Impact – Scapegoating The impact is endless war --- the refusal to use psychoanalysis means we ignore the collective unconscious of the public and the leaders which allows manipulation of values to justify irrational invasions --- our internal anxieties about failing to solve are projected onto the other, creating them as an enemy to be exterminated and legitimating nuclear conflict
Jacobsen 2013 --- University of Chicago (Kurt, “Why Freud matters: Psychoanalysis and international relations revisited”, International Relations, SagePub)//trepka
Psyche, self-interest, and warfare Updating Thucydides, ‘what made war inevitable was the presence of WMD in Iraq and the fear this caused in the United States’. There is ample room here for interpretive work.91 What is at stake is not only a possible shift in relative capabilities but also what a powerful actor was inclined to see in the other’s actions as portending. Freud, after the outbreak of war, remarked in a proto-realist way: Psycho-analysis has inferred from dreams and parapraxes of healthy people as well as from the symptoms of neurotics, that the primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any of its individual members, but persists, although in a repressed state, in the unconscious [and] It has further taught us that our intellect is ... a plaything and tool of our instincts and affects. If you will observe what is happening in this war – the cruelties and injustices for which the most civilized nations are responsible, the different way in which they judge their own lies and wrong-doings and those of their enemies and the general lack of insight which prevails – you will have to admit that psycho-analysis has been right in both these theses.92 World WarZizspurred Freud’s death instinct hypothesis, of an aggressive, destructive drive independent of sexuality.93 Waltz likely approves Freud’s point that ‘war cannot be abolished so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars’ but, more utopianly, Freud noted, ‘war will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all conflicts of interest shall be handed over’. Freud declined to attribute war to instincts running amok; he espied room for improvement in realizing one’s ‘enlightened’ self-interest. How did war tally with self-interest – whether from the vantage point of individual or state – anyway? Historians and social scientists rarely examine the ‘psychological status of self-interest or to trace its actual incidence in human life’, Gay charges:94 The ‘cold calculations that shape actions are less interesting (and often in the long run less important) than the passions that produced the calculations in the first place’. So, psychoanalytic researchers study how ‘individuals and groups internalize [socially induced] deceptions and take them to be their own ideas’ (strongly akin to the Marxist notion of false consciousness). He contends: Much like a neurotic symptom, self-interest is a compromise formation: and much like the ego, an interest must cope with three generally hostile forces: the outside world (the depository of competing interests) the superego (which pours out distressing reminders that others too have valid claims and that one’s own claims are at best suspect) and the id (which incessantly generates wishes.) That is why the ideas of a self-interest wholly rational, clearly perceived and consistently pursued, is largely an abstraction.95 So, the serrated boundary line between material interest and intrusive psyche really runs thin in most cases, and therefore is open to psychoanalytic forays. Fornari highlighted a vital aspect of the legitimation of war as it being based on the group defending itself against acute internal anxieties (and) ‘in this manner we arrive at the paradox that the most important security function is not defend ourselves from an external enemy but to find one’.96 The mechanism here is projective identification: ‘IfZizproject aggression on to the other, he or she is likely to become –in reality – the mirror or embodiment of the aggressionZizam trying to displace into him or her’.97 If this is old news, it is because psychoanalysis earlier unveiled it.98 Winnicott and Fromm contended that people more often go to war because they are afraid of freedom, and its uncertainties, than in order to extend freedom to others, as Bush claimed. Fromm found no ‘cruelty and viciousness which has not been rationalized individually or [presented] as being motivated by good intentions’.99 This process gets especially complex when leaders display a deft ability to believe whatever is expedient, and in this ruse, intra-psychic mechanisms and external motives mingle. As Brooks and Woloch put it, psychoanalysis fosters ‘an attitude of suspicion toward human behaviour and ostensible motives, a semiotic postulate that in all actors [there are] messages to be read, a genealogical undermining of claims to unalloyed virtue, disinterestedness and civilization’.100 What would such beholders make of the Vietnam War, or the ‘war on terror’? Two, three, many Vietnam syndromes The Vietnam War is not usually regarded as ripe stuff for couch analysis.101 Psychoanalysts shied away, instead taking on related issues such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).102 However, at least one analytical account probed ‘narcissistic personality disorders’ in L.B.J. and Richard Nixon – a disorder that seems a job requirement.103 The question why these leaders, and L.B.J.’s ‘best and the brightest’ advisers, went awry in Southeast Asia remains intriguing and inadequately understood. Free world leadership, institutional inertia, anti-communist ideology, bureaucratic politics, leaders’ personal reputations, the military–industrial complex, and misplaced optimism in counterinsurgency techniques are all among the factors driving the United States into the ‘big muddy’. Cognitive psychology has scoured this subject. ‘From a cognitivist point of view, all causal inferences and policy lessons are the product of mental constructions of what would, could, or might have happened had a different set of antecedent conditions held or policies been tried’, explain Goldgeier and Tetlock.104 ‘There is, in principle, an infinite number of possible background factors that one could enter as antecedents in one’s counterfactual constructions of alternative worlds’. So ‘observers must rely on draconian simplifying rules that reduce the number of scenarios to be entertained to a humanly manageable number’. The price exacted by reliance on ‘draconian simplifying assumptions’ can be very high. Parsimony has a lot to answer for. Policymakers, according to this tack, became mesmerized by ‘analogies’ in the form of falling dominoes or Munich-like appeasement. These analogies matter because ‘policy makers routinely turn to the past for guidance’.105 Such ‘schematic processing’ made it ‘difficult for policymakers to appreciate the local forces at work in Vietnam’. So, policy inertia chugged on. In this regard too, Elster, who scolds psychoanalysis for concocting ‘meaning where none exists’, cannot account for why people adopt ‘“cold” mechanisms, these cognitive logics so rigid and naïve that they systemically lead people into error’ – errors that can be ‘individually farcical and collectively tragic’.106 Perhaps, contrary to Elster, one is entitled to probe ‘inside’ in order to understand underlying reasons? The supreme problem for Khong is a ‘breakdown of consensus’ because a ‘consensus’ is deemed a good thing even though it ushered the United States into Vietnam. Perhaps policymakers were ensnared in an axiomatic tangle of their own making, but it is clear from the Pentagon Papers that this was a system for which they had a strong ‘elective affinity’ inasmuch as particular analogies were chosen as the most likely ones that the public would swallow.107 The Pentagon Papers show that McGeorge Bundy invoked domino theory, but only after he ‘rejected even the subtle argument, offered by some long-time Asian experts, that the uniqueness of the Vietnamese case, particularly its extraordinary lack of political structure, invalidated any generalization of our experience there to the rest of Asia’.108 If ‘domino theorists’ did not know that the theory was disputed, it was not because they were unaware. Hans Morgenthau in debates with Bundy poured scorn on domino theory.109 Cabinet naysayer George Ball, citing Japan, ridiculed domino theory at high-level meetings.110 There was ‘no shortage of Southeast Asian specialists in the foreign affairs and intelligence wars of the US government’, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst states, but the ‘consumers did not want what they were producing’.111 This ample latitude of choice undermines the cognitivist case that policymakers had become hapless prisoners of analogical reasoning. Morton Halperin noted that Defense Secretary Clark Clifford on a trip to South Asia ‘discovered to his amazement that none of the countries in the region shared our view about the dominos’.112 A cognitive psychology account, if anything, is likely to furnish convenient if inadvertent ‘cover’ for policies pursued for other reasons. (And irrational reasons are reasons too.) Khong’s argument seems true in the same manner as is Viennese satirist Karl Krauss’ acid sally that ‘diplomats lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print’. Another stellar example is the Military Assistance Command Vietnam’s (MACV) underestimate (by several hundred thousand) of insurgents available to the National Liberation Front in the run-up to the Tet Offensive when US officials were boasting of progress in pacification.113 This underestimation was doubtless deliberate; the only question was the motive. A motive far stronger than ‘simplifying and filtering operations of human cognitive processing’ was at work when deciding who counts as an enemy guerrilla at a time when authorities were under severe pressure to deliver good news.114 An abiding flaw in the cognitive psychologists’ ‘trust-building approach’ is that when policymakers ‘ignored or misinterpreted evidence of the other’s desire for an accord’ (regarding arms control, an economic treaty, or a peace agreement), the motive need not be ‘guiding beliefs’ at all but rather the decision makers’ calculations that they could succeed on their own terms anyway. Only if that familiar possibility is found wanting can unconscious processes credibly come into consideration as significant factors.115 Puzzling over L.B.J.’s escalation in Vietnam over 1964–1965, Kaiser sees the inadvisable series of decisions as a matter of ‘personality and choice’, goaded by a ‘GI generation’ of advisors who experienced nothing but success in all earlier endeavors.116 Yet, the Rural Affairs Office in Vietnam reported in 1963 that the pacification campaign was ‘a will-o-the wisp’ – a failure.117 Senator Mike Mansfield and others counseled L.B.J. to avoid a catastrophic commitment to shore up a flimsy South Vietnam regime.118 L.B.J. and close aides had many well-documented reasons to be wary about the sinuous course of events. Former defense secretary, Robert McNamara later stirred a furor with a mea culpa book on Vietnam, but his claim that he didn’t know until long afterward that the Vietnamese liberation movement was nationalist is, to say the least, extremely dubious.119 ‘McNamara now says we didn’t know anything about Vietnam and what was really happening was not understood’, complained a State Department analyst, ‘That’s a lot of garbage. We would come out with papers showing that things were going very badly indeed’.120 Dissent contradicting official optimism was assiduously ignored. This response constitutes denial in both the everyday and psychoanalytic senses of the word, and it runs up and down bureaucratic organizational ladders. Hence, a social worker in 1969 reported that co-workers treated reports of the My Lai atrocity as ‘obviously delusional’.121 They found it impossible to believe Americans committed war crimes. Psychoanalytic relevance again is triggered by excessiveness, as in an encounter between L.B.J. and Moyers on 1 July 1965.122 Moyers was troubled by the President’s ‘paranoia’, and had been contacted by high officials who were ‘deeply concerned’ too. One day the ‘President would be in severe depression’ and ‘twenty-four hours later, no one who had seen him this way would ever have suspected it’. L.B.J., by selective uptake of intelligence input, quelled his doubts that the United States could salvage the South Vietnam regime.123 Yet, whenever L.B.J. returned to Vietnam, the ‘cloud in his eyes’ and ‘predictably unpredictable behavior’ reappeared. Moyers and Goodwin went so far as to speak to psychiatrists about L.B.J. The President informed Goodwin ‘that since he couldn’t trust anyone anymore he was going to get rid of everybody who disagrees with his policies’.124 The classic paranoiac impact was to transform Goodwin into someone L.B.J. couldn’t trust either. Was the United States fighting in Vietnam to maintain its global