Enjoyment, rather, JOUISSANCE… How many flavors?

HEADNOTES

i. There is no lit review or anything even sketched out here. I know what Žižek and others mean by "perverse enjoyment" and so am just running with that for now just to see what shakes out when I try (though obviously the lit review would have to happen sometime)

ii. This is all very tentative still and will undoubtedly need reformulation and clarification

iii. I am throughout depending on my reader already having a grasp of Lacan's notion of psychic structures. If you lack that, you probably need to read this post first to see how I symptomatically misunderstand these things. 

Perverse enjoyment is participatory but passive, right? 

The neighbor who leaves trash in my yard and wakes everyone up with his music and who I find to be an aggressively unpleasant neighbor, if given a citation by the police for something - some other neighbor perhaps called this in - and I see it all, see it escalate, see the neighbor take a drunken swing at the cop and get flattened and handcuffed and hauled off to jail… Do I not enjoy this? Is there not a smile on my face as I turn to enter my house. This would be perverse enjoyment, enjoying the spectacle of an other being subjected to the law, or 'getting what they deserve.' The concept of perverse enjoyment has a lot of reach and many have explored it since Žižek put the idea forth (at least, I believe it was him).

What interests me and what I'll come back to below in hopes of extending it otherwise is the latitude marked here between structure and jouissance. That is, the perverse subject is said to have a structure of desire which is perverse in itself and is centered around the disvowal of lack and a specific relation to the law, that of situating oneself as the instrument of its application. But this perverse enjoyment, which is passive and participatory, appears to be available to subjects without regard for any congruence with the structure of their desire (maybe, see my dithering below). Also, unlike the psychic structure of any given subject - it seems that we can identify perverse enjoyment when and where it is offered up to us by media of all sorts (witness American Idol or any of a boatload of reality shows, such as… COPS).

But if one can stand outside of the directly perverse interaction, and enjoy the cop slamming the neighbor to the ground and handcuffing him, without even having seen it happen, but simply by relishing the neighborhood gossip… and if this enjoyment is as accessible to the pervert as the hysteric, the psychotic or the obsessional. Isn't the next question that seems to beg for an answer that of whether there are other participatory and passive (or 2nd hand) types of jouissance which these psychodiagnostic categories might allow us to discern, and which might well be already operant in the social world? Is there a psychotic jouissance in this sense of the term? That it is not the specific suffering of the psychotic - the subject who has foreclosed any S1 and either has stabilized this in some sinthomatic fashion or has not. Rather, it would have to be a jouissance which figures the jouissance of psychosis such that other subjects can participate in it. Hypothetically and very tentatively here; If the 'ordinary psychotic' has managed, sinthomatically, to stabilize the registers R.S.I. through investment in something else, in placing some other S1 (master signifier) in a position of central importance and using it as the 'anchor' which stabilizes one's psyche, allowing a livable relation to the Other… then might we postulate an '(ordinary?) psychotic enjoyment' as one in which a subject sustains themselves against the Other's many demands through being all in, that is fully invested, in(as?) their sinthome? Do we not often think of artists in this way? As those who are so committed to their 'vision' that it is the center of their lives, the point of their unfailing devotion regardless of the praise or denigration of the Other. When artists of whatever sort are presented in this way, do we not take a bit of passive and yet participatory enjoyment of this stubborn willfulness which they exhibit? And I mean the whole range of jouissance here, so not merely positive responses to the artist as figure but violent rejections (con man, scam artist, my kid could pant that, etc). More than that, do we not often see this as a sign of "the artist" - that they provoke these responses?  

& what of the phobic, wherever one places phobia as structure or as shared symptomal formation of more than one structure, it would seem that there are many claimants already for phobic enjoyments; homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, etc. Though we would have to begin with skepticism about whether these are in fact truly phobic at all - which is by no means to discount that phobia, in the more clinical sense of the word, is likely present in all of these to some degree, nor is it to take the screamingly obvious jouissance out of bigotry, only to suggest that it needs a more complex analysis. & it would seem that phobic enjoyment, along the lines of perverse enjoyment, is not hard to conceptualize. In Riki Anne Wilchins' Read My Lips there is an anecdote which might help to show what might be at stake in 'phobic enjoyment'.

