[I probably should have edited more carefully, but it was written in haste.]
Hook's paper is called;
Absolute Other: Lacan’s ‘big Other’ as adjunct to critical social psychological analysis?
…I will disagree now and then with Hook, but I am considering this text because of so many of the things that it gets right and for a few suggestions it makes which look to me to be worth pushing further.
Here is Hook's ABSTRACT:
Lacanian theory offers a series of promising conceptualization – amongst then the notion of the ‘big Other’ – which, despite their obvious analytical value, have been curiously neglected by critical social psychology. This paper concerns itself with an overview of this concept of the ‘big Other’ particularly in reference to how it may benefit critical social psychological analyses. The explanatory value of this notion is introduced via a series of Lacanian paradoxes (the Other as vanishing-point of inter-subjectivity that cannot itself be subjectivized; the Other as simultaneously “inside” and “outside”; the Other as both embodiment of the social substance and yet also the site of the unconscious). I then move on to show how this notion opens conceptual opportunities for social psychological conceptualizations of the formation of the social. I close by demonstrating what the ‘big Other’ offers critical social psychological analyses of power.
… as I have only this PDF, I will cite by its page numbers and as this is a blog, I'll feel free to cite more fully than MLA protocols allow for.
Hook's abstract is clear enough I think. Near the opening of this text he observes that "there is little that one might refer to as a contemporary tradition of psychoanalytic social psychology" and that "critical social psychology has shied away from Lacanian theory in particular (…) – the body of thought which represents perhaps the most vital re-invigorating current within psychoanalysis today" (2). These are claims about tendencies, he does offer some exceptions to the general rule. Hook then lists the many issues of concern to social psychology that Lacanian thought might help to illuminate, though here he is interested in highlighting at two of these;
Without launching into a lengthy digression on the above themes and their corresponding Lacanian insights, it might suffice to provide just two exemplars of the usefulness of key Lacanian motifs in social psychological analysis. The notion of jouissance (excessive libidinal enjoyment) has provided an enabling perspective on the libidinal economy of racism, and indeed, on the issue – often avoided by discursive accounts – of the responsibility for the ‘enjoyment’ of racist utterances (…). Likewise, the fact of the paradoxical and often ‘external’ character of belief as articulated by Lacan (…), usefully extended by Žižek's (…) notion of inter-passivity - I myself need not believe for there to be a believing of which I am part – extends our grasp on the prevalence and power of ideology in ostensibly non-ideological times. (Hook 2)
… Though Hook discusses jouissance above, his topic will be the big Other and he hopes to "demonstrate something of the term’s explanatory and analytical efficacy" (3)
Not only is this a concept that sheds light on the ever-vexing question of the subject-to-society relation, it is also one that brings with it a series of lessons about the spontaneous emergence of certain forms of power and social identification. A series of interlinked questions will thus be important in what follows, the first of which opens conceptual opportunities for social psychological understandings of the formation of the social, the second of which concerns more directly critical social psychological understandings of the mechanisms of power, authority and role-induction. Firstly then: how are we as individual subjects linked into the social? How is such an operation managed, moreover, in such a way that consolidates a disparate field of individuals into a coherent society and that thus attains the social objectivity of “the way things are done” in a given culture or community? Secondly, how do the relations thus established give rise to apparently inevitable effects of power and truth; how is it that such relations necessarily instantiate a locus of authority and knowledge? (Hook 3)
In a section called "Paradoxes of the Other" we are given a number of such to think about. The first concerns the fundamental otherness of the Other. Here is Hook;
(…) the big Other exists at a step removed from the dialectics of inter-subjectivity despite that it grounds the coherence of any such interchange. One might accentuate this apparent paradox by insisting on two important facets of the Lacanian notion: the Other is always somehow enigmatic, it escapes encapsulation, it is always an absolute Other, conditioned by a fundamental alterity, despite that it remains the very stuff - the social substance – of my attempts at comprehension.
