Human beings have always defined themselves in pretty singular and unitary ways. We give each other names,attributes,actions,etc. Our subjectivity is always defined by a Cartesian assurance of the self, in that aside from any worldly deceptions , my mind is an individuated contained being. Is this really the case though ? Can we be sure that we can define ourselves as subjects purely on the fact that we can think ‘for ourselves’ and other ‘lower’ species can’t ? Well theorist Donna Harraway, famously challenges this line of presumptions. For Harraway, to say that human subjectivity is wholly created by us is incredibly naive. To say that us as humans are agents of our own becoming, speaks to our own hubris. In her work “Companion Species Manifesto”, Harraway offers up a new way of thinking about human subjectivity. 

Otherness for Haraway is not an absence or rejection of the things that make us what we are, but are precisely what we are. The human and animal distinction is perhaps not a distinction at all, as our ‘self’s’ are dispersed and modular pieces. In the same way a seeing eye dog is a sort of piece of us, as indispensable as an appendage, so are we to the dog. In this difference but simultaneously this modularity that puts into question the line many philosophers have drawn between man and animal. Take Kantian ideas of rationality and desire, that human beings to be fully human or morally good (which are often times people take to be synonymous with each other) must disregard all desire and must instead replace it with reason. To be fully human is to be in accordance with the freedom to make rational choices  and not be a slave to desire. Animals here are tantamount to automatons, to things. Yet Harraway points out this framing of animals as mere things,  misses the very fact that without dogs,cats,cows,chickens,etc , the human race would not be human at all. 

What Harraway seeks to do is not to anthropomorphize, to flip the Kantian idea, to say perhaps “we are the real animals, and my dog is my brethren” , as that simply reinstates the trap of interpellation. It seeks simply to ascribe human subjectivity back on to the animal when what Harraway wants is much like other thinkers: an empathetic embrace of difference. To understand ourselves, we must understand the other, and to understand the other we must understand ourselves in relation. Yet, that takes a compassion and empathy that is precisely lacking in the way scientists and philosophers have so often framed the opposition.

The ‘gaze’ , like many a critical theory terminology , has entered the modern lexicon being used by all sorts of camps to explain or vilify some group. I myself have probably been guilty of misusing or misinterpreting “the gaze”. That’s why it was so refreshing to go back to where the term originates from. Mulvey applies psychoanalysis to cinema, specifically using Lacan’s mirror stage and the imaginary, to observe the way by which the screen has the simultaneous power  of subject formation and scopophilia. She formulates this by first pointing at the spectator and quite evidently pointing out that the spectator is not just a spectator. The man at the cinema is not simply like a people watcher at a park or an audience member at a sports game. Even through the protests of the more ashamed men in the audience, Mulvey thinks we should be skeptical to believe men when they say “I watch it for the story”. What is the spectator than, or the audience member ? Well he is a voyager, a person who takes pleasure in looking and controlling with that look. Ultimately, isn’t that what cinema and cinematic technologies so optimally revolutionized ? The peek through the curtains, looking at those who do not know that they are being looked at. The psychoanalytic dimension of course comes when Mulvey identifies two modes  by which scopophilia takes. The active scopophilia pertains to the formation of the objectified other, by the very conditions cinema produces (i.e. the pitch black theater and blaring screen) . The second is the narcissistic dimension, by which in a Lacanian frame work, when we look upon the screen we see our idealized egos. This happens in the form of the male protagonist, or just any character that can be inhabited, idealized.  The content of the actual character, in my interpretation, does not matter, ultimately characters within films usually are just vehicles for the audience. Take the protagonist from The Forty Year Old Virgin , of course he is far from a James Bond or Tony Montana, yet what matters is the projection of the audience onto him.

The two contradictory things happening, the desire to watch ,pleasurably without consent and inhibited ,and the desire to be recognized by the object being watched  , are seemingly irreconcilable.Yet film in all it’s sneaky hyperreal techniques miraculously pulls it off. The ultimate point of the ‘gaze’ is that as the power of film is so totalizing, one doesn’t even recognize what’s happening when you watch any blockbuster or any movie in general. The only way one can seemingly have what he wants is to inhabit the characters in a film, and so the object will be mine, but I cannot get too close less the illusion shatter. Cinema is finely balanced between the illusive and attainable. What Mulvey then goes onto display is something , I see all the time. Mulvey explains how  the female figure in a film is symbolic of the fear of castration, of ‘sexual difference’. The negation of pleasure is ultimately what a female figure is. Almost paradoxically the object of pleasure, is what threatens it’s undoing. This is why fetishism and sadism are the two avenues by which this anxiety is stimulated. Sadism comes in the form of law, of a sort casual end, requiring narrative. To take pleasure in the active negation of the objectified other is what the sadist enjoys. This is why the trope of the ‘femme fatale’ more usually than not ends in tragedy , the fun stops when the anxiety is gone. The fetishistic scopophilia turns the gaze itself into the drive, taking the objectified other and transforming it into somethings pleasurable in of itself.