Wilchins writes about a sex demo of sorts, or at least a body demonstration, where she invites women, after listening to an informal lecture about sexual reassignment surgery, to don latex gloves and have a feel of what her "transcunt" (her word folks, not mine) feels and looks like. She, naturally, is quite used to her body but for others "it's a different matter."

"Several interesting things occur, the least of which is that people fall apart. For many women, this is a gut-wrenching experience. It's one thing to talk about sex-change surgery, argue about whether I am a real woman and all that jazz. It's another entirely to find your hand buried to the knuckles inside the warm, breathing body of another person…"(116)

So that is the context for the anecdote that I want to consider. 

"[One] participant discovered her friends from home were so grossed out that she had touched a transexual cunt (…) that they stopped speaking to her. She related all of this to me through tears, because these were people she had come to the festival with and had known since childhood. She was astonished to discover how transphobic they were toward me, and correspondingly quick to turn on her, as if I were contagious. What was even stranger was that her outraged friends were so deliciously and completely butch, they made me feel like I was an extra in petticoats straight out of Gone with the Wind." (117)

What is going on here that we could think of as phobic enjoyment? More than meets the eye I think. That is, the butches who diss their childhood friend as is she had been contaminated, as if Wilchins' body were a contagion as firstly enjoying (in the specific sense of jouissance) their own repudiation of Wilchins and of their friend. Had the friend initially thought that she wished to have this experience and then at the last moments said "No way, gross.." etc and run from the tent then she could, presumably have been able to find her butches and share the phobic enjoyment with them… "I almost did, but I just couldn't." etc.  & the friends could have teased her for even considering it, but then all have rested in the enjoyment of marking Wilchins as phobic object and their common repugnance and who knows, more long term humiliation of the friend just for kicks? But as it is, they still got their phobic enjoyment (times two even!) both with regard to Wilchins and their "friend."

Or I think about a story that I recall circulating in High School about some guy having 'made out' with some girl - the 'scandal' of this was that the girl in question was - for reasons that made zero sense to me - marked in the High School's caste system as somehow 'untouchable' (read: skanky, low-class, ugly, etc). So when people told the story of catching the football player making out with her it was met with peels of "ewwwww, gross" from other girls and faces of disgust from guys (some guys laughed too). The football dude was made to suffer for it and lost social standing. The poor abjected girl was still just as abjected, but now was actively offered up in school gossip for specifically phobic enjoyment. I even recall one clear statement made by another girl about the football guy which bears this out, she said something like "I can't believe he put his tongue in that mouth" with a shudder which the other girls listening all shared in. 

And is there then a distinctly neurotic enjoyment, more specifically are their jouissances specific to hysteria and obsession which again offer this passive and yet participatory option of enjoying?

If we understand hysteric jouissance through the Discourse of the Hysteric from Seminar XVII then it would seem sort of easy to picture. Any time that we see an hysteric demand directed at a master act to undermine that master's mastery, to reveal their secret investments and enjoyments of their claim to be master… this then would be 'hysteric enjoyment' of the passive and participatory sort. But, as immediately as this suggests itself to me as a way to think about the hysteric's jouissance, I also wonder if it might be too easy. That is, what is marked a 'hysteric' here is the working of a discourse and not that of a structure. My understanding of the discourses is that none of them is wedded to the structure of any subject's desire and thus that any subject might speak as Master or Hysteric or whatever. 

Perhaps what is specific to neurosis which might help us to think this issue more clearly is doubt, the doubt of the neurotic. The hysteric doubts the words and meanings that are given to account for her body her experience etc (I'll go the traditional route here and make the hysteric her and the obsessional him - though often I reverse this). The obsessional might be said to be doing the same thing… backwards… that is, trying again and again to capture being in meaning and then doubting that it is enough, that this "capture" (in language) is really his at all - after all, likely it is just a reiteration of what some dead master already said and thus not authentic to this subject and thus further evidence that meanings must be doubted requiring more meanings more knowing. As I write this, I'm reminded of the Discourse of the University and I wonder if it might not have some links to the obsessional structure. Both the agent in the discourse and the obsessional seem to wish to be taken as masters of a sort but both are haunted by the master that they must repress, for both it seems that the production or more and more knowledge, more S2s, is a continual need and that it serves to keep the master repressed and out of sight.