credibility, as a key justification goes? The ‘doctrine of credibility’, Logervall notes, ‘is a psychological rather than territorial domain theory’.125 Against assertions that ‘American credibility was on the line’, Logervall cites DeGaulle’s plea in 1963 to cease intervention in the South and permit a coalition compromise.126 Only a handful of nations supported, or could be induced to support, the growing American misadventure. ‘What allied and non-aligned government questioned was not America’s will, but its judgment’, Logerval tartly observes.127 L.B.J. operated ‘less out of concern for American credibility’,Zizbelieve, than out of fear for their own personal credibility; it became a ‘question of manliness for LBJ’. Doris Kearns recorded L.B.J.’s ‘recurring dream’ early in the war that pulling out of Vietnam would bring hordes of hawks (including bête noir Robert Kennedy before his turnaround) down on him as a ‘coward’. An unmanly man. A man without a spine:128 OhZizcould see it coming, all right. Every night whenZizfell asleepZizold see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long open space. In the distanceZizcould hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting and running toward me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’ Unless circumstantial necessity can be demonstrated, Logerval’s suggestion is a compelling hypothesis. Moyar too viewed L.B.J. as able to go either way in 1964–1965 on Vietnam129 Moyar quotes L.B.J.’s tragic plea that he had ‘the choice to go in with greater casualty lists or to get out with disgrace’.130 Here is an emotive plight, roiling with idiosyncratic personal predilections, that would be very odd for analysts to ignore. Deputy Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, too concluded by 1967 that the ‘US objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation’ in ‘an escalating military stalemate’.131 The scare word ‘humiliation’, attests a Pentagon Papers researcher, reverberated up and down executive branch corridors. Curiously, by contrast, President Reagan later did not feel, nor was in any way made to feel, ‘humiliated’ for pulling Marines out of Lebanon after the massive barracks bombing in 1982. Steinberg identifies pivotal moments for L.B.J. in 1965 and for Richard Nixon in 1969–1970 when force of circumstance was not operative and both presidents retained the option of backing off commitments to a predicament that they viewed with misgivings. Steinberg detects the clinching clues in the inner worlds of L.B.J. and Nixon, leaders ‘prone to shame and humiliation when thwarted’, or about to be, and who therefore unwisely escalated.132 Even Kissinger, despite a renowned distaste for psychiatry, wondered what Nixon would have been like had somebody loved him.133 Steinberg’s ‘control group’ here is Dwight Eisenhower who by her reckoning was a well-balanced personality who declined military intervention at Dien Ben Phu. (Eisenhower, out of office, nonetheless advised L.B.J. and Nixon to ‘go all out’ once bogged down in Vietnam.)134 Unable to live up to their own idealized standards, L.B.J. and Nixon ‘externalize the punitive unconscious self-criticism’, which then comes back to them magnified, and malevolently so.135 In layman’s terms, both presidents responded to perceived challenges to their brittle masculinity by acting rashly when the actual situation, and the institutional dynamics in play, did not remotely warrant it. What opens up here are opportunities for prying open not only the ‘black box’ of the state but of political agents too in those important instances where neither the domestic political environment nor structural exigencies dictate reactions. 9/11 and the mismanagement of fear Realpolitik proponents blanch at the post-9/11 neo-conservative project for a New American Century agenda, an agenda featuring a grandiosity worthy of a distinct Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV) category. Whether the Bush administration strategy for Iraq, and all the wishful thinking therein, is describable as ‘rational’ is a matter for debate, but one can allow it for the moment. Cognitive explorations of 9/11 cannot explain why Americans – ‘unaided’ by the drumbeat of incessant insinuations – came to identify Saddam Hussein as culprit when the evidence to the contrary was abundant. No matter how much weight scholars attribute to the role of emotions, a vengeful US public did not drive a reluctant Bush administration into war in Iraq. Granting the post-9/11 sense of national peril, the next step is to look at the tactics used by US and UK leaders to persuade citizenries to ‘disarm’ Iraq. Bush and Tony Blair deployed propaganda blitzes. To rephrase Thucydides again, ‘What made war inevitable was the presence of WMD in Iraq and the fear this caused in the United States’. Even champions of the invasion of Iraq at the time now admit there is a great deal wrong with that sentence. We are no longer concerned with shifts in relative capabilities (between Iraq and the West anyway) but with whatever one set of players (state A) was inclined, indeed determined, to see the actions by a counterpart player (state B) as portending, and why. One doesn’t need a Freudian to show that by stirring fear a central authority can win acquiescence to radical schemes purporting to protect the citizenry. Lasswell discussed how elites manage the ‘direction of discharge of insecurities’ and about how a group can go about ‘capturing attention and guiding mass insecurities’.136 Politicians who have little else credibly to offer ordinary citizens readily resort to this maneuver. Security is a ‘bewitchment’ word, in Wittgenstein’s sense, which induces beholders to mistake the word for the thing it promises to provide, when the authorities’ actions produce the opposite of the announced effect. It may be impeccably rational, from the authorities’ ‘nested’ vantage point, to behave aggressively abroad because blowback redounds to their benefit insofar as it is interpreted as evidence of need for more of the same coercive medicine, which augments their power. Psychoanalysts have contributions to make in parsing out these complex motivations. A psychoanalytic approach is warranted in circumstances where one has reason to believe that, because of asymmetric power, ‘oppression gets psychologically inverted: the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself’.137 It is a truism in IR that the attacker never deems itself the aggressor, but rather a wounded party. Why should the weak not