Postmodern Identities, Part 3 of 4

So the second author we've read for this week is Lavo Gegac, who is, like Judith Butler an extraordinarily prolific and provocative, and interesting philosophical voice. and like Judith Butler, has, is become a a philosopher of the world really has audiences all over the world in and outside of academia. Lavo Gegac is, is, written a lot about popular culture and so his, his his words, and his his shtick I could call it, really, that is his performance or, resonate widely because of his attentiveness to, non-academic forms of communication. And his, his penchant for, incisive, readings of what we thought of as very familiar. Forms, whether that would be Hitchcock or other popular cinema, and or, his, his wonderful, wonderful use of humor or instruct us on some really complex and difficult issues. Butler has recently seen herself in the, in the as a, in a legacy of[UNKNOWN] , a notion of critique. but and, and, and she has paid extraordinary debts to to deconstruction. Lavo Gegac as he says often, is a card carrying Lacanian, that is he has learned a lot from Jacque Lacan, a great French psychoanalyst and theorist who started of being very influenced, not only by Freud. but also by the surrealists and then by Alexander Cousev. Hegelian, and, may have mentioned before in this class, and Cousev's notion of a master slave dialectic from Hegel. And Lacan went on to write very enigmatic and powerful works about how language, the unconscious, and desire intersect form of constellation of forces, that we could never fully understand but that structure our lives are subjectivity, our fantasies and our actions. Gegac begins from that and I think, one of the first things to do was just to get a sense of Gegac in addition to the reading which assigned and we just designed a small essay from the London Review of Books called "You May", which is really the imperative of you must enjoy. We, I'd like you to look at some, some film clips that you can see on, on YouTube. And we have some, we'll post some, some links here and, and if you have a chance to look at the film, Gigac, which is about a 70 minute film, it gives you a sense of his ideas, but also of his of his his way of thinking as a, as a, as a person moving through the world. Very, I think, very compelling an, analyst of contemporary culture. >> [MUSIC] This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. >> But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions, but this are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away, from our reality, this embodied fixtures, that regulate it, you lose reality itself. I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fast food religious experience. But a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself. If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too, too filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalize it. >> Anyway, for our purposes, we're, we are focusing on this, this text and, and Gegac in here, talks about, ma mannerism as a practice that voyage itself around a an empty spot where we thought God was[LAUGH] . That is the that from mannerism there was this the notion that we, that, that God is missing, that there was a empty, there was a, this spot where God or the ordering principle or the, the sovereign of the world, that, that, that, that was a, that, that, you, we used to think that was there. And then when modernism di, dis, discovers is that, that's gone. That, that it's dead, God is dead, or the, there is no ideal or As Gegac puts it on page 43 of the text we've assigned, the thing is lacking. That the machine of the world, or our machine of the, of the universe revolves around an emptiness. And he says the post modernist reversal, this is on page 43, the post modernist reversal shows the thing itself. As the incarnated, materialized emptiness. In other words rather than just thinking that God is dead, the post modernism thinks that the dead God, the, the materialized emptiness is is this terrifying object that nonetheless structures are our very existence. This sounds awfully cryptic, and it is awfully, awfully cryptic, cryptic. what for Gegac what happens is that we have a notion of what he calls, following Lacan, the big other that is some, some ordering principle of the universe. Some, force that determines who we are and what we do. am, and. That, in post modernism, we realize that the force that determines what we are and, who we are are and what we do. That that force is, itself, materialized emptiness. That there is, a power. Of absence, that, That controls us. That, that, that defines our existence. it's not as if we can be free by just realizing that. There is no, wizard behind the curtain, you know. Remember the Wizard of Oz, that you rea-, oh there's no wizard behind the curtain. Well, we, it's not that we, we come free when we realize that there is that God is dead, as Nitzche said it. We don't become free there, we just we realize that the, the force that structures us is a force of emptiness. On page 51 he puts it this way, by the mere act of speaking we suppose the existence of the Big Other, the guarantor of meaning. this is on page 51. we, we, when we engage in a language game, when we engage in an act of speaking, we acknowledge that there are a set of rules that guarantee meaning. and that if we didn't act as if there were a set of rules. That guarenteed meeting, we would be crazy, we would be as he says, "Psychotic." Believing there is a code to be be cracked Gegac writes, "Is of course much the same as believing in the existence of the Big Other." That is, if you think there's a code behind it all, if you think there's a. " A conspiracy, or that you think that there's a force controlling all things. you, you, what you are doing is believing that there is a, a, there is a, author of a structure that gives meaning to our everyday lives. and, For Gegac, this is, an, eh, eh, a fantasy. A-, a-, an illusion. And for him instead, what he's interested in is the, the the ways in which, what looks like prohibition, actually gives rise to desire, and what looks like desire, is actually, becomes a form of prohibition. This is the Gegac's typical move, that is, what he tends to do is to emphasize that what looks like x is really y, and what, what pretends to be y is really z. And that, that you what, what and he does this in a way that acknowledges our first perceptions of the situation but then reverses those perceptions. >> Let's say you have the this so-called tolerant post-modern father. What he will tell you is the following. You know how much your grandmother loves you, but none the less, you should only visit her, if you really want to. Now every child, who is not an idiot, and they are not idiots,[LAUGH] know that this apparent free choice secretly contains an even much, much stronger, much stronger [INAUDIBLE] . Not only you have to visit your grandmother, but you have to like it. >> I'm beginning to like this book, Call to War. >> That's one example of how apparent choice, tolerance, and so on, can conceal a much stronger, a much stronger order. >> So, we should go back to more like the dad that just says, because I said so. >> Absolutely, it's more honest. >> On page seven he's talking here about what he calls sometimes the post-modern father. He says the modern, the old-fashioned father which say you know, you, you, you're going to grandma's house on Sunday. We're going to grandma's house on Sunday, and you're coming. You want to go play baseball, to bad you're coming to grandma's house. The post modern father the very, seems to be very permissive, seems to be gentle, says oh we're going to grandma's house on Sunday and you know how much grandma loves you. You know how much I want you to be there with grandma, because she loves you and I, I, I know you'll make the right decision and you'll, you'll go to grandma house with us on Sunday. And for Gegac this apparently more tolerant, more permissive gentler force is much more oppressive, much more pernicious because what it's really saying is You will want to go to Grandma's house. The first father, the old fashioned father says, you're going to go to Grandma's house, 'cuz I'm the father. [LAUGH]. And you're going to listen to me. Whereas the second one, under the guise of tolerance. Under the guise of permissiveness. What the second father is saying is, you will have the desire I want you to have because I want, not just to control your behavior, but I want to control your desire. So, in a permissive society there is a different form of repression. In a permissive society, Gegac writes, there's a different kind of transgression. This is from page seven of the reading for this week. In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master slave relationship becomes transgressive. The master-slave relationship becomes a transgressive relationship. The paradox, this paradox reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis does not deal, psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who prohibits enjoyment. But with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself. So for Gegac, the obscene father is this post-modern father who makes you want to do something rather than just prohibit you from doing something you originally wanted to do.