Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
Knowledge9.The 1AC replicates the so-called emancipatory politics of the status quo. The AFF’s illumination of injustices eschews enjoyment and the role it plays in mobilizing change.McGowan ’13 (Todd, Associate Prof. of Arts & Sciences @ U. of Vermont, “Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis,” University of Nebraska Press, July, 2013, pp. 172-176) For emancipatory politics, the transformation of knowledge from a vehicle of liberation to an instrument of power has had devastating effects. Emancipatory politics has traditionally relied on knowledge in order to facilitate political change, and even today one of the primary operations of emancipatory politics is getting information out to citizens. In the minds of most people engaged in the project of emancipation, the fundamental task has been establishing class consciousness among the members of the working class. Class consciousness, according to this way of thinking, is the basis for substantive political change. As Georg Lukécs puts it in History and Class Consciousness, “The fate of a class depends on its ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it.”” Political change depends, for someone like Lukécs, on the knowledge that makes decisive action possible. As long as authority remains in the position of the traditional master, knowledge can have a revolutionary function. Historically, the primary problem for emancipatory politics involved access to education, which is why a key component of the communist program that Marx and Engels outline in The Communist Manifesto is universal access to public education. There are those on the side of emancipation who continue to insist that knowledge will be the source for political change. According to this position, people side with conservative policies against their own self-interest because they lack the proper information. They are the victims of propaganda, and emancipatory politics must respond by providing the missing knowledge. If not for big media’s control over knowledge, the thinking goes subjects would cease to act against their self-interest and would begin to oppose contemporary capitalism in an active way. For those who adopt this position, political activity consists in acts of informing, raising consciousness, and bringing issues to light. But today the failures of consciousness-raising are evident everywhere. Such failures are the subject of Thomas Frank's acclaimed analysis, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank highlights the proclivity of people in areas of the United States like Kansas to act politically in ways that sabotage their economic interests. He notes: “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.” 13 The Right's current success in the United States and around the world is not the sign that more people have become convinced that right-wing policies will benefit them. Instead, conservatism permits people away of organizing their enjoyment in a way that today's emancipatory politics does not. Emancipatory politics may offer a truer vision of the world, but the Right offers a superior way of enjoying. Traditionally, the primary advantage that emancipatory politics had in political struggle was its challenge to authority. When one took up the cause of emancipation, one took a stand against an entrenched regime of power and experienced enjoyment in this defiance. One can still see this form of enjoyment evinced in the revolutions of the Arab Spring in 2011. Though emancipatory activity always entailed a certain risk (even of death, to which the fate of innumerable revolutionaries attests), it nonetheless brought with it an enjoyment not found in everyday obedience and symbolic identity. In short, there was historically a strong libidinal component to emancipatory militancy that the risk it carried amplified rather than diminished. The liberating power of emancipatory activity is present in almost every political film. We see activists falling in love as they jointly embark on an emancipatory project or romance burgeoning as a fight for justice intensifies. This dynamic, attesting to the enjoyment inherent in militancy against the oppressive ruling order, manifests itself in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), Ken Loach's Bread and Roses (2000) , and Gillian Armstrong's Charlotte Gray (2001), to name just a few of the many. In each case, the romance seems to spring out of the risk that militancy against an oppressive regime entails. The love that develops between Maya (Pilar Padilla) and Sam (Adrien Brody) in Bread and Roses sparks first at the moment when Maya helps Sam to elude corporate security agents at the office building where he is trying to help unionize the janitors. Maya risks losing her job as a janitor when she aids Sam, and this risk acts as the driving force for the eroticism between them. Conservatism has not traditionally provided much enjoyment of this type, but it has had its own appeal. It took the side of authority and stability. Whereas emancipatory politics could offer the enjoyment that comes from defiance of authority, conservatism