suffer what they must, with Thucydidean fatalism, and national leaders leave it at that, with Thucydidean realism? Clearly, no one ever leaves it at that. Psychoanalysis aids efforts to explain why. A strong case can be made for applying psychoanalytic method even in instances where interest-oriented models seem to do the job. One may have good cause to suspect that realpolitik functions as an excuse for doing what one wants for less ‘rational’ reasons. Morgenthau reproved McGeorge Bundy, and other, on this score regarding Vietnam.138 ‘These disastrous policies consistently pursued served the self-protection of by those who have initiated or inherited them’, Morgenthau wrote, ‘We are here in the presence of an issue not of foreign policy or military strategy, but of psychopathology’.139 Indeed, political figures believe they rarely can go too far in pleading for security and its accompanying dilemma. ‘Getting tough’ plays well at home and even politicians who know better played along, as in the 2003 vote authorizing action against Iraq. Yet, as Page and Bouton, among others, attest, surveys disclose a public that is less belligerent, and more conciliatory, than their leaders (which overturns hoary Lasswellian caricatures).140 Did George W. Bush invade Iraq due to unresolved Oedipal conflict?141 The problem for psychoanalytical explanations is twofold: first, nearly every move Bush made can be explained in rationalist terms and second, Bush’s advisers encouraged his foreign policy venture: In trying to understand the frequently unconscious aims of individuals it often helps to ignore what they say, to themselves as well as to us, and to look as ingenuously as possible at what they seem to be trying to do. a veteran psychotherapist advises, ‘in which case the aims may become surprisingly obvious’.142 Few IR specialists will contest the view that the weight assigned to psychological (or structural) factors needs to be tempered by attention to deeds, to what actors ‘are trying to do’. Conclusion Psychoanalysis offers analytical ‘added value’ in cases especially where ideational analysis can be said to apply, and where pivotal decisions depart from what observers reasonably agree is rational action. Multiple equilibria invite deeper looks at the motivational bases of the participants. Past applications of psychoanalysis either tended to cleave to ‘top–down’ elite theory or else applied individual methodology uncritically to collective phenomena that really are the hybrid product of many factors. State managers certainly can behave irrationally in ways that do not require depth psychology for explanation. Psychoanalysis requires an investment in time, resources, and sometimes clinical training. Psychoanalysis does not begin and end with Lacan, as one might infer from the discourse-oriented IR practitioners parsing this realm. (Indeed, the hermeneutical element of Lacan’s work that intrigues IR specialists often has little to do with the clinical psychoanalysis of dreams, drives, ambivalence, relationships, and unconscious forces.) Will an academic knowledge pay off in insight for scholars or even policymakers? One obvious danger here is mere indulgence in formulaic dead-end ‘parlor analysis’. But, apart from guidance in investigating puzzling policy decisions, psychoanalysis urges us to examine the motives behind the models we deploy. Still, the field of IR, and political science generally, tends toward quantitative and formal modeling.143 Even those who are historical in approach usually do well enough without depth psychology. What then is to be gained? The force of the circumstances and institutions (‘operational codes’) in which leaders find themselves override personal considerations – but not always. Structural forces, and institutional constraints, need not press the decision-maker to take one particular course of action. The ‘sufficient’ decision based on material factors may seem adequate from one angle, and question-begging from another. One doesn’t need a sadistic personality structure to launch a war, but it seems to help. It may be instructive to wonder what would have happened if, instead of Kennedy, Nixon or a grown-up George W. Bush had been President during the Cuban missile crisis? In any case, the task of parsing the interaction of agency and structure, of their ‘mutual constitution’, too rarely is approached from the ‘agency’ end, perhaps because few in IR circles are disposed to try.144 Finally, the ‘sunk cost fallacy’, encountered in Vietnam, is a descriptive term, and requires an explication of the personal psychodynamics underlying the decision rules invoked to account for it.145 Why does one person, or group, ‘stay the course’ in a hazardous situation but another counsel against it? Emotional states, character structure, and defenses help us to understand how leaders process what they behold. Even in cases where material circumstances seem overwhelming, psychoanalysis still can illuminate studies of decision makers and group psychology, and thereby ‘open up space for human agency’.146 ‘What can we get away with not knowing when we analyze politics?’ is not a compelling slogan to emblazon on a scholarly banner, Occam notwithstanding.
The ultimate failure to decrease surveillance causes violent lashout
Stavrakakis 2002 --- Professor of Political Discourse Analysis (Yannis, “Lacan and the Political”, https://books.google.com/books?id=_jjJAwAAQBAJ&dq=stavrakakis+lacan+and+the+political+scapegoat&source=gbs_navlinks_s)//trepka
WhatZizwill try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a “scapegoat” in order to constitute itself – the Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the “Jew” is a good example, especially as pointed out in Zizek’s analysis. Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatized scapegoat. The naivety—and also the danger—of utopian structures is revealed when the realization of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatization is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This represed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is “driven out through the door comes back through the window” (is not this a “precursor” of Lacan’s dictum that “what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real”?—VII:131). The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this Manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operation—here the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analyzing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958).
