WHAT CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS TELL US ABOUT CYBERSPACE? (PART TWO)

The pervert directly elevates the enjoying big Other into the agency of Law

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Below is part two of my texts on Cyberspace.

The Digital Perversion

... et pourtant, il revient dans le réel

The first paradox of this retreat of the big Other is discernible in the so-called "culture of complaint," with its underlying logic of ressentiment: far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn't exist, i.e., as if impotence is no excuse—the big Other is responsible for the very fact that it wasn't able to do anything: the more the subject's structure is "narcissistic," the more he puts the blame on the big Other and thus asserts his dependence on it. The basic feature of the "culture of complaint" is thus a call, addressed at the big Other, to intervene and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc.)—how, exactly, is this to be done is again a matter of different ethico-legal "committees." Is thus the "culture of complaint" not today's version of hysteria, of the hysterical impossible demand addressed to the Other, a demand which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds his/her existence in his/her complaint—"I am insofar as make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery"? The gap is here insurmountable between this logic of complaint and the true "radical" ("revolutionary") act which, instead of complaining to the Other and expecting it to act, i.e., displacing the need to act onto it, suspends the existing legal frame and itself accomplishes the act... So what is wrong with the complaint of those who are really deprivileged? The fact that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address themselves to it: by way of translating their demand into the terms of legalistic complaint, they confirm the Other in its position in the very gesture of attacking it.

Furthermore, a wide scope of phenomena (the resurgent ethico/religious "fundamentalisms" which advocate a return to the Christian patriarchal division of sexual roles; the New Age massive re-sexualization of the universe, i.e., the return to pre-modern pagan sexualized cosmo-ontology; the growth of "conspiracy theories" as a form of popular "cognitive mapping") seem to counter this retreat of the big Other. It is all too simple to dismiss these phenomena as simply "regressive," as new modes of the "escape from freedom," as unfortunate "remainders of the past" which will disappear if we only continue to proceed even more resolutely on the deconstructionist path of historicization of every fixed identity, of unmasking the contingency of every naturalized self-image. These disturbing phenomena rather compel us to elaborate much more in detail the contours of the retreat of the big Other: the paradoxical result of this mutation in the "inexistence of the Other"—of the growing collapse of the symbolic efficiency—is precisely the re-emergence of the different facets of a big Other which exists effectively, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction.

The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is, of course, the most succinct definition of paranoia; for that reason, two features which characterize today's ideological stance—cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy—are strictly codependent: the typical subject today is the one who, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. The distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject's refusal to "take it seriously," relies on the belief that there is an "Other of the Other," that a secret, invisible and all-powerful agent effectively "pulls the strings" and runs the show: behind the visible, public Power, there is another obscene, invisible power structure. This other, hidden agent acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life). It is here that we should look for the roots of the recent impasse of narrativization, i.e., of the motif of the "end of large narratives": in our era when—in politics and ideology as well as in literature and cinema—global, all-encompassing narratives ("the struggle of liberal democracy with totalitarianism," etc.) seem no longer possible, the only way to arrive at a kind of global "cognitive mapping" seems to be the paranoiac narrative of a "conspiracy theory"—not only for the right-wing populism and fundamentalism, but also for the liberal center (the "mystery" of Kennedy's assassination) and left-wing orientations (see the old obsession of the American Left with the notion that some mysterious government agency is experimenting with nerve gasses enabling the power to regulate the behaviour of the population). The large majority of movies which, in the last two decades, were able to attract the public interest on account of their plot, not of the fire-cracking action, were different versions of conspiracy theory. And it is all too simplistic to dismiss conspiracy narratives as the paranoiac proto-Fascist reaction of the infamous "middle classes" which feel threatened by the process of modernization: it would be much more productive to conceive "conspiracy theory" as a kind of floating signifier which, as we have just seen, can be appropriated by different political options, enabling them to obtain a minimal cognitive mapping.

This, then, is one version of the big Other which continues to exist in the wake of its alleged disappearance. Another version is operative in the guise of the New Age Jungian re-sexualization of the universe ("men are from Mars, women are from Venus"): according to it, there is an underlying, deeply anchored archetypal identity which provides a kind of safe haven in the flurry of contemporary confusion of roles and identities; from this perspective, the ultimate origin of today's crisis is not the difficulty to overcome the tradition of fixed sexual roles, but the disturbed balance in the modern man who puts an excessive emphasis on male-rational-conscious etc. aspect, neglecting the feminine-compassionate etc. aspect. Although this tendency shares with feminism the anti-Cartesian and anti-patriarchal bias, it rewrites the feminist agenda into a re-assertion of archetypal feminine roots repressed in our competitive male mechanistic universe... Yet another version of the real Other is the figure of the father as sexual harasser of his young daughters, which stands in the very centre of the so-called "false-memory syndrome": here, also, the suspended father as the agent of symbolic authority, i.e., the embodiment of a symbolic fiction, "returns in the real" (what causes such controversy is the contention of those who advocate re-memorization of childhood sexual abuses that sexual harassment by the father is not merely fantasized or, at least, an indissoluble mixture of fact and fantasy, but a plain fact, something that, in the majority of families, "really happened" in the daughter's childhood—an obstinacy comparable to Freud's no less obstinate insistence on the murder of the "primordial father" as a real event in the humanity's prehistory). A further aspect of this "return in the real" of the father is undoubtedly the growing obsession of the popular pseudo-science with the mystery of the alleged Christ's tomb and/or progeny (from his alleged marriage with Mary Magdalene) which focuses on the region around Rennes-le-Château in the south of France, weaving into a large coherent narrative the Grail myth, Cathars, Templars, Freemasons, etc.: these narratives endeavour to supplant the diminishing power of the symbolic fiction of the Holy Ghost (the community of believers) with the bodily Real of Christ and his descendants.