We often speak of ideology as synonymous with beliefs or ideals or principles. You’ll hear people say someone is spewing a “harmful” ideology or that they are “ideologically” opposed to this or that. Yet what is lost in this common, general conception of ideology is that any ideological position is in of itself a form of ideology. The Marxist, the liberal, the conservative, the centrist all take ideological positions that come to inform a broader system of ideology. This is perhaps keenly seen in Louis Althusser’s conception of the ISA (Ideological State Apparatus).

For Louis Althusser, societies formulate social structures on the basis of “reproduction of the conditions of production”. One way of thinking about it is the way in which many urban areas are designed, where in times past the serf was allocated a plot of land in which he could rest or raise his family, the industrial workers of the mid to late 19th century lived in overpacked cities with a sort of hub where production took place. Of course with a change in productive capacities  came a change in the reproduction of the conditions of production. These conditions are of course maintained through wages, as enough earnings from their labor power goes into survival, but not enough to simply move on. Subsistence is perhaps an appropriate word. 

These processes are facilitated by the ruling class, and by extension the state. Althusser, on the state says;

“Let me first clarify one important point: the State (and its existence in its  apparatus) has no meaning except as a function of State power. The whole of the political class struggle revolves around the State…”(1290)

 and later clarifying

 “In order to advance the theory of the State it is indispensable to take into account not only the distinction between State power and State apparatus, but also another reality which is clearly on the side of the (repressive) State apparatus, but must not be confused with it. I shall call this reality by its concept: the ideological State apparatuses.” (1291)

He sets up the State as not necessarily a separate entity in of itself, but the means in which the holders of the means of production impose its will upon the masses. That will of course be the reproduction of the conditions of production. State power is simply this notion that it is a will that is being imposed whilst the state apparatus is the mechanism that provide the means in which state power can be enacted. Take state power to be the rod gun, and the state apparatus to be the barn where the sheep are held, the system that labels and organizes the sheep into units, the farmers who facilitate the breeding of new sheep, and so on. This repressive state apparatus is of course to us brutal and imposing and inhumane. Yet Althusser sees another state apparatus appear, in which the subjugation is far more complex.

The Repressive State Apparatus(RSA) enacts it’s violence through the military, through the police, or through the judicial system. All these means by which people are “kept in place” are necessarily violent, coercive, or punitive. Yet as Althusser explains the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)  does not need to be violent, insofar that it is explicitly violent , it can self actualize and self regulate  its mission within each and every individual. The most indicative ISA is the school and of it Althusser says ;

“It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy). Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of children are ejected ‘into production’: these are the workers or small peasants. Another portion of scholastically adapted youth carries on: and, for better or worse, it goes somewhat further, until it falls by the wayside and fills the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar workers, small and middle executives, petty bourgeois of all kinds. A last portion reaches the summit, either to fall into intellectual semi-employment, or to provide, as  well as the ‘intellectuals of the collective labourer’, the agents of exploitation (capitalists, managers), the agents of repression (soldiers, policemen, politicians, administrators, etc.) and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of whom are convinced ‘laymen’) ” (Althusser 1296).

The school is the prime ISA because like stated previously it builds within the mind of each person the ability to reproduce the conditions of reproduction, by making it seem as if it is “natural” or “a rite of passage” or “virtuous”. ISAs carve you ,psychologically, into molds which you can or cannot fit. Most importantly ISAs don’t really care if you don’t conform, as he says that those who fall into the waysides still are accounted for and get assimilated into other ISAs. 

Think of perhaps a caricature of the dichotomous relationship between like a blue collar worker and a snooty intellectual. The blue collar worker sees the intellectual as some prissy metropolitan, who doesn’t do anything productive, whilst the intellectual sees the blue collar as some grunt doing somebody else’s busy work, while they are working in a sophisticated , prestigious field. This is precisely what the ISAs do. Ideology represents these imagined relations as it’s prime goal.” Not all is lost to doom and dread !” perhaps you may say. You may say that realizing that these relations are imaginary and getting back to the roots of the real conditions of existence is what matters. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble but Althusser’s main point at the end of it all is that, in a sense, everything is ideology.

