Personal/political Unconscious

I was reading some Monique Wittig today for my French Feminism class. In the pieces I was looking at, she complains that Marxist thought leaves no room for the single subject, eschewing it for the universal subject of history (i.e. the proletariat). Everything else, she argues, is dismissed as simply ‘bourgeois’. I think this points to what was at issue in what we were talking about at the end of the panel the other day: there is the personal sinthome, but we can’t forget the social synthome.

Zizek seems to think that there is no personal symthome, spending all his time on the social synthome. And it’s tied into the externalization of the unconscious – that is, the unconscious exits in the things we do rather than what we think, and as such are tied by social experience: “…the fundamental lesson of psychoanlysis is that the unconscious is outside, crystallized in institutional practices” (Zizek in an interview with Chris Hanlon). He goes on to say that Jameson reporaches him with the charge that “the inner self-experience disappears with me, that I externalize everything into social rituals”. This is close to what we were discussing – that is, what is the place of the ‘personal unconscious’?

This comes up in the ‘second interlude’ of Parallax View when the Z is digging into J.A.M.: “And the theoretical co-ordinates within which one formulates one’s position? The most boring old hermeneutic insistence on the uniqueness of the individual who should not be turned into a statistical unit, reduced to one-in-the-series-of-others…. Where are the days when it was clear to every critical individual that this insistence on the uniqueness of the subject is merely the obverse of ‘quantification’, the two being the opposite sides of the same (ideological) coin?” (261). This sounds just like what Wittig was writing about… I buy the idea that our problems are deeply rooted in social structures, and taking this all the way means that fixing these problems rather than assuaging them necessitates social change. Which is all to say that ‘you don’t exist’: you are nothing but your social unconscious.

The problem for Wittig, as I can surmise from the little bit of reading that I’ve just done, is with the declaration of a social problem as the social problem – i.e. capitalist exploitation over race and gender. Her argument is that taking captialist exploitation as ‘one exploitation to rule them all’ (this is more or less the position that David McNally at York was telling us in the ‘rethinking captial’ class I took) is to marginalize racial and gender issues as unimportant. She also wants to hang onto the idea that each individual subject is important. However, she establishes this negativly, i.e. by way of dismissing Marxist claims that subjectivity is ‘bourgeois’, so it’s hard to say if that idea has any legs …(maybe she gives a positive argument for it elsewhere…)

So, my first question is: do we think its correct to say that capitalism is the thing that needs to be eliminated, and all else will follow, or that there are several struggles, all of them equally valid? I’m leaning towards capital, but I’m not fully convinced that the second option doesn’t have something to it. That is, will the end of capital automatically spell the end of racism and sexism? If those are based in the exploitation of labour, then yes. If not, no.

This begs the following question: if exploitation for profit isn’t the basis for racism and sexism, what is? Fear? That seems a little simplistic. Some innate drive to dominate? that doesn’t seem right either…. I don’t know post-colonial or feminist theory well enough to guess what another explanation would be. Do you two?

My second question is: is there room for a personal unconscious? What does it actually mean when Z says that “the uniqueness of the subject is merely the obverse of ‘quantification’, the two being the opposite sides of the same (ideological) coin?”?

‘I think thow dost protest too much’, as they say – I think Z overlooks the potential in the idea that one must take each analysand as a unique incarnation of a single problem. That is, if we stick to the idea that capital is the problem, it seems to me that the ‘Leninist’ approach would be to read each struggle – both personal ‘passages a l’act’ and collective ‘passages a l’acte’ (riot, strike, whatever) – as a unique situation that has to be dealt with (i.e. directed through a poltical project, politicized) on a one-by-one basis. That is, what worked in a political struggle in Russia in 1917 isn’t going to work in a struggle in Canada in 2008 (And I’m sure Z knows this and has said as much. Hence ‘repeating Lenin’ and not ‘copying Lenin’). One a personal level, with an analyst, wouldn’t this mean the ‘end of analysis’ would see the analysand transformed into a revolutionary who tackled whatever social-ill most directly affected them (racial inequality; sexual abuse; labour exploitation)?

Otherwise, it seems to me, all that you could otherwise expect from analysis would be reconciliation with/in the situation in which you find yourself, rather than change…

And in a ‘Hegelian’ way, don’t we HAVE to say that the social-ill can only manifest in a particular being? That is, you can’t have a social ill without something to be that social ill. But, how is this not just another way of saying “I am nothing but the product of my social surroundings”? My guess is that there has to be people with particular ‘its’ (ids), who in wrestling with their own shit, come to the moment where they are able to say “I am responsible for all this” (i.e. formal-conversion) and then ‘Act’.

…?

G

[Christopher Hanlon: “psychoanalysis and the post-political: an interview with Slavoj Zizek” in New Literary History, 2001, 32: 1-21.]