The Lacanian Unconscious (2 of 4) : Logical time
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- Опубликовано: 5 июл 2024
- Lacan's essay on logical time enables us to draw a series of schematic distinctions between the subjective, the inter-subjective and the trans-subjective (or, respectively, in Lacan's own formulation: 'the instance of the glance', 'the time of understanding' and 'the moment of concluding'). One can argue - as does Slavoj Zizek - that it is only when the third of these dimensions of subjectivity is in play ('the trans-subjective') that the big Other becomes operative, that society as such (as opposed to an aggregated collection of individuals) exists. The big Other means that certain forms of social consensus and "social objectivity" become possible. This trans-subjective dimension of the unconscious leads to paradoxes at the level of the unconscious, and, indeed, to paradoxes at the level of social belief. There can, for example, be movie-stars and super-models that no one, at a subjective level, really likes, just so long as everyone presumes that the big Other likes them. Emphasizing the trans-subjective helps us understand something about the anxieties we might experience when amongst an unfamiliar group. What provokes anxiety is not just what individual members of that group might think of me, but what group members think other group members (as a whole) think of me. We might ask then, in pointing to a trans-subjective level of anxiety concerning one's identity: what does the Other of others, think of me?
Link to board:
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The way public opinion is framed here makes perfect sense to me, as in, people's opinions of other's is their guess about what other people think their opinion of others is. I've heard it said that the reason Biden won the Democratic nomination in the U.S. is not because anyone in particular liked him, but because everyone assumed that a lot of other people (the Big Other) liked him.
Nice example!
Hi Derek, thank you for this video. I was led to your channel after reading your paper on 'Logical Time' and trans-subjectivity. You explain it very well, but there's one thing I'm still stuck on. Doesn't the subject in the prisoner problem also rely on trans-subjectivity in the white/black scenario, when he ascribes the 'two black means I'm white' logic to the prisoner with the white hat? What I mean is, doesn't the statement 'seeing two blacks, one knows they're a white', which the prisoner attributes to the other, also constitute a shared social logic, so that trans-subjectivity is involved in the white/black scenario just as it is in the white/white one?
This is great! Thanks
you for clarifying such a complex concept.
If I saw two black hats and assumed that both of those prisoners had deduced the fact that the deduction of the colour of their own hat relied on whether I deduce that I'm wearing a white hat, I'd just sit there and not move just to confuse them.
Interesting
Which of Adrian Johnston's texts is cited around 3 minutes in?
It is a 2004 paper called 'The cynic's fetish' published in the journal Psychoanalysis Culture and Society No.9
This seems almost too nice, a universal logic or rationality of the unconscious. The big other as operative. But in this confusion of the puzzle (which never seems to be worked out "fully") also conceals flaws in that reasoning, doesn't it? What do we do with that? Does that error constitute something? i.e. as it does with the logic(s) and rationality of "conscious" language. "Social objectivity" is as erroneous as all language is? Language (as rhetoric and speech at least) is only such because we are able to error. I'm thinking, here, of the necessity of at least two different moments of pause and scansion. Some prisoners have one and some have two because we must look to the movement of the other who is also looking at my movement (and non-movement). That means that some will be getting up at different times, stopping, going, stopping, going, etc. There would be different signals that don't overlap--signals being the signifier that the big other understands. You could say that this is all irrelevant because it is merely a rhetorical device for imagining the necessary existence of a transubjective the thinking about the other thinking about others. But, at what point does the logic actually undermine itself. For instance, the rational calculation of a given stimuli based on a pre-programed al-gore-rhythm--no transubjective (or other subjects) needed. Or, is it this formula which is, precisely, what is trans-subjective? I could ask about essentialism, contradiction, but I'm going to stop h...
My view on all the complications that arise from the prisoner's dilemma is to note that it is a (perhaps flawed) illustrative device so as to dramatize a series of postulates. So, sure there may be issues with it, problems, etc., but I think it does convey that there is simultaneously the prospect of a symbolic logical way of reasoning through the problem, while stressing that this apparent 'purely symbolic' is never free of the impediments of the complications of anxiety and imaginary inter-subjectivity.