His term for this is interpolation. Interpolation is the means by which an individual is encoded, and stamped by ideology. I believe he uses the example of a police officer hailing you down and saying “You! Yes you!” and the almost intuitive, hypnotic sense in which you recognize yourself in that hail. This is to turn the individual into a subject. As a subject you can now be subjected. Your subjectification towards the Subject. Then a cluster of recognitions between the subject, the Subject, the process of subjectification, and most crucially myself in the subject. That is ,to put it in more concrete terms, there is no escape for ideology because as soon as a stamp is placed upon me marking me as a thing, I become a subject.

Domination and subordination are often seen as coming about through physically violent means. When we see for instance depictions of dominance we envision perhaps a slave owner lashing a slave or a man physically restraining or harming a woman. To subordinate could then be defined as the ends that dominance requires, as a physically harmful act. Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote about domination and subordination not exactly as physically violent. Of course, power dominates through bodily violence but it can also and perhaps more effectively achieve its end, namely of a subordinated mass, through a far more implicit almost trivial form of violence. This violence does not take the form of the whip, the baton, or the stock of a rifle, but instead, it actively engages as much as it suppresses.

Gramsci calls this hegemony, which we can see explored in one of the many texts he wrote whilst in an Italian Fascist prison; The Formation of Intellectuals.  He starts off with a question and it is quite a provocative question we must all ask ourselves. Are the people who “know” more or who are more “qualified” than us simply just that, or are they part of a bigger socioeconomic context? Gramsci, the great Marxist that he is, sees intellectuals in a bigger picture. He speaks particularly of ‘ idealist’ philosophers and how they saw themselves as “ ‘independent’, autonomous, endowed with a character of their own,etc”. These are the “traditional class’  of intellectuals which operate outside the bounds of dominant culture, in the sense that they do not particularly belong to a specific class, rather they are remnants of previous historical stages. They are not instrumental to any productive class, whilst the ‘organic’ intellectuals are exactly that.

The organic intellectual does not belong to an ahistorical elite but emerges from contingent productive classes. Take doctors or lawyers, who emerge from certain classes. In this sense, the ‘organic intellectual’ has a much more vested interest in the furtherment of its own class rather than their individual selves. These processes are of course not the ‘natural way’ of things exactly, but they are integral parts of the formation of intellectuals and social classes. Gramsci clarifies this when he says “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals” and then states “homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens”. The separation or differentiated “intellectual”, the maker and the thinker are one in the same. Similar to Marx’s famous declaration that;

 “While in communist society…each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”(Marx 1845).

Yet with the division of labor and specialized labor, we see that this goal of Marx is skewed. That there are so many fields that are created in which intellectuals burrow into, that many a person are made to be “experts” or “specialist” in this or that, leads to as Gramsci says“Vast cries of unemployment for the middle intellectual strata, and in all modern society this takes place” (Gramsci 934). For Gramsci it could be seen how the intellectuals are imperative for hegemony. He says that hegemony creates two levels of society; that of the state and that of “civil society”, which is the sphere concerning the relations of individual subjects. The intellectual serves the ‘subaltern function’ meaning they dictate what discourse can be brought about. In other words, the intellectuals, referring back to our traditional conception of violence, coerce the subjugated masses (workers and non-intellectuals) to accepting certain ideas as natural. In this way, violence is not connected brutally but consistently, as certain ideas are wrenched from the minds of the masses, before they could even be allowed to be conjured. Gramsci lays it out wonderfully when he says of these ‘subaltern functions’ ;

“1. The ‘spontaneous consent’ given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group;this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige… 2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not consent either actively or passively” (Gramsci 935).

One can see this perhaps most brazenly in something like the U.S. judicial system where laws are bound “by unalienable, god-given rights”. These things are positioned as natural and innate fibers of American society, most people agree to not kill other people, to drive according to traffic laws, to steal, etc, because it has been generally ‘consented upon’ by the masses. Coercively might I add, but it is justified by certain ideals or figures. Hegemony is not just about predominant ideologies, it is not simply about values, but about a self-regulatory subjugation. A slave who’s chains appear to be a part of our very hands.