The affirmative’s inevitable failure to reconcile the divide between desire and external demands results in a destructive drive against the Other
Hollander 14 – Currently a research psychoanalyst, educated at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, Former Professor of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills (Nancy Caro Hollander, 4/8/2014, Routledge, Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, ISBN: 978-0881634914 // SM)
Most psychoanalytic research demonstrates that the social matrix either facilitates or impedes psychic development and integration. Libidinal and aggressive impulses are fated to be constructively or destructively expressed, depending on the existence and nature of container/contained relationships, not only in the intimacy of the family but in the culture at large. How can psychoanalysis help us understand the nature of human destructiveness, which is a major theme of this book? Two trends generally characterize psychoanalytic thinking, the first that sides with Freud's conviction of an innate destructive drive or instinct that is inevitably mobilized against the self or outward against others; and the second that conceptualizes aggression as a response to deprivations and frustrations in the environment, impingements that originate in the catastrophes of childhood trauma and are reproduced throughout the life span. My view as it is elaborated in my analysis of the violence of terror in the Americas parallels Stephen Mitchell's perspective in which aggression, like sexuality, does not represent a "a push from within." but a response to others, biologically mediated and prewired, within a relational context (Mitchell, 1998, p. 25). Hegemonic institutions and ideologies either exacerbate primitive anxieties and their manifestation in envy, greed, and hate or promote the capacities that form the basis of reparative guilt and love, concern, and responsibility for others (see Rustin, I991; Peltz, 2005). Psychoanalytic theories have also elaborated how interpersonal experience is realized through the medium and psychological use of social symbols. D. W. Winnicott, for example, thought of symbolization as a constructive, expansive, intrapsychic capacity as well as a relational process in which one uses a transitional me/not me space to negotiate a balance between acceptance of authentic internal wishes and needs and responsiveness to external reality's expectations and demands. When the transitional space fails, it exacerbates what Melanie Klein called paranoid/schizoid states of mind, characterized by primitive defenses such as splitting, projection, idealization, and projective identification that protect the subject from being overwhelmed by annihilation anxiety stimulated by external as well as internal forces.‘ But Winnicott, Klein, and other object relations theorists did not take into account how external reality contains the hegemonic cultural symbols of the social order‘s asymmetrical forces on privilege and power, which are internalized to form an alienating aspect of identity. Several psychoanalytic traditions elaborate the relationship between the psyche and the larger social order, one represented by the group theorists associated with the work of S. H. Foulltes and Wiliord Bion and the other by Jacques Lacan and jean LaPlanche. Both approaches are useful in our analysis of the individual and group response in this country to 9/11.
The aff’s construction of an ideal world of economic growth or legitimacy is an unachievable dream --- the failure to achieve this dream ensures endless violence and extermination of the object deemed responsible
Stavrakakis 2002 --- Professor of Political Discourse Analysis (Yannis, “Lacan and the Political”, https://books.google.com/books?id=_jjJAwAAQBAJ&dq=stavrakakis+lacan+and+the+political+scapegoat&source=gbs_navlinks_s)//trepka
WhatZizwill try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument What constantly emerges from this exposition is that when harmony is not present it has to be somehow introduced in order for our reality to be coherent. It has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction. One should not get the impression though that this is a mere philosophical discussion. In so far as our constructions of reality influence our behavior—and this is what they basically do—our fixation on harmony has direct social and political consequences. Reality construction does not take place on a superstructural level. Reality is forced to conform to our constructions of it not only at the spiritual or the intellectual, but also at the material level. But why does it have to be forced to conform? This is due, for instance, to the gap between our harmonious fantasmatic constructions of nature and nature itself, between reality and the real. Our construction of reality are so strong that nature has to conform to them and not they to nature; reality is conceived as mastering the real. But there is always a certain leftover, a disturbing element destabilizing our constructions of nature. This has to be stigmatized, made into a scapegoat and exterminated. The more beatific and harmonious is a social fantasy the more this repressed destabilizing element will be excluded from its symbolization—without, however, ever disappearing. In this regard, a vignette from the history of nature conservation can be revealing. As is well known nature conservation was developed first in the United States; what is not so well known is that 'a major feature of the crusade for resource conservation was a deliberate campaign to destroy wild animals -- one of the most efficient, well-organized, and well-financed such efforts in all of man's history' (Worster, 1994:261). All this, although not solely attributable to it, was part of a 'progressive' moralistic ideology which conceived of nature together with society as harboring ruthless exploiters and criminals who should be banished from the land (Worster. 1994:265). The driving force behind this enterprise was clearly a particular ethically distinctive construction of nature articulated within the framework of a conservation ideology. According to this construction what 'was' had to: conform to what 'should be' and what 'should be', that is to say nature without vermin (coyotes and other wild predators), was accepted as more natural-more harmonious-than what 'was': 'These conservationists were dedicated to reorganizing the natural economy in a way that would fulfil their own ideal vision of what nature should be like' (Worster, 1994:266). This construction was accepted by the Roosevelt administration in the USA (1901-9) and led to the formation of an official programme to exterminate vermin. The job was given to a government agency, the Bureau of the Biological Survey (BBS) in the Department of Agriculture, and a ruthless war started (in 1907 alone, 1,700 wolves and 23,000 Coyotes were killed in the National Parks and this policy continued and expanded for years) (Worster, 1994:263). What is this dialectic between the beatific fantasy of nature and the demonised vermin doing if not illustrating the Lacanian dialectic between the two sides of fantasy or between fantasy and symptom? Since we will explore the first of these two Lacanian approaches to fantasy in Chapter 4, we will concentrate here on the fantasy/symptom axis?" As far as the promises of filling the lack in the Other is concerned, fantasy can be better understood in its relation to the Lacanian conception of the symptom; according to one possible reading, fantasy and symptom are two inter-implicated terms. It is the symptom that interrupts the consistency of the field of our constructions: of reality, of the object of identification, by embodying the repressed jouissance, the destabilising part of nature excluded from its harmonious symbolisation. The symptom here is a real kernel of enjoyment; it is the repressed jouissance that returns and does not ever 'stop in imposing itself [on us]' (Soler. 1991:214). If fantasy is 'the support that gives consistency to what we call reality' (Zizek, 1989:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (Zizek, 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome. In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy. The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy. This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. But how is this done'? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as 'an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order' (Zizek 1991a:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. To return to our example, the illusory character of our harmonious construction of nature is shown in the fact that there is a part of the real which escapes its schema and assumes a symptomatic form (vermin, etc.); in order for this fantasy to remain coherent, this real symptom has to be stigmatised and eliminated. It cannot be accepted as the excluded truth of nature; such a recognition would lead to a dislocation' of the fantasy in question. When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the play—the relation—between the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality.
