles sometimes
turns itself inside out,
and the particle that you
thought was the fundamental unit
turns out,
in fact, to have within it a
fundamental unit of which it is
a part.
 
I'm just referring to what
happened during the golden age
of the linear accelerator when
all sorts of remarkable sorts of
inversions of what's taken to be
fundamental seemed to be made
available by the experimental
data;
so that in all of these ways,
ranging from scientific to the
most subjectively visual ways of
understanding the world,
there are possibilities of
doubt that can be raised about
part-whole relations.
 
What is a whole?
 
How do we define a unity?
 
Should we be preoccupied with
the nature of reality as a set
of unities?
 
Obviously, Deleuze is extremely
upset about this.
He doesn't want anything to do
with unity.
The whole function of his
thought experiment is the
de-centering of things such that
one can no longer talk about
units or wholes or isolated
entities.
It's the being together,
merging together,
flying apart,
reuniting, and kinesis or
movement of entities,
if they can even be called
entities,
that Deleuze is concerned with.
Now another aspect of the
postmodern is what the
postmodern philosopher
Jean-François Lyotard,
in particular,
has called "the
inhuman"
or the process of the
dehumanization of the human.
 
Now this is a weird term to
choose because it's not at all
anti-humanistic.
 
It's really a new way of
thinking about the human.
Deleuze, you'll notice,
talks--not just here in this
excerpt,
but repeatedly throughout his
work,
which is why he has so little
to say about it here that's
explanatory--
about "bodies without
organs."
That might have brought you up
short, but what it suggests is
that we are, as Deleuze would
put it, machinic rather than
organic.
 
If the problem with centered
thought is that it thinks of
everything as arboreal,
as a tree, that problem has to
do with the fact that a tree is
understood in its symbolic
extensions to have organs.
 
The roots are muscles and
circulation;
the blossoms are genital in
nature;
the crown or canopy of leaves
is the mind of the tree reaching
up to the sky,
the mentality of the tree.
By the same token,
if we think of our own bodies
as arboreal,
we think of certain parts of
those bodies as cognitive,
other parts of those bodies as
having agency,
as doing things.
If that's the case,
then we think of a centered and
ultimately genital or genetic
understanding of the body as
being productive.
 
Deleuze wants to understand the
body as being interactive,
as being polymorphous perverse,
among other things.
He wants to understand it as
being everywhere and nowhere,
an un-situated body among other
bodies.
In order for this to happen,
its interface with other things
has to be without agency and
also without cognitive intention
on the model of "I think,
therefore I am;
the world comes into being
because I think,"
without any of this in play.
 
In other words,
the dehumanization of the
postmodern has to do not at all
with denying the importance of
the human but with this radical
way of rethinking the human
among other bodies and things.
 
Plainly, this emphasis involves
a kind of dissolving into
otherness,
a continuity between subject
and object in which the
difference,
ultimately, between what is
inside me,
what is authentic or integral
to my being me,
and what's outside me become
completely permeable and
interchangeable.
 
The late nineteenth-century
author and aesthetic philosopher
Walter Pater,
in the conclusion to a famous
book of his called The
Renaissance, had a
wonderful way of putting this:
he said in effect,
"We are too used to
thinking that we're in here and
everything else is out there and
that,
somehow or another,
our perspective on everything
out there is a kind of saving
isolation enabling our power of
objectivity."
 
Then Pater says,
paraphrased,
"How can this be,
because we're made up of the
same things that are out there?
 
We, too, are molecular,
in other words.
What is in us ‘rusts iron
and ripens corn' [his words].
There is a continuousness
between the inside feeling we
have about ourselves and the
exteriority with which we are
constantly coming in
contact."
Deleuze and Guattari,
of course, have their own
excited,
jumpy way of putting these
things, but it's not really a
new idea that we exaggerate the
isolation of consciousness from
its surroundings.
There is a permeability of
inside and outside that this
kind of rhizomic,
or de-centered,
thinking is meant to focus on.
 
