Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC


Link – Monopoly on Enjoyment



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Link – Monopoly on Enjoyment

They imagine the Other has a monopoly on enjoyment --- reducing surveillance is an empty act of rebellion to steal some of that enjoyment while maintaining the locus of enjoyment in the Other


McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t Have, Project Muse)//trepka

As Slavoj Žižek points out in Tarrying with the Negative, “We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to this way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ att itude toward work.”32 This belief — this paranoia about the other’s secret enjoyment — derives from the signifier’s inability to manifest its transparency. In one sense, the signifier is transparent: the very possibility of psychoanalysis depends on the fact that subjects speak their unconscious desire even (or especially) when they try hardest to hide it. The signifiers that subjects choose reveal the truth of their unconscious desires. And yet, at the same time, the signifier does not avow its own transparency; every signifier appears to be hiding something, a secret meaning, a private intention, to which only the subject itself has access. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the better part of his philosophical career attempting to disabuse fellow philosophers of the idea that the signifier could hide anything. When we believe that signifiers hide a private meaning, we fall victim to the deception of language as such. Hearing what someone says allows us to grasp all that there is to grasp. As Wittgenstein puts it, “To say ‘He alone can know what he intends’ is nonsense.”33 In fact, he goes so far as to claim that the subject can know the other’s intention even better than its own. He notes, “I can know what someone else is thinking, not whatZizam thinking.”34 By recognizing the transparency of the signifier, we might fight against the paranoia that seems to accompany subjectivity itself, and all of Wittgenstein’s thought participates in this combat. Even though Wittgenstein’s argument has undoubtedly found adherents among many philosophers and laypersons, paranoia about the other’s hidden enjoyment has not disappeared in the years since this argument first appeared. One could even safely say that paranoia has grown more rampant. Is this simply the result of a failure to disseminate Wittgenstein’s thought widely enough or of popular resistance to it? Or is it that paranoia is written into the structure of the signifier itself? The hidden meaning that the subject perceives beneath the signifier is the result of the signifier’s apparent opaqueness, and no amount of inveighing against hidden meaning will stop subjects from believing in it. The belief that the other holds a secret enjoyment that the subject has sacrificed renders the smooth functioning of collective life impossible. The force that allows human beings to come together to form a society in common — language — is at once the force that prevents any society from working out. The structure of the signifier itself militates against utopia. It produces societies replete with subjects paranoid about, and full of envy for, the enjoying other. Though one might imagine a society in which subjects enjoyed without bothering themselves about the other’s enjoyment, such a vision fails to comprehend the nature of our enjoyment. We find our enjoyment through that of the other rather than intrinsically within ourselves. Our envy of the other’s enjoyment persists because this is the mode through which we ourselves enjoy. It is thus far easier to give up the idea of one’s own private enjoyment for the sake of the social order than it is to give up the idea of the enjoying other.

Link – Panoptic Model

The Panoptic model of surveillance confuses material structures with the underlying ontological field of the gaze - the aff can't solve surveillance and our psychoanalytic critique is better


Crossley 93 Nick Crossley, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10, United Kingdom. Human Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4. “The Politics of the Gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty”. Pgs. 408-415. PWoods.

The effect of the look is described by Sartre in terms of alienation. To experience "the look" is to experience oneself as no longer belonging to oneself but as belonging, as an object, in the project of the other. This involves a change in our very structure. We are not normally objects of our own awareness, in Sartre's view. We "do" and live our life and actions, rather than having them as objects of our thought. The look of the other tears us away from this however. Through it we come to experience ourselves as objects of our own contemplation and awareness. We are divided and estranged. Moreover, we are aware that our actions and experiences have a meaning and a significance, in the project of the other, which we can neither control (at least not completely) nor necessarily have access to. We experience our being as not belonging to us therefore. We belong, in part, in the project of the other, as an object of his/her thought and designs. We are possessed by the other. And we are thereby (again) estranged. Sartre finds a literary illustration and elaboration of this effect in the novels of Kafka (1953, 1957). Kafka's novels describe and utilise this very notion of alienation. The actions and experiences of Joseph K. in The Trial, and of the Land Surveyor in The Castle, Sartre notes, have meaning for those protagonists, but the protagonists are also aware that they are objects in the eyes of others, and that their actions have a different meaning and different significance for these anonymous surveyors, which they themselves do not and cannot know. They experience their life and actions, therefore, as not completely belonging to them. They feel estranged in relationship to their actions and experiences because they do not understand or know the meaning of those actions and experiences as they exist for the anonymous other. The effect of "the look" is achieved, for Merleau-Ponty, when this mutual recognition is not realised; when we feel that we are individuated and objectified in the gaze of the other, when we feel that our actions and expressions are "not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect's" (1962: 361). The look "takes the place of a possible communication" (ibid.). One party to the encounter constitutes him or herself as "inaccessible" or as an "inhuman gaze" (ibid.). They refuse to communicate, although, of course, "The refusal to communicate is still a form of communication" (ibid.). Such refusal is a "style of conduct", it belongs to the world of the carnal-intersubjective, the intercorporeal, not to a mythical inner world, and it is only in this way that it can communicate to the surveyed subject that they are not being recognised as a subject but are being constituted as an object. It is only in this way, in other words, that the surveyed subject can experience objectification, estrangement and capture. Furthermore, the refusal to communicate, and the objectification of an other, according to Merleau-Ponty involves the (surveying) subject retreating into their "thinking being" (ibid.): i.e., it involves their involvement in the linguistic and more specifically reflective practices of their culture qua intersubjective interworld. The necessary caveat to this point is that for Merleau-Ponty, as for Sartre and Foucault, there is no reason why "the look" cannot be secured through an indices of human presence rather than through an actual other. For Merleau-Ponty then, the look, despite the fact that it involves the experience of objectification, is intersubjectively situated. It is a cultural practice, effected in the action of a surveyor and communicated (by virtue of its visible/cultural form) to a surveyed. It is not an absence of intersubjectivity but a tension or knot within the intersubjective fabric. Furthermore, in contrast to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty maintains that "the look" is constituted within the particularity of a given situation. It is not an inevitable consequence of a given state of the human condition. Foucault describes the Panopticon as a machine. He marvels (1979, 1981) at the manner in which it secures its effects independently of human intention or will. In this paper, whilst not denying Foucault's claim, I have argued that there is a human infrastructure to the Panopticon which Foucault does not and cannot account for. I have suggested that we examine the human relations which make the Panopticon a Panopticon and not a pile of bricks. And in particular I have called attention to the perceptual and intersubjective-intercorporeal character of these relations and this infrastructure. Such notions are, to some extent at least, inconsistent with Foucault's philosophy. Certainly his philosophy does not and cannot provide for an understanding of them. Furthermore, I have argued that Foucault's philosophy cannot actually account for the "anxious awareness" which it refers to and depends upon. In respect of these problems, I have suggested that the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty provides for a rethinking and recasting of our understanding of Panopticism. I would also add to this that in facilitating a deepening and extension of our understanding of Panopticism, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy provides for a deepening and extension f our understanding of the politics of the gaze more generally.


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