In accounting for this paradox we need refer to an elementary distinction, first voiced by Lacan in his Seminar II between the Other and others. In respect of the latter, one refers to other subjects, people with whom I might identify with, or enter into aggressive rivalries and conflicts with; these are ‘little’ others with whom inter-subjective relations are possible. The Other, by contrast, stands beyond the realm of imaginary identifications; it exists outside of the frame of such games of mirrored wholeness and antagonism. I do not, indeed mistake ‘Other for I’ and ‘I for Other’. Freud (2004) provides a nice example of this in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: when a solider adopts habits of his peers this makes him one of the group; if on the other hand he attempts to adopt the mannerisms of his General, he becomes ridiculous. Incidentally, this example nicely replicates the distinction introduced at the very beginning of the paper, between the ‘i’ of the ideal-ego (imaginary identifications with like others – i.e. fellow soldiers) and the ‘I’ of the ego-ideal (symbolic identifications that gain their orientation from the place from which we look at ourselves).
Put bluntly then, there is no psychological domestication of the Other, it remains always radically exterior, beyond the horizon of any conceivable inter- subjectivity. It cannot, in and of itself, be subjectivized, given a localized psychology. Importantly however, as Lacan points out in Seminar VIII, another subject may occupy this position, and may thus ‘embody’ the Other – albeit in an impermanent or contingent manner - for another subject (as is the case of the General in the Freud example). We might say then that the Other is the vanishing-point which provides the co-ordinates for inter-subjectivity despite that it itself cannot be ‘subjectivized’. (Hook 3-4)
I quote this at length because it is well said, though I do diverge somewhat from Hook's account here. I will later give a lengthier discussion of why, but for now, I'll sound a note of caution about the claim that imaginary identification is impossible relative to the Other. That is to say, because the general in the example above does 'embody' the Other for the soldier, it does not seem that we can truly bracket imaginary identification in the relation of soldier to general. Even, I would argue, in a situation where the soldier had never seen any actual general, he could identify with the role and powers that this symbolic placement provides in his understanding, and that understanding is always going to partake of both imaginary and symbolic determinations.
Next Hook is interested in "the rules of the game"...
The ‘beyondness’ of the Other is best grasped in connection with a second crucial component of the concept, the notion of the Other as the entirety of the symbolic domain, that is, as not only the rituals and institutions around which our society is organized, “but the very language which marks the subject as a speaking being” (Salecl, 1998, p. 21). This is the Other both as “the collection of all the words and expressions in a language” (Fink, 1995, p. 5), and the Other as social substance, as the amassed roles, traditions, understandings and unwritten obligations that define a given societal situation, the Other, in other words, as the ‘rules that govern the game’. The Other here is an alienating system, an always already existing totality to which the subject needs accommodate themselves; it is the “treasury of signifiers” with which there can be no automatic or harmonious fit. As is by no doubt apparent, our distance from everyday conceptions of psychological subjectivity is here pronounced. We have been confronted with a kind of supra-agency – be it that of language, the entire accumulated mass of ‘the social’ – which speaks through, or over, which appears to determine the subject. In the tussle between psychological subjectivity and the role of determining structure, the Lacanian notion of the Other, so it would seem, is on the side of structure.
A daunting question arises at this point – a second paradox – namely that of how the Other emerges. We confront here, as Žižek (1996) stresses, the apparent deadlock between methodological individualism (the explanatory primacy of individuals and their interactions) and the Durkheimian notion of Society as ‘always already there’, the notion of society as the substantial order that serves as the spiritual foundation of individual being. Or, framed slightly differently, if it is the case, as Evans (1996) asserts, that “the Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject” (p. 133), then how is the Other is also the embodiment of social substance, that which amounts to more than the sum total of a society’s individuals? Or, to echo one of our opening questions: how is it then that ‘the social’ comes to constitute a type of objectivity (of accepted background norms, mores and values, a ‘rules of the game’) that exceeds a mere aggregation of individuals?
. . . ok, I have been restraining myself, so I guess I had better clarify my criticism of Hook's understanding of these ideas. There is a slippage between the Other and the big Other which is admittedly not always clear in Lacan and others, and which is what licenses Lacan later in his teaching to assert that the big Other doesn't exist. I have written about this to a degree in an earlier post here, but it bears both repeating and clarifying.