Now you could say that what
Deleuze is interested in--
if you go back to our
coordinates that we kept when we
were talking about the
formalists,
Saussure through structuralism,
through deconstruction--
if you go back to those
coordinates,
you could say that what Deleuze
is interested in,
like so many others we've read,
is a rendering virtual,
or possibly even eliminating,
of the vertical axis:
in other words,
of that center or head or crown
of the tree which constitutes
everything that unfolds on the
horizontal axis--
be it language,
be it the unconscious
structured like a language,
be it whatever it might be.
 
You could say that the project
of Deleuze, too,
is the undoing or rendering
virtual of this vertical axis.
Well, in a way,
I think that's true,
but then what is the horizontal
axis?
That is where the relation of
Deleuze to, let's say,
deconstruction becomes a little
problematic and where we can
actually see a difference.
 
I'm going to compare him in
this one respect with Lacan,
but I want to hasten to point
out, as I will in a minute,
a divergence from Lacan as
well.
You remember that in Lacan's
"Agency of the Letter"
essay,
he doesn't just talk
about the axis of combination as
a series of concentric circles,
each one of which is made up of
little concentric circles.
He doesn't just talk about that.
 
He also talks about the way in
which the combinatory powers of
the imaginary in language,
or desire in language,
take place is like a musical
staff,
so that the organization of
signs, in their contiguity with
each other,
can be either melodic or
harmonic;
but in any case,
you can't just think of the
axis of combination as a
complete linearity.
 
It has dimensionality of
different kinds.
That's why Deleuze and Guattari
introduce the concept of
plateau.
 
The book in which your excerpt
appears is called A Thousand
Plateaus.
 
Ultimately, the concept of
plateau is even more important
to them than the concept of
rhizome,
but when they introduce the
concept of plateau they're doing
exactly the same thing.
 
They are saying,
"We jump from sign cluster
to sign cluster and not all sign
clusters are linear and
uniform."
 
This is where there is perhaps
a difference from
deconstruction.
 
Deleuze and Guattari are
interested in "multiplicity
of coding,"
as they put it.
They're interested in the way
in which when I think,
I'm not just thinking in
language, I'm not just thinking
pictorially,
and I'm not just thinking
musically,
but I am leaping around among
codes so that the actual thought
process is eclectic in this way.
Now you could say that this is
something actually anticipated
also by Lacan.
 
You remember also in the
"Agency" essay
that Lacan reminds us,
true inheritor of Freud which
he takes himself to be,
that at the beginning of The
Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud said that the decoding
of the dream work is like
figuring out the puzzle of a
rebus--
a rebus being one of those
trick sentences which are made
up not exclusively of words but
of the odd syllable or of
pictures: for example,
"I 'heart' New York."
 
"I 'heart' New York"
is a rebus.
The dream work functions
constantly, in Freud's view,
as a rebus.
 
So you could say that Lacan
already introduces for Deleuze
the possibility of thinking of a
multiple coding that needs to be
decoded on a variety of plateaus
if it's going to make any sense.
Now Deleuze's relationship with
all the figures we have been
reading is rather problematic,
really.
The book preceding A
Thousand Plateaus was called
Anti-Oedipus,
and it is a continuous
systematic attack on--
he always calls Freud "the
General"--
the idea that Freud feels that
the whole of our psychic lives
is completely saturated and
dominated by the Oedipus
complex.
Deleuze with his idea of
de-centered thinking,
of the rhizome,
sets out to show in a variety
of ways how limiting and how
unfortunate for the legacy of
psychoanalysis this kind of
focus on a particular issue
turns out to be--
this is Deleuze's critique of
Freud, not mine.
 
You would think that Deleuze,
then,
would be a lot closer to Lacan
just for the reasons that I have
just described,
but Lacan, too--at the very
bottom of page 034 in your copy
center reader,
on the right-hand column--he
says: "…[I]t is not
surprising that psychoanalysis
tied its fate to that of
linguistics…"
Now it's impossible to say--
I think quite by design--it's
impossible to say whether
Deleuze is referring to Freud or
Lacan in saying that,
because it's Lacan who claims
that Freud said it:
in other words,
that The Interpretation of
Dreams is the text in which
we discover that the unconscious
is structured like a language;
but at the same time,
posterity has taken Lacan's
focus on linguistics to be a
massive,
perhaps inappropriate revision
of Freud and to be a very
different matter.
So it's interesting that
Deleuze quite ambiguously seems
to suppose that Freud and Lacan
are part and parcel of each
other.
 