In Good Will Hunting, there is a scene where some guy in a bar is belittling Ben Afflect's character (sounds fun doesn't it) in this hyper-intellectualized fashion and Matt Damon's character in turn attacks the attacker. He does this through undermining the guy's criticism by showing that it is not that guy's at all, but one found in a book which Damon can cite and, if memory serves, also disputing the guy's understanding of the very criticism that he had made. This looks rather like what we have been discussing as obsession getting its comeuppance. The initial belittling comments, had they fully succeeded would perhaps have been one instance of obsessional enjoyment, but then Damon's rebuttal would restage the same sort of scenario in that Damon asserts a greater mastery than the guy he is debating with while also presenting himself as above or outside the material at hand and able not only to see where some scholar's work has been used, but used incorrectly. Then, to the extent that we viewers of this scene enjoy seeing Affleck made to appear dumb, and then the guy who made Affleck appear dumb to be made to look worse. Would this be obsessional enjoyment? The very reiteration of it perhaps suggestive of the word obsession, an endless re-staging?

But what about hysterical jouissance? Can we rest with the dynamics that the Discourse of the Hysteric provides or does that risk losing sight of the crucial disjunction between language and body? That is, if I challenge a professor's mastery and reveal it to be a sham by virtue of addressing them in the hysteric's discourse - it would seem that the specific content of my discourse might not be concerned with the language/body issue at all, but simply about the posture of mastery that they are performing. Here I am reminded of the course I took with a professor at Uni Mainz, one Müller-Wood, who it seems to me often spoke with this pretension of great knowledge that, it was implied, would prove the truth of the many bald assertions (quite essentialist in character at times) but which she never actually would produce when questioned - tending instead to show some affect (of the 'how dare you question me' sort) and to evade the question or the request for her implied knowledge or sources. My questions to her were at times constructed with the Discourse of the Hysteric in mind, and often enough they seemed to work as that discourse is said to work. But again, this does not seem to be about  my contesting the ability of her language (concepts, theories, etc) to capture my body (experiences, etc) and yet it is still working the way the hysteric's discourse works it seems to me. (This point is perhaps extraneous to my endeavor here to delineate other modes of 2nd hand enjoyment, but might be important for those using the discourse of the hysteric or trying to connect it to specific feminine subjects or feminine discourse - if such a thing can be shown to exist - I am not saying it cannot, only that I have yet to be completely convinced). 

If we instead try to maintain the body/language disjunction as crucial to hysterical enjoyment, can we retain the framing provided by the Discourse of the Hysteric in addition?  That is, to mark hysterical jouissance that can be enjoyed 2nd hand as that which presents a hysteric challenging a master's ability to enchain her in his language as if without remainder. So when I read Susan Stryker's introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader and she speaks of an event...

"As I stood in line, trying to marshal my thoughts and feelings into what I hoped would come across as an articulate and eloquent critique of gay historiography rather than a petulant complaint that nobody had asked me to be on that panel, a middle-aged white man on the other side of the auditorium reached the front of the other queue for the other microphone and began to speak. He had a serious issue he wanted to raise with the panelists, about a disturbing new trend he was beginning to observe. Transsexuals, he said, had started claiming that they were part of this new queer politics, which had to be stopped, of course, because everybody knew that transsexuals were profoundly psychopathological individuals who mutilated their bodies and believed in oppressive gender stereotypes and held reactionary political views, and they had been trying for years to infiltrate the gay and lesbian movement to destroy it and this was only the latest sick plot to. . . .

