Millennial Ironies

(some conceptual parataxis, not arguments, just possible statements, and disjunctions between them)

There is a certain irony in late modern poetry which awaits interpretation. It’s diminutive impassivity could be mistaken at first glance for witticism or cuteness, while on further consideration it refers to disturbing negativity verging on the hysterical. It signals an obstinate refusal to choose from among the infinite possibilities for market transaction, and the odor which issues from the burning of the overwhelming potential of money through the pockets. This is a scene where the signifier gets immolated by the infinite possibilities of the liberal markets and vaporizes into the artificial flow of imagery. Then to put a further twist on this, there is the culpability of critical reason which is charged with the deconstruction of the signifier. This is poetry that dramatically stages the extinction of subjective agency in the avalanche of technical contingencies, along with the culpability of reason for the murder of the primal signifier. This should be taken as mise-en-scene, which does not assume a history of the decline of symbolic efficacy. This is rather the self-staging of self-affectation in late modern poetry. 

What appears most conspicuous in this poetry is a relentless play of ironic reversals.  Yet this work ultimately manages to assert some classical ideals of virtue. The controversial issue here is how “postmodern irony” can be effective in the servicing of classical ideals. This performance involves several layers of dissimilation as it attempts to contravene both the customs of grievance and the values of commodification. And its aspiration to the impersonal refuses any celebration of heroic individuality.  Then what sort of virtue might this poetry promote? One could paraphrase Ian Hacking by saying that it performs a suffering involved in the “taming of contingency”. And while this poetics emerges in the later twentieth century, the virtue it promotes is not restricted to the conditions of that epoch. 

This poetry deals with traumas of contingency which belong to the annals of modernity disturbance. That archive would include Wordsworth swooning amidst the crowds of London, and Simmel stupefied by the motorcars of Munich. But notice how these earlier shocks affected the perceptual faculties of the organic body on a concrete level, whereas our problem concerns a more abstract and even spiritual kind of inundation. The Leibnizian monadology bears witness to a traumatic experience which is more relevant for the concerns of late modernity, where the peculiar division of bodies and monads responded to the liquidation of estates during the crisis of the 1600s. The insistence on optimization reaches an ascetic refusal of all possibilities (“that’s not it!”).     

A spectrum of sufferance is evidenced in 1980s pop culture, especially in musical genres like new wave, heavy metal, punk, and techno. These genres might be associated with complexes such as masochism, primal murder, or incest. Though it’s wiser to assume that each audience could interpret any genre according to their own affective dispositions. These structures of feeling belong to an epoch of the ending of history, where undirected time raises social entropy as an aesthetic problem. This condition results from an economy where the idea of the “developed world” serves as a guiding value for the “undeveloped nations”. This relational world structure was reproduced in a feedback loop between promotion and investment. The “developed” condition posed a threat for a primal repression that had assumed the temporality of progress, and various aesthetic styles emerged as responses to this undoing of primary repression. A millennial poetics was manifested in songs of Leonard Cohen from the mid-1980s, and in films like Pump Up the Volume. 

In the late 1960s, Laplanche and Pontalis posed the question, “doesn’t primal repression found humanity?”. Perhaps the very posing of this question announced a challenge for capitalist development.  If humanism was the great obstacle for development, then its overcoming required the undoing of primal repression.  Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “repressive desublimation” moved towards such a hypothesis.

Primal repression is like the formatting of a hard drive, which determines the structuring of information processing.  The mind has a reflexive capacity to reformat itself according to different structures.  Neurologists have described the economic trade-offs between versatility and processing capacity. A mind which has a relatively invariable topology gains advantages from being more accustomed to the consistency of its self-organization. This is like a conservative librarian who religiously adheres to the Dewey decimal system, which gives them the ability to quickly retrieve whatever books are requested. Yet this invariance becomes a disadvantage when new genres of information appear, since the existing system would lack appropriate categories. Conversely, a liberal librarian who is inclined to spontaneously alter the filing system would make the opposite trade-off:  they are able to create suitable categories for new kinds of material, though they may have difficulty retrieving information which is requested.   