The reason he can do that is
that he is interested in a form
of thinking about language which
no linguistics has successfully
accommodated,
as far as he's concerned.
In other words,
he keeps talking about Chomsky.
Chomsky seems to be,
in a way, the villain of your
essay.
 
But I think,
in a way, that's just a way of
evading talking about Saussure,
because you wouldn't want to
get in trouble with all those
structuralists;
because the problem with
Saussure, too,
is that there is a certain
tyranny or arboresque tendency
in Saussurean thinking to be
focused on the binary--
that is, the relationship
between the signified and
signifier as fixed,
as inflexible,
and as lacking in what Derrida
would call "free play"
and therefore,
too ,a kind of tyranny.
So, very quickly,
on the rhizome.
How do we know a rhizome when
we see it?
Whatever frustrations Deleuze's
essay puts in your path,
I think probably in the long
run you're pretty clear on what
a rhizome is,
but if there is any lingering
doubt just think about the flu.
 
There is what Deleuze calls
"rhizomatic flu."
That's something we get from
other people,
the circulation of disease.
 
As we all come down with it
around midterm period,
the circulation of disease is
rhizomatic.
It's a perfect example of--to
use another instance from
Deleuze--the relationship
between the wasp and the orchid.
The wasp, like the virus,
sort of flits about from
blossom to blossom,
descends, and then constitutes
the flu.
 
By contrast there is hereditary
disease--
that is, that which is lurking
in us because we're programmed
for it,
we're hard-wired for it,
and it is genetically in our
nature.
This Deleuze associates with
the arboresque.
It comes from an origin.
 
It is something that is a cause
within us or a cause standing
behind us,
as opposed to something coming
out of left field in an
arbitrary and unpredictable
fashion and descending on us--
perhaps this is also not unlike
Tynjanov's distinction between
modification and evolution.
The arboresque evolves;
the rhizomatic is modification.
The give and take of tensions
among entities--
the rats tumbling over each
other, the maze of the burrow,
the spreading of crabgrass--all
of this has a kind of randomness
and unpredictability.
 
The power of linkage at all
conceivable points without any
predictability--all of this is
entailed in the rhizomatic.
Now as to what's being
attacked--and again,
the value system surrounding
these things is not absolute,
Deleuze is not going so far as
to say "arboresque bad,
rhizomatic good."
 
He's coming pretty close to it,
but he acknowledges the perils,
as I say, of the
rhizomatic--but in the meantime
just one point in passing--
because I'm running out of time
to talk about Žižek--
just one point in passing about
the arboresque.
 
There are actually,
in the first pages of your
essay, two forms of it.
 
One is what he calls the
"root book,"
the traditional classical book
which presents to you a theme:
"I am going to write about
so-and-so,
and I'm going to do so
systematically,
one thing at a time in a series
of chapters."
That's the root book.
 
Then there is what he calls the
"fascicle book,"
a book which consists of
complicated offshoots of roots
but nevertheless entailing a tap
root.
This is what he associates with
Modernism, precisely,
in your text.
 
He says in effect:
"The fascicle book is like
Joyce's Ulysses.
 
Everything including the
kitchen sink is in it.
It looks as though it were
totally rhizomatic,
but it is, of course,
controlled by,
unified by, and brought into
coherence by a single focusing
authorial consciousness so that
it is not truly rhizomatic;
it's a fascicle book."
 
And here, now,
A Thousand Plateaus is
going to be a rhizomatic book.
 
So you have not just two kinds
of books in this idea but three.
All right then,
very quickly about Žižek.
I think he can help us
understand Lacan.
I hope you agree with this in
having read it,
but I think in a way,
it also takes us back to,
or allows us to revisit,
Peter Brooks.
The best example,
it seems to me,
of the way in which the tension
of desire in narrative works for
Žižek is--
although these are splendid
examples and I think largely
self-explanatory--
the best example is actually in
another book by Žižek called
Everything You Wanted to Know
About Lacan But Were Afraid to
Ask Hitchcock.
 
In that book,
of course, you get a lot of
attention paid to
Vertigo.
Just think about Vertigo
as an instance of the kind
of plot Žižek is talking
about.
There is that--I've forgotten
her name--really nice woman.
You remember,
the painter,
and Jimmy Stewart just pays
absolutely no attention to her.
She's right there.
 