The affirmative can never fulfill the desire for decreased surveillance --- the resulting scapegoating causes widespread violence
Cooper 11 – Prof @ The University of Sydney (Andrew, “Conceiving Society: religion, politics and violence”, http://www.polsis.uq.edu.au/docs/Challenging-Politics-Papers/Andrew-Cooper-Conceiving-Society.pdf)//trepka
Hobbes saw this tendency of humans to be in rivalry with one another as an unavoidable condition that requires some form of regulation which he described as the social contract. The social contract tradition focuses on the idea of mutual advantage, where parties depart from the state of nature to gain a mutual benefit. It implies that the people in a particular community give up sovereignty to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law. As opposed to societies found on religion or tradition, Hobbes envisioned a society based on a rational agreement between its subjects, making way for an unprecedented equality and mutual benefit. However, with the perspective of hindsight we can see today that even the wealthiest communities founded on a contractarian basis continue to create inequalities and divisions amongst themselves, despite being egalitarian in theory. As many political thinkers have recognised (such as Marx 1975, Tocqueville 1968, Lacan 1980, Žižek 2003), the more freedom and equality we receive, the more we expect. The social contract does not deal with the problem of rivalry, but prevents the spread of conflict through the use of force. Mimetic desire Similarly to other psychoanalysts, Girard understands the motivating energy behind human action as desire. However, he derives his conception of desire through the novelistic understanding of humanity in writers such as Proust and Dostoyevsky. He argues that in writers who are sensitive to the human condition (a class of his own determining), desire is not spontaneous, but imitative. Desire is 'triangular' in the sense that a model mediates the desire of the subject for the object (Girard’s 1965: 2). In opposition to Freud's presumption that desire as an innate function associated with basic drives,2 Girard’s theory avoids the structuralist implications of such a view by simply suggesting that humans copy the desires of those around them. Humans fear their lack of being – their feeling of nothingness – and attempt to signify themselves in relation to the being of others. Contemporary advertising offers an obvious example of using mimetic desire in the service of capital, relying not on showing valuable qualities of the product being marketed, but in presenting a model – the perfect mother or the perfect lover who is overflowing with being. All one requires in order to be like the model is to possess the product, say Ajax or a Coke. Such desire is 'irrational' – Coke does not quench thirst and having the right cleaning products does not result in good parenting. Girard reduces desire from functionalism or metaphysics to the anthropological plane, explaining the tendency of our desires to conglomerate around the same objects. According to mimetic theory, violence arises when one person imitates the desire of another for a particular object – one that is unique. In such a case only one can posses it. Because the agents ignore the mechanism that guides their desires to the same object, the mimetic mechanism, they become protagonists in a conflict whose origin they do not understand (Palaver 2000). This is the crisis that Hobbes foresaw where both agents become enemies, fighting for the one object. This process, if not stopped, must lead to physical violence and from violence to death. As one blocks, the other hits, and vice versa. This mirroring of violence operates without reason, as each party can have good reasons for attacking each other. A violent exchange is a repetition of the same gestures, and in the end violence reduces both enemies to mirror images of each other. In this way it is not difference but the lack of difference which gives rise to violence (Girard 1988: 54). The implications of mimetic theory in regards to reciprocal violence are great, suggesting that even the most rationally justified forms of violence, such as state punishment, imprisonment or military defence, are merely mirror images of their opponents, failing to address the 'logic' behind the battleZizhave come across many examples of this in my own experience as a youth worker alongside some of Sydney’s homeless youth. One such example involved a girl from the inner city called Martha.3 When a gang of her partner’s friends attacked and raped her, Martha responded by verbally abusing the girlfriend of one of her attackers. This girlfriend began threatening to attack Martha, claiming that she would get the gang of boys to come back and sexually assault her again. When this girl aggressively turned up at Martha’s door to threaten her further, Martha stabbed her in retaliation. Martha was then taken to court, and charged with assault. The others went free. As one punched the other blocked, mirroring the attack of their opponent. Both had reasons for attacking and both were caught up in mimetic rivalry, but only one was charged. Exploring lived experiences such as Martha's story highlights that acts of violence are not isolated, and that responsibility cannot be traced back to a single action of cause and effect.4 Girard’s mimetic theory helps us to see that violence is mimetic. It is contagious, as once erupted it has the strange ability to spread. Those who seek to prevent it are usually brought to perform the very actions of violence that they sought to stop. The problem is not only that it seems that nothing can stop the mimetic process, but that the struggle will spread to infect the whole community. Girard wants to call into question the presumptions of political theory in the traditions of Hobbes' social contract and Kant's (2006) essay 'Toward Perpetual Peace,' calling our attention to the escalating occurrence of violence in the contemporary world despite unprecedented attempts to curtail it. He questions the rationality behind the western tradition of political science, and