This computational metaphor provides an approach to ontology.  When categories are taken as more permanent and fundamental then they are hardwired into the functioning of the mind. The mind has greater efficiency when thinking in terms of these fundamental categories. Heidegger favored a course of mental development where the basic neurological processes would move along the axis of Being and beings.  Whereas a certain reading of Hegel would prioritize an axis between contingency and actuality.  When Lacan introduces the Vel in his eleventh seminar, that idea has implications for this fundamental partitioning of thought. Conservatism that would emphasize some fundamental binary division between concepts, figures, or numbers. Whereas the Spinozist lesson of the poststructuralists was to establish the oneness of the middle as such before considering the identity of the sides which it divides.  Then the elementary articulations of twoness would be defined in temporal and spatial terms.   

Jean Piaget divided the learning process into the phases of assimilation and accommodation. On the first encounter with new material, the mind of a learner is overwhelmed by inconceivable and unpresentable alterity. The mind does not possess suitable concepts, figures, or numbers which could give the other an adequate symbolic expression, so there is a hackneyed expression where some familiar symbols are deployed to stand for the unrecognizable qualities of what has just manifested for the first time. This assimilation carries a sense of inadequacy because the other is not well expressed. This sense of inadequacy sets into motion a reformatting of symbolic differentiation, which is the accommodative secondary phase of learning. This pedagogical theory can be reinterpreted as an après coup where time figures itself in the double mirroring of a mise-en-abyme. There is an inverse reflection of the past in the future. There is an earlier time when the other is the same, and a later time when the same is the other.     

Consider the “example” of learning the sounds of a new language.  In earlier attempts at speaking, the learner reproduces the sounds of their mother tongue. The foreign sounds are assimilated into the familiar sounds. The phonetic distinctions of the new language have not yet discernible, and the muscles of the vocal tract have not yet developed to produce them. The learner perceives the new sounds as inarticulate noises which can be represented only through assimilation into the repertoire of already familiar phonetic distinctions. This is also basically what it means to speak with a foreign accent. 

The concept of language devolves from the experience of particular languages. And today this conception gets shaped by the status of English as an international language.  This implies a repression of sensitive regional contingencies, so that concepts of language are shaped by regional language politics. Then the virtual potential of language, which inheres universally in the physiology of the species, undergoes varying regional repressions. The releasing of this potential would require a conception of language that is not bound up with the particularities of recent experience. The virtual idea of language moves the linguistic into non-identity with itself, and this pushes the very articulation of conceptuality off-kilter, bringing the erasure of sociopolitical identities, and dissolving the concrete immediacy of language as an anchor of territorial identity in perceptual belief.

A certain deconstructive argument is exemplary in its capacity to undermine the conditions of primary repression. This argument posits that the concepts of time and space are implied within a “common root” that is shared by the distinctions active/passive and self/other. Self and other change roles in a rhythmic alteration between passive and active, and all metaphysical concepts emerge from these rhythms.  In terms of concrete experience, these rhythms emerge in dialogue, sports, industry, politics, and sexuality. The contemplation of this deconstructive argument quietly undoes primary repression behind our backs and exposes thought to the contingencies of its own conditioning.  Thought loses the particularity of its own orientation within the symbolic and sets out on the adventure of discovering a radical neutrality.    

Alenka Zupancic explains how speech is only possible from particular positions within symbolic relations.  This means there can be no neutral speech that would issue from nowhere, anywhere, or everywhere. A speaker must assume a symbolic position that would relate them with other speakers, some of whom being the same in some way, and some of whom being different. The symbolic relation would divide the possible speakers into the same and the different. This division of roles in language coincides with the division of sexual roles. In terms of logical expression, the slide into the neutral neutralizes the powers of affirmation and negation. The neutral is where affirmation and negation become indiscernible. This is what Lacanians would call the failure of the symbolic relation. This could be understood as a general ethical failure to establish any kind of interpersonal rapport.     

The question that eventually arises is whether there can be a symbolic division of the neutral. This is the route suggested by Blanchot when he distinguishes the neutral from the neuter. The drawing of such distinctions would require the initial failure of all symbolic distinction, such that other and self are dissolved into an anonymous murmur. There would have to be some registration of this ethical failure where the capacity for symbolic expression. The style of modernist novels called the flow of consciousness, or even the traditional narrative convention of free indirect speech, might provide some basis for this symbolization of the non-symbolic. Then from within this anonymous murmur, the question becomes how the neutral itself could undergo a symbolic division.  

