There are a few scenes in Ken Loach's film "I ,Daniel Blake" that present the reality of segregation in action in the JobCentre, especially the reduction of talking to a discourse that is nothing like a conversation. We see the subject – the speaking being , the parlêtre – being effectively eliminated by the prevailing discourse in the JobCentre. For instance, one of the employees, a woman, keeps trying to reinsert a human element into the process by speaking to Daniel Blake as if he is still a human being, but she always fails, and the prevailing discourse reasserts itself. This editorial by Paris-based psychoanalyst Marie-Hélène Brousse opens the new issue of The Lacanian Review which is stuffed to the gills with important articles about this pernicious phenomenon. On sale now!
Segregations/Subversion
Marie-Hélène Brousse
first published in The Lacanian Review, No. 3, 2017
Why dedicate an issue of The Lacanian Review to segregations, a topic more frequently dealt
with by other disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, history, cultural
studies, law and political science?
This everyday word – commonly used, popular even, which
has also had a legal definition in certain states at specific historical times –
is a recurrent theme for Lacan and for psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation
today. Moreover, it even came to the fore in the guise of a prediction, as Lacan’s
“Note on the Father and Universalism”, with which this issue opens, attests.
His assertion in 1968 of an ever-increasing development in segregative processes
is now vindicated. It highlights the demonstrative rigour of psychoanalysis,
which makes it a predictive science.
Segregation is now part of everyday life. Open the
newspaper, switch on your mobile phone and you see it instantly displayed: at the
level of states, with Brexit in England, Trump’s wall separating the US from
Mexico, and all the barriers that rise in the world to prevent, limit, and control
migratory flows. But it is also materialised in the urban space between neighbourhoods,
in civil society between social groups. It is appropriate to see the field of identity
politics as a ramification of new barriers, and to see a development of
segregation in the multiplication of identity claims. In the past, segregation
was something one was subjected to and which came from the Other; today it is
self-imposed, wanted, and even demanded.
How does psychoanalysis account for the contemporary
extension of the segregative processes on the one hand, and how can it formalise
its psychical mechanisms on the other?
In
Extension: Appropriation of the Master’s Discourse by the Sciences
Lacan is precise on the first point. Several times, and
on various occasions between 1960 and 1970, he stated:
“The factor at stake here is the most burning issue of
our times in so far as this era is the first to have to undergo the calling
into question of every social structure as a result of the progress of science.
This is something we are contending with, not only in our domain as
psychiatrists, but in the furthest reaches of our universe, and in an ever more
pressing fashion: with segregation.”[1]
The rise of segregation is the consequence of a mutation of what, seven
years later, he will call, and formalise as, a discourse. Discourse is one of
the four categories, together with language, speech and lalangue, according to which the axiom “the unconscious is
structured like a language” is to be modulated. This definition of the
unconscious makes it possible to subvert the traditional definitions of the
unconscious in terms of depth/surface and to annul the difference between
individual/collective unconscious. The rise of segregation and the
modifications of its modalities thus depend on a mutation of discourse: the
discourse of the master, in other words, the social bonds insofar as they are
orders. The term ‘order’ is to be taken here in its very equivocation: it is both
a mode of organising the link between speaking subjects, and an ‘order’ in the sense
of an imperative which promotes a specific form of jouissance. The discourse of
the master was previously organised by a principle of hierarchical authority; now,
under the domination of science, it is ordered by numbers, mathematical
formulations and techno-sciences. This is how we can approach the Shoah. The
segregation of Jewish populations goes way back. But the “concentration camp” modality
for the implementation of the Nazi “final solution” is of another order, and
obeys another logic. The person targeted by this new form of segregation is no
longer envisaged as a speaking subject, another human, however hated. This
individual is no longer approached as a subject on the basis of the fantasy, namely
the forms his or her desire takes. The individual is reduced to the “pure
subject”, a pure knowledge, “that of modern science”, and not of unconscious
knowledge, which, though it manifests itself in every being by a “I do not want
to know anything about it”, nonetheless organises the life of the subject on
the basis of its relation to its objects.