It was an all-too-familiar diatribe—a line of thinking about transsexuality that passed at that time for a progressive point of view among many on the cultural left. At some point, in a fog of righteous anger, I leaned into the microphone on my side of the room and, interrupting, said, “I’m not sick.” The man across the auditorium stopped talking, and looked at me. I said, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not // sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” We locked eyes with each other for a few seconds, from opposite sides of the auditorium filled with a couple of hundred gay and lesbian scholars and activists (and a handful of trans people), until the man suddenly turned and huffed out of the room." (1-2) 

I enjoy this. YMMV. Imagining this scene and the dynamics involved and so on and so forth, there is undoubtedly jouissance in my response to Stryker's words, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” [Snap!] And in this instance it seems to me that Stryker is objecting to this 'master' who is very clearly proposing to delimit and constrain the meaning of her embodied life, and that she challenges him precisely on that point - the inadequacy of his meanings. My enjoyment here is hysterical I think - in that "2nd hand", passive and participatory way that has been the concern of this post to tease out. [n.b. this is not to say anything at all about Susan Stryker's experience and whether the jouissance she surely experiences in this moment of confrontation is of any particular 'kind.'] 

Two things have been held in abeyance throughout my discussion. One of them might wreck the apple cart or perhaps only shake it really good. The 2nd of them links this with my earlier post about the structures of desire and the criticisms I offered there of psychodiagnosis used as a tool of pathologization.  Let's begin with the potential monkey wrench.

It is commonly said that, neurotics fantasize about what perverts do. Ok, why is that an issue? My concern is that … I might be over-stating the case when I assume above that perverse enjoyment is open to subjects of any structure. Maybe, in the same way that what is usually thought of analytic technique is really the technique of the clinic of neurosis, perverse enjoyment is an option for neurotics but not necessarily for perverse or psychotic subjects. Certainly I do not think that perverts fantasize about what either psychotics or neurotics do. & I have no clue what psychotics might fantasize about or how fantasy even operates for them. 

Now perhaps this problem is not as significant as it might seem in that it is said that the vast majority of human subjects are neurotic with perverse or psychotic subjects being relatively rare. If so, perhaps this mapping of different modalities of jouissance might still have some theoretical purchase and thus use. But it makes me uneasy to a degree, as if one loses sight of that fact (the possible neurotic specificity of '2nd hand' enjoyment) then do we not run a risk quite similar to assuming all people are straight (because gays and lesbians and such are but a small percentage) or assuming everyone is cisgendered (again due to the small sample size of those who are not)?

But, without dodging the challenges that the last two paragraphs pose to this theorization of mine, I think that there are very good reasons for considering these modes of jouissance that I have been trying to elaborate here. Very simply put, these are as follows;

1. Given that psychodiagnostics is a tool for analysts to use in the clinical relation and one that is, even there, entirely suppositional and only to be judged adequate if the treatment works to lessen the suffering of the analysand… Perhaps it ought to be largely retired from lacanian scholarship in the cultural sphere where none of the subjects discussed is being analyzed at all (in the clinical sense of that term) and so to claim, as I have seen and read before, things like Joan of Arc was hysteric, or John Wayne is an obsessional, etc would be invalidated on the grounds that one cannot make that ascription with any certainty outside of a robust clinical experience with Joan or John. But, it would seem to me that while others' enjoyments are no more obviously measurable, that in a clear enough context there are moments when the enjoyment that is presented can be discussed in one of these ways - and that this would be possible without making unjustifiable assumptions about the psychic structure of people (pathologizing) or filmic or literary characters (silly, but also common). 

2. Formulations like "phobic enjoyment" offer similar extensions and applications to "perverse enjoyment' and thus allow one to specify this 2nd hand enjoyment  and the ways that it can act to sustain cultural biases and so forth (recall the Wilchins' example above, where the phobic response of the butches to their 'friend' serves to abject Wilchins and the friend who touched her). [In fact, might phobic enjoyment often go hand in hand with what I wrote about as the Discourse of the Abjector?] We might also imagine the range of these brought into play when discussing the points of identification that viewers or readers of films or texts experience.

Works cited___

Stryker, Susan. "(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies." In Stryker and Whittle eds. The Transgender Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006. (1-17)

Wilchins, Riki Anne. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Firebrand Books, 1997.