When Zupančič explains the sexual distinction, she takes up a line of thought from Joan Copjec, who read the pattern of Lacanian sexuation into Kantian philosophy. The female side of symbolic form gets expressed through the mathematical sublime, which opens beyond the antinomies of containment. This is the undecidability about whether the universe has limits in time and space. This could be associated with disciplinary knowledge that emphasizes containment such as earth sciences, contextual linguistics, and the maternal analysis of Melanie Klein.  Whereas the male side gets expressed through the dynamical sublime, which opens beyond the antinomies of volitional determination. This could be associated with the Baconian power-knowledge where instrumental intentions take themselves as the causes of industrial development. Then there would necessarily be some correlation among these “sexed” disciplines. 

This sexual division of disciplinary knowledge would draw a symbolic distinction within neutrality, such that both kinds of disciplinary knowledge are objective. But this was not the distinction that Blanchot proposed between the neuter and the neutral. That point might be articulated as one between an Other-neutral and a neuter-neutral. The neuter-neutral would be an infantile fantasy of an impossible asubjectivity which would inhabit the omniscience of nowhere. Inclinations towards this position tend towards destructive impotence. This position of the neuter-neutral is “infantile” in the sense that it requires mourning or sublimation.  Through that process of mourning it can be transformed into the Other-neutral.  This Other would be an empty third which separates the female logic of containment from the male logic of causality.

A labor of subtraction is required to keep this Other vacant, to prevent it from sliding back into the neuter-neutral, or to prevent it from becoming the site for the return of a deity which would guarantee identities.  Kojève was responding to this problem when he elaborated his theory of the juridical third which was modelled on the Platonic statesman.  That is the form which authority would assume after the end of history. This juridical neutrality stands a process of dying that would coincide with the mourning or sublimation of the neuter-neutral.  The historical struggle for recognition would be a struggle for the occupation of this infantile position of the neuter-neutral. And the passage beyond the end of history would be the success of the mourning  or sublimation which transforms that position into the emptiness of the third which separates the male and female positions.

This leaves problems about whether the neuter-neutral could ever be completely absolved into the Other-neutral.  This coincides with the problems surrounding the ending of history.  Obviously this cannot be understood as a single event which happens once and for all. There is the question of whether this labor of sublimation has anything to do with historical chronology, or whether this should be approached as a mise-en-scene of self-affection or group-affectation. The term neuter-neutral would work metonymically as a name for whatever polite modernity cannot tolerate. This could explain why sexuation entered the discourse of modern philosophy under the heading of the sublime. The sublime was classified among the “figures of classical rhetoric”, but in truth it was always a category for the mourning of lost antiquity.  Longinus was already a proto-modern in this sense. 

The neuter-neutral would be a category of unmourned infantile attachments which include traditionalist fantasies of antiquity.  These are distinctly modern reveries of a lost past.  This could refer to numerous legacies and traditions which are associated with the glories of the ancients. This topic concerns the pathological tendencies associated with traditionalism. This is where psychoanalysis has emphasized the figure of the primal father. The term “infantile attachment” has often connotated maternal attachment, but the neuter-neutral dissolves the distinction between maternal and paternal, such that phantasies of the maternal phallus may arise. 

This moves towards a dialectical strategy for dealing with the politics of traditionalism. Tactless liberals attempt to assume the greatest distance possible from traditionalist pathologies.  They want to deride their enemy from a safe distance. This a projection of the neuter-neutral into the other. But perhaps symbolic relations are conditional on access to the neuter-neutral.  This means that a sexual division would reemerge afresh from their submerging into that abysmal neutrality. For this reason, traditionalism should be approached where it is bound with liberal modernity in the most compromising ways. Resisting the inclination towards projection, this would mean seeking out the speculative identity of liberal friends and traditionalist enemies. 

For example, the legacy of theodicy provides opportunities for the discovery of such speculative identities. This is the traditional genre of Christian writings which attempt to account for evil in the world.  The supposedly modern notion of the free will has its origins in theodicy.  Here we find liberal modernity compromised by the darkness of antiquity. It’s at sites such as this that a labor of mourning can proceed through the play of millennial ironies.