Note:

All though I did not delve too deeply into this idea of “unskilled labor” which Gramsci briefly talks about in the text, I would like to direct anyone who is interested in the topic and particularly on a certain discourse being had on this idea that there are “unskilled” laborers to this great video made by one of my favorite theory video essayist. Give it a watch 🙂 :

The Proletariat and the Problem of Unproductive Labor

No Description

Ferdinand de Saussure is known as the father of structural linguistics and he lays out his pretty revolutionary theories in the “Course in General Linguistics” in which he explains how language is structured not as a system of innate concepts but rather how language is exactly the opposite. As he says “There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language”(Saussure 830). For Saussure, language is a constructed series of signs that are in a constant state of difference. The Sign is in a purely negative system, meaning that any sign lies in the expanse of other signs.

The way he formulates his arguments is he first identifies the characteristics of language. The first characteristic is that language as a system is fixed and words are different from each other. The second characteristic is that the study of language itself is the subject of a mostly independent study. The third characteristic is that language is arborescent in the sense that it “is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images”(Saussure 824). The final characteristic is that language is constructed sum of the totality of other sound-images. 

He speaks a lot of sound-image which I, at the beginning of reading the text, was under the assumption of the sound-image being a term to describe the association speech and perception but as Saussure uses it is far more. Of the nature of the sound-image he says “The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound” (Saussure 826). That is to say, at least how I understand it, that the sound image is psychological less than it is necessarily “material”.This then is opposed by the concept, which is simply the idea of whatever is being referred to. Saussure refers to these two as; the signified(concept) and the signifier (sound-image), which they come to be as a whole a sign. The relation of the two is solely abortuary, in that any succession of sounds is not linked to the idea. The sign then is not purposeful, it does not gravitate towards objects in the world, rather words come into being on a purely differential relationship. Saussure view on language gets translated into his epistemological view in which he says pretty definitively ;

“ Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.”(Saussure 830)

 We see here how Saussure thinks any talk about “innate ideas” or “a priori knowledge” is naive. For him, reality is not fixed or “true”, reality is constructed with language, with signs. The ontological conclusion could be that being in the world is purely differential. For us to be things with names and conceptions of ourselves as being things, our condition in the world is defined by structures. A structure that is not necessarily positivistic, but solely negative. We are therefore constructed and not by any means whole of ourselves, but whole as a series of differentiating signs or in other words our being in the world is defined by other beings.

“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”  is a declarative and radical critique of language, truth, and identity. Nietzsche does what he does in all his texts and lambasts the preconceived notions we and other thinkers before him declared about the world. The main thing he is lambasting here is truth, specifically the idea that there is an objective truth and that language serves to conceal it. 

He positions human consciousness as only regarding itself, and that when we speak of truth we speak not of some universal principle or concept(ie. The Forms, The Thing In-Itself, God) but rather we speak solely for ourselves. He critiques not just these universal principles that Western philosophy is built upon, but likewise there is a critique of empirical truth, that is truth based on observation, as seen when he says:

 “ If I create the definition of a mammal and then, having inspected a camel, declare, ‘Behold, a mammal’, then a truth has certainly been brought to light, but it is of limited value, by which I mean that it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point which could be said to be ‘true in itself’… he strives for an understanding of the world as something which is similar in kind to humanity, and what he gains by his efforts is at best a feeling of assimilation”(Nietzsche 757).

 Even empirical study is still a means by which human consciousness imbues upon other entities in the world its own will. The majority of the text is centered around the purpose of language, which is not only to conceal truth but to stand in place of truth. As formulated language is the great power of the human mind, as language is the means by which we construct concepts and these concepts come to inform our very “essences” as beings. Nietzsche compares us to bees but declares us superior to them, as “the latter builds with wax which she gathers from nature, whereas the human being builds with far more delicate material of concepts which he must first manufacture from himself”. As stated quite explicitly by Nietzsche, we are precisely what we construct ourselves to be. Language to Nietzsche, therefore, constructs ourselves and reality, we are not free rational agents nor are we epistemically linked, rather what constitutes truth is the very desire to masquerade the void. When confronted with the world or lack thereof humans must do what they do best construct. 

Of truth Nietzsche says:

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected  to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have 

forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.”(Nietzsche 756 )

Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he towards the end of the essay formulates two types of men whom he refers to as; the man of intellect and the man of intuition. The man of intellect is the one by now we should’ve all become familiar with, he clings to his abstractions and “strives merely to be as free as possible of pain”. The man of intuition harkens to those of the ancient Greeks; he is careless and free of concepts, to the degree that he will suffer more acutely than the other man ever will. As he ends the essay, Nietzsche asks to perhaps see in ourselves these men.