When we think of the Other as The Symbolic Order, and when we think of it as the big Other, we are not thinking about the same thing. I am tempted to say that the big Other is a consequence of our inability to not imaginarize The Symbolic Order. In the earlier Lacan "The Other" captures both of these senses without a great deal of distinction. But as Lacan begins to recognize and depend upon the difference between them, it is helpful in understanding this change if we are quite rigorous in our terminological choices. As such, when I write in what follows, "The Symbolic Order" I am referring in large part to what Hook finds in Salecl and Fink above, but I think of it somewhat differently.
The Symbolic Order is the set of all possible combinations semiotically allowed, understood in its regulating or over-determining aspects. This is a larger arena that a focus on language alone can provide and it is crucial (as I argued in that earlier post) not to simply identify The Symbolic Order with language. They are not the same thing. We do not use, access or understand language without the inputs of both the symbolic and the imaginary.
By contrast The big Other has everything to do with our imaginary attachments to symbolic designations. Hook will get to some of these issues and so I'll hold off on a lengthy discussion here. Suffice it say that the big Other is a suppositional "entity" of sorts. Another way of saying this is that the big Other is the "Other of the Other" which Lacan denies through saying that the big Other doesn't exist, that there is no Other of the Other, and also by his formula that there is no metalanguage. We'll come back to these issues below.
Hook's next paradox is addressed under the heading "I don’t know what I am going to say"
The ‘big Other’ (…) is the name for social substance, it is that on account of which the subject never fully dominates the effects of their acts (…) Given this reference to extra-intentional acts and effects, along with the above reference to the supra-agency of the Other, it is not hard to anticipate the more overtly psychoanalytic – and clinical – application of this idea of the Other as the treasury of signifiers. Indeed, the Structuralist echoes of the above quote need be taken in conjunction with the associated notion that the unconscious can be regarded – as in Lacan’s famous assertion – as “the discourse of the Other” (Lacan, 1977). The Other here is tantamount to another locality, an ‘other place’, a term in which Freud’s description of the ‘other scene’ of dreams shines through.
Lacan’s assertion in Écrits is that the origin of speech cannot be fixed in the subject – for the effects of subject are taken always to exceed the controls of the ego – and should instead be located in the Other (1977, p. 16). Lacan’s claim implies the importance of a focus on the dimension of speech itself, and draws attention to the role of the Other as a kind of ‘hovering interlocutor’ that accompanies each instance of speaking. Here then a third paradox: how is the Other both “the discourse of the unconscious” and the ‘rules of the game’, the ‘treasury of signifiers’ of the entire symbolic order?
(…) What comes with the use of language, the cost, as it were, of attempts at expression within this foreign system, is that more than one line of meaning can be traced through what I have just said. The speech we produce is always thus shadowed by an Other sensibility. In other words, speaking is never merely a function of ego discourse; it remains always the enunciative possibility for an Other tongue, for the Lacanian unconscious which precisely is the processes of signification beyond the control of the speaking subject. With these points of concern – the extra-intentional, the unconscious, the seemingly external locus of speech – we can once again mark our distance from the mainstream of social psychological analysis. (4-5)
. . . Perhaps in what follows, I'll be able to consider the "paradox" above and whether it is in fact paradoxical. My hunch is that to see it as paradoxical is already to have erred in understanding the terms in play and how they are inter-related. Hook will claim something similar below, but it feels to me that there is still more to say about this. But, again, I'll try to come back to it.
Next paradox: "From where I am heard"…
The Other, notes Leader (2000), is not only the set of elements that make up the symbolic world the subject is born into, it also the symbolic place which is present each time that someone speaks. The puzzle that emerges here – to reiterate the paradox just offered - is that we have two apparent directions or locations. We have the Other apparently “inside” us, as the foreign language – or “mOther tongue” to use Fink’s (1995) helpful phrase – that we rely upon in our attempts at expression. Then there is the “outside” Other, the Other as the set of communicative rules and symbolic codes which forms the grounds and basis of all attempts at meaning-making. This, we might say, is the Other as a locus of listening:
"The Other is a place from which you are heard, from which you are recognized. The Other is thus the place of language, external to the speaker, and yet, since he or she is a speaker, internal at the same time" (Leader, 1995, p. 60).
It is perhaps easier to grasp this apparent double-nature of the Other (the Other as both “inside” and “outside”; as both ‘discourse of the unconscious’ and the social substance) by drawing attention to how each act of speaking presupposes a point of reception, a place of intelligibility from which one might be understood. This is one of the points Lacan (1977) makes about the functioning of speech in Écrits: each instance of speech implies an interlocutor, even (we might add) if this interlocutor is little more than a hypothetical postulate.