She's available.
 
She's in love with him.
 
He doesn't even see her except
as a confidante:
"Oh yes,
you;
I'm so glad you're here."
 
But he is, on the other hand,
obsessed with a woman whose
identity he can't even be sure
of.
It's not just that she's
inaccessible for some reason or
that she's a distant object of
desire.
Her identity and the question
of whether or not she's being
play-acted by somebody else
remains completely unclear--
unclear for many spectators
even as they watch the ending of
the film,
completely unclear.
That is an obscure,
not just a distant but an
obscure object of desire.
 
Of course, the premise of her
inaccessibility is what drives
the plot.
 
Now I think that it's
interesting to think about the
relationship between the element
of detour and delay,
as Žižek implies it,
in understanding narrative and
what Peter Brooks is talking
about.
Peter Brooks is talking about
the way in which middles in
plots protract themselves
through episodes,
all of which manifest some sort
of imbalance or need for further
repetition in a new key.
 
Much of this--because the
characteristic plot of the kind
of fiction Brooks is mainly
thinking about is the marriage
plot--
much of this has to do with
inappropriate object choice.
 
That indeed can also in many
cases, à
la what I began by
mentioning in Žižek,
lead to inappropriate political
object choice.
Think, for example,
about the plot of Henry James'
Princess Casamassima in
that regard.
Poor Hyacinth Robinson strikes
out on both counts in rather
completely parallel ways.
 
He ends up on the wrong side of
politics, and he ends up on the
wrong side of love.
 
In a way, the Princess
Casamassima is an
exploration of these two sides
of the issue.
So in any case,
for Brooks the resolution of
the plot is a way in which
closure can be achieved.
It is a final moment of
equilibrium,
as one might say,
or quiet or reduction of
excitation,
such that the Freudian death
wish can be realized,
as we know, in the way we want
it to be realized,
as opposed to our being
afflicted by something from the
outside.
So in Brooks,
whose closest ties are to
structuralism,
there is an achieved sense of
closure which is an important
aspect of what's admirable in
fiction.
 
Žižek is more postmodern.
 
Žižek sees,
following Lacan,
the object of desire as
asymptotic, as being ultimately
and always inaccessible;
or if it becomes
accessible--
as, for example,
on page 1193 in the right-hand
column--
or one might say,
almost accessible,
this gives rise to as many
problems as it seems to
eliminate.
 
At the bottom right-hand
column, page 1193,
Å½iÅ¾ek says:
… [P]erhaps,
in courtly love itself,
the long-awaited moment of
highest fulfillment,
when the Lady renders
Gnada,
mercy, to her servant is not
the Lady's surrender,
her consent to the sexual act,
nor some mysterious rite of
initiation,
but simply a sign of love on
the part of the Lady,
the "miracle"
that the Object answered,
stretching its hand out towards
the supplicant.
The object, in other words,
has become subject.
In this moment of exchange,
mutuality of recognition,
or becoming human on the part
of the lady--
whom of course Žižek has
associated with the dominatrix
in a sadistic relationship--
in this moment of becoming
human and of offering love,
the object becomes more
accessible.
 
That is to say,
there is now the possibility of
some form of mutuality,
but in her becoming more
accessible,
the energy of desire is
threatened with dissolution.
 
In other words,
closure in Žižek is a threat
to the energy of desire.
 
Desire is something which
inheres in our very language,
according to Žižek,
and which, were it to be
understood as brought to
closure,
the lady--Žižek gives lots of
examples of the lady,
after all of this sort of
seeming inaccessibility--
the lady says,
"Sure, why not?
Of course."
 
The person is completely upset
and then refuses the act because
there's nothing more to desire.
 
All of a sudden,
the whole structure of that
energy that drives language and
consciousness comes tumbling to
the ground, and desire has
become need.
It's become merely a matter of
gratification through what's
ready-to-hand and no longer a
question of sustaining a dream.
This, generally speaking,
is what Žižek wants to focus
on in talking about these plots.
 
The object of desire must be
not just distant but also
obscure.
 
I'm going to make two more
points.
First of all,
as you can no doubt tell,
this is a perfect replica of
Hans Holbein's The
Ambassadors.
 