No longer a name, an origin, but a number. We are
moving towards, and maybe we are already there, being subject-objects reduced
to genetic marks. With science we have gone from being subjected to the empire
of the name to being subjected to knowledge. We can see this in the way that selections
are made on human embryos in medically assisted procreation. Speaking in 1967
to psychiatrists “of a concrete segregative practice, the confinement of madmen”,
Lacan told them: “The expansion, dominance of this pure subject to science is
what comes to these effects of which you are the actors and the participants,
namely: these profound rearrangements of the social hierarchies which constitute
the characteristic of our time.”[2]
The extension of segregation finds its condition in the substitution of the divided
subject for the pure subject of science. The management of divided subjects can
only be envisaged from the perspective of the symptom, and requires language
and speech. If these subjects are reduced to encrypted data and writing, they
can be managed without speech. Segregation is the modality of management of
human masses which short-circuits division. It is intimately linked to the statistical
processing of data, the latter including even individual choices. Here is a
simple example: you buy several books on Amazon. You receive a message telling
you that ‘Customers who bought this book also bought this or that book’, which
are then offered to you. You are thus segregated into the category of ‘buyers
of this or that’. Even your most singular desire is liable to work on a
segregative modality.
Hetero-segregation
vs. the Self-segregation of Brothers
To the stranglehold of science on the discourse of the
master observed by Lacan, we can, forty years on, add another argument: the
transformation of speaking subjects into ‘Ones All Alone’, according to the
formula Jacques-Alain Miller developed out of Lacan’s very last teaching. In
the “Note on the Father and Universalism”, Lacan highlighted the end of the
father, but also at stake is the change in the status of the One. The One
linked to metaphor by means of the name, the One linked to the exception, is
replaced by all these scattered ones, without any metaphorical link allowing
the one to pass to the two, the three etc. All that remains is the Ego. So egos
are also what form groups. Segregation by the Other gives way to self-segregation,
and the techno-sciences place themselves in its service. This self-segregation
has a name, it is the fraternity that organises identity politics, spearhead of
a certain version of cultural studies. The 21st century is the
century of brothers and sisters, the ones who are ‘alike’, the counterparts who
situate in the Other the jouissance that unites them.
Intension
Take a look at the games given to small children for
their “cognitive development”: a cube with holes of different shapes: stars,
squares, triangles. Or these elements that must be distributed by colour, or material
they are made of ... The point is to differentiate and classify these objects according
to specified traits. Naming/thinking/classifying require that these differences
become attributes, then variables. Both language and logic are based, each in a
different way, on this treatment of differences by signifying combinations. There
is no thought without class, attribute or predicate. The question, then, is not
that of the existence of classifications, but what makes them segregative.
There are two elements: first, signifying differences
are taken up in the value system of a discourse aiming to gain mastery over
bodies, and second, identification to the other, founded not on the lack of
being associated with any signifier, but with the object of jouissance.
Segregation always implies violence on bodies, a logic
of appropriation, or misappropriation, which nowadays feeds identity scares. A recent
example is the way that the New York
Times[3]
and other newspapers reported the work of the “white artist”, Dana Schutz, who
was exhibiting at the Whitney Museum Biennale. She had painted a black body,
that of Emmett Till, who had been savagely murdered sixty years ago. “Cultural
appropriation” is one of the names of segregation today. It reduces the subject
to his or her body in a debate that entraps speaking beings in the imaginary register,
leading to an “either you or me”. Oddly, it is the same logic used by the
extreme right which, for its part, carries out identity segregation on the
basis of the blood of ancestors and not from the bond of conversation.
If we speak of bodily phenomena, then we also speak of
the modalities of jouissance which belong to these bodies according to the
different objects that determine them, the ones that psychoanalysts call
objects a: oral, anal, phallic, vocal
or scopic. The name of jouissance is double: Ecstasy or Rapture, and Abuse. It
is in this that it is always traumatic. So segregation is classification allied
to jouissance.
This issue of The
Lacanian Review includes papers exploring different disciplinary approaches
to segregation as well as texts, both theoretical and clinical, that elucidate
the psychical mechanisms at work in segregative practices. Above all, the
reader will see how the analytic experience, combining the unconscious as deciphering
with the real unconscious, enables a treatment of segregative processes today. It
is an experience that makes the identifications imposed by and through the
discourse of the master fall, and it removes from the Other the consistency
that it derives by hosting jouissance. To the segregative orientation,
psychoanalysis responds with subversion. To the universalism that no longer
exists, it responds by taking the singularity of each one: desire. Desire is
what makes each and every parlêtre absolutely
unique. Psychoanalytical institutions such as the World Association of
Psychoanalysis and the New Lacanian School are at the service of this
objective, all over the world.
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