Why is it, we might ask, that we use socially-intelligible terms to express ourselves – when I swear to express frustration, say – even when we are totally alone? The Lacanian answer: as speaking subjects we never step outside of the social field. Every time we are involved in the making of meaning – even if only to ourselves – we do so in view of a context of potential recognition (i.e. of ‘how one is heard’). Such a place of recognition – never within the confines of our control – necessarily plays a crucial role in determining the meaning of our utterances, in how they are taken up, how they resonate. (Hook 6)
. . . This is again very well put, and aids in clarifying how the symbolic order, as big Other, is active in our daily thoughts and conversations, in short, in our lives. But to further points I began above. This absent interlocutor that Hook discusses is not The Symbolic Order per se, it is rather the Symbolic as big Other. Here I will risk another formulation about the relationship of these two ideas. Meaning cannot be given by The Symbolic Order alone, it requires the big Other as that silent interlocutor for whom what I am saying makes sense. Here, to use an example that risks reducing the symbolic to language, the notion of language as differential system as put forth in a structuralist vein,.. we might see it as the regional "Symbolic" of a given language, but only if we recognize that deriving meaning from that differential system is not something that happens all by itself. Positing a meaning is something that we do by virtue of our faith that meaning inheres in words and utterances (that is, via our belief in the big Other). But of course it does not, it inheres in our belief and it is transmissible, to the extent that it is, by virtue of our regional language-specific "Symbolic" being shared with others with whom we attempt to "communicate."
In the next subsection "The frame of social intelligibility" Hook answers to one of the "paradoxes" above...
We have a sense thus of how meaning might be said to come from the Other, and an awareness also of how the apparent “inside”/”outside” distinction posed above collapses. Any act of signification is only intelligible, only indeed possible against a background framework of rules and presuppositions that, as it were, co-determines my meaning. This is also how to understand the overlap of the Other as symbolic order and the unconscious as “discourse of the Other”. We are concerned once again with the impossibility of ever fully controlling the implications of one’s speech within the social field: this impossibility – in contrast to the presumptions of a depth psychology - is the precondition for effects of the unconscious. To be doubly sure: the eternal disparity between what speakers intend to say and the enunciative dimension of how this is actually performed and/or heard against the backdrop of the ‘treasury of signifiers’ is an absolute condition of possibility for the emergence of the Lacanian unconscious. The Other as language, as frame of social and communicative intelligibility is thus coterminous with the eruption within everyday speech of unconscious discourse.
Salecl adds a useful gloss to these issues which works to summarize much of the foregoing discussion. The Other, she says, is the symbolic structure in which the subject has always been embedded. It is not a positive social fact:
"it is quasi-transcendental, and forms the frame structuring our perception of reality; its status is normative, it is a world of symbolic rules and codes. As such, it also does not belong to the psychic level: it is a radically external, non-psychological universe of symbolic codes regulating our psychic self-experience. It is a mistake either to internalize the big Other and reduce it to a psychological fact, or to externalize the big Other and reduce it to institutions in social reality" (Salecl, 1998, p. 17).
(…) Perhaps one of the most crucial facets of this notion – vital to grasp if we are to profit from its analytical value – is that the Other, the ‘third in any dialogue’, is explained neither by sole reference to structure nor by exclusive explanations of psychological subjectivity. It arises indivisibly between structure and psyche, as the mediator between the societal and the individual which inevitably conditions each such interchange without becoming a subcategory of either side. (6-7)
. . . Where Salecl writes of the Other as "the frame structuring our perception of reality" it is worth recalling that for Lacan reality is a "montage" of the symbolic and the imaginary. Then where Hook writes of the Other emerging "indivisibly between structure and psyche, as the mediator between the societal and the individual which inevitably conditions each such interchange without becoming a subcategory of either side" we have to recognize the imaginary component of all of this which Hook's text and the sources that he calls upon do not register.
I will pass over a few subsections where Hook considers how structures can often trump empirical "realities" as well as his reflections on Dolar and differences between Foucault and Lacan in order to look more carefully at a section that exemplifies the problem of conflating The Symbolic Order with the big Other.