I'd be amazed if anyone in
the room hadn't recognized it,
>
 
but there it is.
 
[Gestures to drawing on the
board.]
There's two guys.
 
There's a table between them.
 
They are negotiating probably
over one of Henry the Eighth's
marriages, and this I think is
not insignificant.
They are there in the service
of Henry the Eighth negotiating
one of those extremely
complicated marriages,
possibly even the one that led
to the abdication of the
Anglican Church from the Roman
Catholic Church--
who knows?
 
But the lore about the painting
is that it has to do with the
negotiation for an object of
desire, and that object is
absent.
 
In other words,
it's something really only
implied by the painting.
 
In the foreground of the
painting, notorious to art
historians, there is this thing.
 
[Gestures to drawing on the
board.]
Now this is pretty much what's
in the painting.
This is not a replica of the
two guys standing there,
granted but this is
pretty much what you see when
you look at the foreground of
the painting.
If you look sort of from the
side, it turns into something
very much like a skull.
 
Generally speaking,
there's a kind of consensus
among scholars that it may be a
weirdly distorted shadow or
representation of a skull,
although what a skull is doing
in the foreground,
of course, causes us to wonder
as well.
 
Obviously, you can have some
ideas on the subject,
but it's still not exactly
realist painting we're talking
about if he sticks a skull in
the foreground.
Well, it also has a certain
resemblance to other things we
could mention,
but the main point about it is
that we don't really know what
it is.
It is, in other words,
something we've already become
familiar with in thinking about
Lacan.
It is that signifier,
that ultimate signifier,
which is the obscure object of
desire called sometimes by Lacan
"the phallus,"
and it seems simply to be there
before us in this painting.
 
Now both in the book on
Hitchcock,
where he finds something like
this in just about every film
Hitchcock ever made,
and also in Holbein's painting,
Žižek calls this "the
blot."
We have nothing else to call it.
 
It's a blot.
 
What's it doing there?
 
In fiction, we would call it
irrelevant detail.
We can find a way of placing
formally absolutely everything
in fiction.
 
The weather,
the flowers on the table,
whatever it might be:
we can place these formally,
but there may be something in
fiction which is simply
unaccountable.
 
We cannot account for it,
and that's the blot for
Žižek.
 
All right.
 
Now finally,
on desire on language:
there's a part of Žižek's
essay which you may have thought
of as a digression.
 
He's suddenly talking about
J.L. Austin's ordinary
language philosophy.
 
He's suddenly talking about the
linguist Ducrot's idea of
predication.
 
What's important about,
in the one case,
the element of performance in
any utterance and,
in the other case,
the dominance of an entire
sentence by predication--
what's important in both of
those elements is that they take
over an aspect of language of
which they were only supposed to
be a part.
In other words,
in Austin there are both
performatives and constatives;
but in the long run,
the argument of How to Do
Things with Words suggests
that there are only
performatives:
I thought this was a
constative,
he says in effect,
I thought this was just
straightforward language,
but I can now see an element of
performance in it.
 
That's the way that there's a
gradual changing of his own mind
in Austin's book to which
Žižek is sensitive.
By the same token,
Ducrot talks about the way in
which the predicate element of a
subject,
the predicate relation,
has a kind of energy of agency
that simply takes over the
grammatical subject and
constitutes a kind of
performance in the sentence--
performance in both cases
meaning "desire."
When I promise to do something,
I also desire to fulfill the
promise.
 
When I predicate something,
I'm also evoking a desire that
that something be the case
possibly through my own
instrumentality.
 
This is the argument.
 
That's what Žižek means by
"desire in language,"
by the inescapability of desire
in language,
and the way in which it
permeates everything we can say
to each other--
most particularly,
the way in which it permeates
the plot or,
as they say in film studies,
the "diegesis"
of the kinds of film examples
that Žižek gives us.
I'd better stop there.
 
I hope that this somewhat
rapid-fire survey of some key
ideas in these texts are
helpful.
I think in the long run
perhaps, I hope,
mainly that you see these two
energetic authors as exemplars
of what we call Postmodernism
and see the relevance of the
concept of the postmodern to the
study of literary theory.
Thanks.
 