suggests that this very rationality exists in continuation with the religious institutions that held society together before the rational systems of the enlightenment. The Scapegoat Mechanism The second aspect of mimetic theory is the hypothesis that culture originates in the scapegoat mechanism. While disunity arises because all cannot possess the object together, it creates the conditions for solidarity between those who can fight the same enemy together (Girard 1987: 26). The arbitrary blow of one individual against another can capture the imagination of the others who join in striking the momentarily weaker rival. The war of all against all becomes the war of all against one, and because violence is representational, it is envisioned as issuing from some force exterior to man (Palaver 2000). The community transfers the responsibility of the mimetic crisis onto the victim and holds it responsible for the violence and disorder that occurred. The victim is then unanimously killed in an act that is exempt from criticism.
Empirics prove this is a thing
Müller 12 --- Prof @ Universität St Gallen, Switzerland (Martin, “Lack and jouissance in hegemonic discourse of identification with the state”, Sagepub)//Trepka
Hegemony, lack and jouissance in the identification with a strong Russia Hegemony: strength At MGIMO, the idea of a strong Russia, of Russia’s re-emergence as a great power, proposes a hegemonic discourse that most students can identify with. Ideas of what could constitute a great power are diverse. Some consider great powers to be states with a great past: ‘like every country which has a rich history, rich traditions, a rich culture––this is a great power’ (Larissa, Year 4, International Relations, 15/89). Economic success is also seen as a crucial precondition for bolstering Russia’s great power ambitions. Russia can only become a great power if it rebuilds its economy. ‘Improving our economic situation, we become more important in the world arena and the big countries will turn their attention to us’ (Galja, Year 4, International Relations, 23/10). For others, it appears important that Russia plays a leading role in unifying the post-Soviet space: All should be united in one political space, in Eurasia. … In what context, in what way this will happen is not clear yet. Maybe it will be Russia again. Russia should have the leading role, because it has the biggest assets. (Aleksandr, Year 3, International Relations, 14/55) Articulations of Russian strength are complemented with articulations of Russian autonomy. A strong Russia is also an autonomous Russia which does not look to others for orientation or support. For Andrej, a fourth-year student of political science, the status of a great power is associated with political, technological and military leadership:Zizthink that Russia is not only a great power because of its nuclear weapons, not only because it is the biggest country in the world, but because it has resources, it has potential. … And if we cannot definitely call it a great power now, if we cannot compare with America now, then we can at least say that in the very near future Russia will recoup this status. (Andrej, Year 4, Political Science, 24/74–76) This vision, of course, is utopian in the short to medium term, but it is expounded with all the more vigor. This daydreaming also allows to articulate visions of Russia that break with the image of a great power that flexes it muscles and are far removed from the current state of affairs and policy conduct. Consider, for example, Boris’s rendition of a strong Russia: For me a great power is primarily a state which can serve as an epitome of virtue for other states, an example of highly moral, highly cultured political relations with that country. A highly developed society which has a high self-awareness, which has its role in the world. (Boris, Year 4, International Journalism, 27/49) Boris still subscribes to the discourse of a strong Russia, although for him it is not military, political or economic strength but ethical considerations that distinguish a strong Russia. We can see here that a wide range of diverse demands, ranging from economic leadership to re-establishing control over the post-Soviet space, is united within the discourse of a strong Russia. With Laclau (1996b), a ‘strong Russia’ presents an empty signifier that unifies the social field (compare Figure 1): almost everyone at MGIMO can identify with it, because it offers to fulfill almost every identificatory demand. What makes the identification with a strong Russia all the stronger is the fact that it also grips students’ desires. As with most political projects (Stavrakakis, 2008: 1054), the realization of a strong Russia is linked up with promises of enjoying a ‘good life’: consumption, a successful career and, for male students at least, the fulfillment of sexual desire. In general terms, this is the elite life that students and graduates of an elite university such as MGIMO expect and, indeed, are taught and presented with in everyday life. Stories about the weekend trip to Europe or a summer holiday in Goa and the purchase of the latest car model are omnipresent among students at MGIMO. Recruiting events for ‘high potentials’ advertise the stellar career opportunities that await MGIMO students with a degree from their institution. Such a career does not only constitute a guarantee to indulge in consumption, but, for male students, also helps to find and afford an attractive partner. Students therefore at least in part submit to the hegemony of a strong Russia in education at MGIMO, because of the promise of a future ‘payment’, as Žižek (1997: 48) puts it, in the form of enjoyment. This promise becomes most evident in the MGIMO student magazine, which, in a reflection of everyday life at MGIMO, is a peculiar crossover between a politics, a fashion and a career magazine. The cover of one of its issues advertises an interview with Russian foreign minister Sergej Lavrov and a feature story of career perspectives in the export of Russian arms against the background of a picture of an MGIMO student lasciviously lounging in a Maserati