There is a crucial paradox to be added to those discussed above: despite that it functions as a crucial anchoring-point, a locus of authority and knowledge, despite its very inevitability, the Other is lacking, not whole. This is something that is easy to overlook once we have grasped the importance of the Other as ‘the third in every dialogue’, as the background, the ‘objective spirit’ to use Hegel’s term dictating ‘the way things are done’, the implicit already accepted standards of value and belief within a given society. We must though remain attentive to the frequent qualifications in Lacanian theory: the Other – along with all the knowledge and/or authority it is supposed to embody – never moves beyond the status of presupposition, hypothesis. It is never fully confirmed, definitely established - except in fantasy-formations, such as that of the ideal, harmonious society, the soul-mate partner that fully completes me – but always retains doubt, indefiniteness, virtuality as defining features. One can never be absolutely sure about the Other. It is always, in part, a transferential relation.
This lack, or indeed, non-existence of the Other (as in Lacan’s l’ Autre n’existe pas) – something that every successful analysis is said to reveal - does not mean that Other ceases to function as an operative principle of social and communicative coherence. This is precisely the paradox: the Other is at the same time lacking, a domain of presumption and fiction, and yet it nonetheless remains the anchoring-point that a given society relies upon to maintain its coherence. There is no necessary contradiction here: it is quite possible that we continue to act as if the Other exists, even if in a rational or cynical frame of mind we claim not to believe in any such over-riding principle of authority. This, incidentally, is why the intellectual insight of the Other’s insubstantiality – that there is ultimately no final, absolute truth, no single authority of being – remains an inadequate level of realization for psychoanalysis. (Hook 9-10)
. . . There is no paradox in saying that the big Other does not exist. I am also far from sure that recognition of this fact is an "inadequate level of realization for psychoanalysis" either. The Symbolic Order does exist. In saying this I am not arguing that somewhere there is a book or computer or repository of any kind which contains it all. I recognize that it has no comprehensive represented material form (even as large parts of it are represented in a variety of ways). Yet, it has consistent and predictable material effects. The Symbolic Order exists effectively. It is rather the big Other which does not. Why would I say that? Does the big Other not also effectively exist just as the Symbolic Order does? My answer is no. The big Other is able to function solely on account of its being a mask for The Symbolic Order. The big Other is thus the imaginary imputation of consistency, wholeness, etc that we make to a Symbolic that is always lacking, not whole, and constitutively incapable of being whole. Recognizing this would then be a necessary step beyond being endlessly pushed and pulled around by desire that opens the door to drive. Recognizing this relativizes the big Other's meaning allowing for the possibility of being the author of the meanings we will hold dear, our new master signifiers acting as anchoring points within The Symbolic Order.
So when Hook quotes Žižek saying that a Lacanian “counts on the efficiency of the big Other, yet he does not trust it, since he knows he is dealing with an order of semblance” (1994b, p. 209). He misses this distinction completely. But he follows it up with observations that accord with my discussion thus far, writing that
It is worth pausing to note here that all the examples provided above (God, Nation, the ideological Cause, Justice) are potent signifiers – they represent ideals that many are willing to live and die for – that as such bear the weight of considerable investment and fervour. How then do we account for this overlap of emptiness and undecidability with the operation of a primary signifier, this extraordinary co-incidence of that which is hypothetical, even fictional, with that which, potentially, means everything? (Hook 9-10)
This is not really so difficult to account for is it? To the extent that we believe that the big Other exists, we are beholden to it to always underpin the meanings of those signifiers that we are subjected to "God, Nation, the ideological Cause, Justice" or whatever they may be. These signifiers are all insubstantial and filled with contradictory meaning potentials which only achieve fixity through the big Other, or through the actions of subjects in electing this meaning and excluding others from their allegiance to them. A signifier by itself is stupid, meaningless, empty. We can either make it mean or suppose that it does already. The former course would be taking responsibility for our own desires, the latter of continuing to let them be imposed upon us.