could offer the enjoyment that comes from identification with it. This is the enjoyment that one feels when hearing one’s national anthem or saluting the flag. It resides in the fabric of the nation’s military uniform that makes the fingers touching it tingle. This eroticism is not that of emancipatory politics — and it is perhaps not as powerful — but it is nonetheless a form of eroticism. It produces a libidinal charge. The struggle between conservatism and emancipatory politics has historically been a struggle between two competing modes of organizing enjoyment with neither side having a monopoly. Despite the traditional emphasis that the forces of emancipation placed on knowledge, even in the past the struggle between emancipatory politics and conservatism centered on enjoyment rather than knowledge. In the political arena, knowledge is important only insofar as it relates to the way that subjects mobilize their enjoyment. If subjects see through ideological manipulation and have the proper knowledge, this does not necessarily inaugurate a political change. The knowledge that something is bad for us — a president or a Twinkie — does not lessen the enjoyment that we receive from it. It is not that we have the ability to enjoy while disavowing our knowledge but more that the knowledge works to serve our enjoyment. The enjoyment of a Twinkie does not derive from the physiological effect of sugar on the human metabolism but from the knowledge of the damage this substance does to the body. Knowing the harm that accompanies something actually facilitates our enjoyment of it, especially when we are capable of disavowing this knowledge. Enjoyment is distinct from bodily pleasures (which the Twinkie undoubtedly also provides); it depends on some degree of sacrifice that allows the subject to suffer its enjoyment. Sacrifice is essential to our capacity for enjoying ourselves. There is a fundamentally masochistic structure to enjoyment. It always comes in the form of an alien force that overcomes us from the outside. As Alenka Zupancic puts it, “It is not simply the mode of enjoyment of the neighbour, of the other, that is strange to me. "The heart of the problem is that I experience my own enjoyment (which emerges along with the enjoyment of the other, and is even indissociable from it) as strange and hostile.”’15 An initial experience of loss gives birth to the lost object around which we structure our enjoyment, and our subsequent enjoyment demands a return to the experience of loss. Through sacrifice and loss, we reconstitute the privileged object that exists only as an absence. This is why actually obtaining the privileged object necessarily disappoints: when the lost object becomes present, it loses its privileged status and becomes an ordinary empirical object. Knowledge thus helps us to enjoy not in the way that we might think— that is, by showing us what is good for our well-being — but by giving us something to sacrifice: if we know, for instance, that cigarettes are unhealthy and could kill us, this elevates the mundane fact of smoking into an act laced with enjoyment.” With each puff, we repeat the act of sacrifice and return to the primordial experience of loss. The death that we bring on is not simply the price that we pay for smoking; it is the means through which we enjoy the act of smoking. In this sense, every cigarette is really killing the smoker. If it didn’t, the act would lose its ability to provide enjoyment (though it may still produce bodily pleasure) .17 Under the rule of the traditional master, prohibition sustains the possibility for this type of enjoyment: we can enjoy an act because it transgresses a societal prohibition. As Lacan notes in Seminar VII, “Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law. If the paths to jouissance have something in them that dies out, that tends to make them impassable, prohibition, if I may say so, becomes its all-terrain vehicle.”18 Prohibition makes our enjoyment possible by offering us the possibility for sacrifice. We sacrifice the good and violate the prohibition. But prohibition no longer plays this role in contemporary society. No universal prohibition bars certain activities; instead, knowledge about the harm that activities cause begins to play the role that prohibition once played. We don't avoid smoking simply because it is wrong but because we know the harm that it causes. We don't refrain from extramarital sex because it is wrong but because we know the societal and physical dangers it entails. Even conservatives think and talk this way. When, for instance, conservatives argue for excluding information about condoms from sex education classrooms, they claim that we know condoms aren’t 1oo percent safe in preventing the spread of HIV. In each case, the authority is knowledge, not law. The libidinal charge in politics involved with challenging the master has largely disappeared today, and now that libidinal charge has attached itself to challenging the experts, who represent the new agents of authority. Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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