sports car, announcing a multi-page photo shoot in that issue. A strong Russia, this suggests, does not only mean heavy-handed military strength and tedious diplomacy. No, it is much sexier. It means a successful career, a stylish car and an equally stylish and desirable female partner. This promise of enjoyment also plays out in everyday life at MGIMO. Regularly updating one’s wardrobe with pieces from the newest collection, flaunting an expensive mobile phone or boasting about the latest trip abroad is as much part of students’ lives as the hunt for the best job offer that promises the realization of one’s career ambitions and enough money to indulge in a consumerist lifestyle, all the while being true to one’s country (see Müller, 2009). These promises are bound up with the education at MGIMO––an education that not only seeks to make subjects of a strong Russia but also appeals to their desires. They represent the libidinal investments that turn the Russian great power project into something that subjects actively desire to identify with. The lack in the discourse of a strong Russia We have seen in the previous section that the discourse of a strong Russia is hegemonic at MGIMO because it both promises enjoyment and manages to cancel most differences and construct a unified social field where almost every demand can be formulated in terms of establishing a strong Russia. But at the same time, there is a paradoxical sense that becoming as a great power might be impossible, that there is a lack at the centre of the discourse of a strong Russia that prevents the realization of a strong Russia and bars the discourse from what Laclau calls a complete suture of the symbolic. This impossibility of symbolization fashions lack with a traumatic quality of something that cannot be mastered (Hurst, 2008: 208–220). In the circling of lack, the symbolic order breaks down and established conventions of speech and reasoning are unable to express what subjects want to say (Driver, 2009b: 355; Hoedemaekers, 2010: 384). But what prevents this realization of a strong Russia? For one thing, it is the perceived presence of the West as an antagonist to a strong Russia that vitiates the full constitution of the discourse. The West is constructed as an agent that tries to curtail Russia’s influence and prevents its emergence as a strong state, for example through supporting the centrifugal tendencies in the post-Soviet states: [L]ook at those botanic revolutions, or at the horticultural revolutions or at the flower revolutions as they call them. Lemon revolution, saffron revolution. All those revolutions cannot do without Western NGOs. The West, in fact, is at work. It is just that in the closed Soviet society we did not know how the West worked against us. (Lecture 62/4) For this lecturer, the color revolutions mark the advance of the West in Eastern Europe and he interprets them as a threat to a strong Russia. The ridiculing in this statement (‘horticultural revolution, … lemon revolution, saffron revolution’) presents, once again, a radical deviation from the standard style of reasoning that relies on facts and figures and is espoused at MGIMO. Unsettling established organizational practices of teaching and knowledge acquisition, this deviation transcends the symbolic dimension. In circling the lack through the use of cynicism it hints at a traumatic event that defies symbolization and exposes a lack in subjects’ identification (Driver, 2009a). If Russia’s strength is challenged in its own backyard, who can rightfully speak of a strong Russia? Interviews and lectures thus reveal a sense of blaming an external culprit, an outside force for the permanent failure of a strong Russia. This process of scapegoating, of constructing an external antagonist, attributes the impossibility of a strong Russia to an external antagonist (see, for example, Žižek, 1989 on Jews as scapegoats in Germany under national socialism). In a similar vein, in the lectures and interviews a feeling of exclusion repeatedly surfaces that reinforces the blockage of Russia’s re-emergence. Rather than being taken seriously as an equal partner, Russia is perceived to be looked down on as backward and underdeveloped. What shines through in those instances in both lectures and interviews is a feeling of personal offence. ‘We can do what we want: we stay unreliable partners. Here, again, [the West] tries to create such a negative image of Russia’ (Aleksandr, Year 3, International Relations, 14/57). Just as Western states are perceived to display a condescending attitude towards Russia, reluctant to grant the country equal footing in world diplomacy, so are Westerners thought to display a condescending attitude towards Russians. Reaching, once again, beyond the realm of the symbolic, the failure of a strong Russia also extends to students’ enjoyment. Consider the following anecdote by a student which she recounts with palpable indignation and outrage: In [the imagination of] the majority of European countries we remain a country in which people drink vodka all the time.Ziztravel a lot in Europe and it hurts me deeply whenZizhear that we drink the whole day, that we don’t know anything, that we are a very backward and poor country.Zizhave been told a story that a [Russian] girl once visited Germany and they gave her a shampoo as a present. That is, they think that she doesn’t have money to buy herself shampoo. Really horrible stereotypes!Zizam confronted with them all the time. (Marina, Year 4, Other Department, 34/62) With Žižek (1993), social groups attribute their lack of enjoyment to an external force who is thought to be enjoying more or better. The anecdote of the shampoo gift seems to refer to exactly this: the West seems to enjoy more and better than Russia, which, in the view of the West, needs basic lessons in consumerism. The encounter with the West suggests a lack of wealth and consumerist distinction in Russia. The discourse of a strong Russia reneges on its promise of enjoyment: even in the field of consumption, the West still seems to be outdoing Russia.
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