I'll again jump forward a bit, this time to one of my favorite moments in this article. In a section titled "From lack to that which means everything" Hook proposes a method of sorts for pursuing those master signifiers that animate our lives. He writes;
Let us take an everyday example: if one is to interrogate one’s own deepest values, and to press on with question after question as to ‘why?’, as to what lies behind, what justifies the single most important belief we claim to have – whether it is a spiritual, an emotional, a political commitment – this chain of values will ultimately lead to an empty ‘because I do’, ‘because it is’. (…)
What Lacanian theory is attentive to is the moment in which such a lack - the inability to articulate a final justification, a definitive substance - switches over into something quite different, into that which (potentially) lies behind the meaning of everything, that which grounds me, providing a coherent social role and significance for my existence. A failure, in short – an inability to explain – is thus translated into the positive condition of our existence as types of meaningful social subjects. (Hook 11-2)
I am very taken by the 'method' suggested here. When I first read this article during my stay in Mainz (it was the spring of 2010 precisely), I began applying it to virtually everything. Rigorously applied this method can be rather chastening at times, and at others peculiarly affirming. The challenge is the rigor and how it in some ways requires more of any person than they can consistently provide. That is, Hook's endpoints "because I do" and "because it is" evoke less any specific master signifier, than of a place where a decision has seemingly been made without us having necessarily made it. It is also complicated by the mode in which we answer our own questions. This method pushes one toward making statements in the master's discourse, but it seems likely that answering via the university discourse could stall the approach to any endpoint indefinitely. Be that as it may, try it.
In light of my position regarding necessary distinction between The Symbolic Order and the big Other, a passage that Hook quotes from Žižek can be shown to support my basic contention here;
"In other words: how do we pass from the...dispersed, inconsistent collection of signifiers to the big Other qua qua consistent order? By supplementing the inconsistent series of signifiers with a Master-Signifier, S1, a signifier of pure potentiality of meaning-to-come; by this precipitation (the intervention of an ‘empty’ signifier which stands for meaning-to-come) the symbolic field is completed, changed into a closed order." (Žižek qtd in Hook 12)
This "dispersed, inconsistent collection of signifiers" is The Symbolic Order, and it becomes the big Other the moment we orient it by imputing "meaning-to-come" and via the imaginary, presume that "the symbolic field is completed, changed into a closed order."
Now, rather than continuing through Hook's article, I'd like to think a bit more about the distinction I've been arguing for and about the potential risks of failing to recognize it.
One danger I see, and perhaps Hook is ensnared in this given his comments about the claim that the big Other doesn't exist, and how this recognition is somehow insufficiently realized... That danger is perhaps obvious, it is believing in the big Other, believing that The Symbolic Order is the locus of meaning, rather than recognizing that facts mean nothing alone and must be made to mean.
A second danger has already been mentioned. That of too quickly equating language with the symbolic (or the big Other). There are many languages and many semiotic codes intertwined with them. Our interactions with these smaller order exemplars of The Symbolic Order is always partial and always engaged through both imaginary and symbolic aspects. That we can be immediately against certain concepts, or attracted to certain others speaks to this imaginary component. Somewhere Lacan speaks of the symbolic as the realm of peace. This is because The Symbolic Order is by itself effectively neutral. It is only our imaginarized relation to these symbolic components which ushers them into the realm of affective responses and bodily consequences.
While I grant the efficacy of treating The Symbolic Order and the big Other as unified "things", it seems that we also must (as I suggested in that earlier post) recognize regional instantiations of each. The über-wealthy and the most socially abject in a given social world may exist within miles of one another, and yet to assume that the meanings which the big Other imposes for each group is equivalent seems mistaken. Likewise, while The Symbolic Order does provide (via the big Other, or through other means external to it) a way of considering the totality of symbolic determinations, it seems that we also must recognize that our life histories also act to imbricate us within some portion of that totality and leave us untouched by other aspects of it, I would like to call this, somewhat problematically I suppose, a regional Symbolic, to pair with the regional big Other just evoked. That such ideas have purchase is shown, I think, if we consider the situation of a person who finds him- or her-self in a culture that is quite foreign, whose regional Symbolic and big Other do not match that of our solitary traveller. Things this person may say are surely also uncontrollable in their significations here too, just as in the mOther tongue, but to suggest that these unintended significations are part and parcel of this person's unconscious and immediately in effect seems wrong-headed. In time perhaps this would become the case, but that it doesn't immediately shows the pertinence of a regionalization of these notions.
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| This is Derek Hook |
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