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The Social Unconscious: The Superego vs. The Big Other - Field, Habitus, and Capital - Dave n Mikey
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- Опубликовано: 13 июл 2024
- Dave continues from last time on The Social Unconscious. Mikey lectures on the two social agencies that must be understood to do ideology critique: The Superego vs. The Big Other!
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Theory Underground is a research, publishing, and lecture institute. TU exists to develop the concept of timenergy in the context of critical social theory (CST). CST is the umbrella over critical media theory (CMT), critical doxology and timenergy (CDT), critique of libidinal economy (CLE), critique of political economy (CPE), critique of gender and sex (CGS), and critique of psychiatry and therapism (CPT), critique of science and religion (CSR), and many more. To get basically situated in this field you will have to know a handful of important figures from a bunch of areas of the humanities and social sciences. That would be a lot of work for you if not for the fact that Dave, Ann, and Mikey are consolidating hundreds of thousands of hours of effort into a pirate TV-radio-press that goes on tours and throws conferences and shit like that… It’s a crazyfun experiment, and you can enjoy a ton of the content here for free.
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Complete fire, throughout. The dialectic between “position” and “disposition” was genius, and I completely agree that we cannot think one without also thinking the other. Positions generate dispositions, as dispositions tend to be selected for certain positions, and if we take this seriously, it won’t suffice simply to cultivate people of different dispositions, for they either won’t be selected for the positions or they will be trained out of those dispositions by the positions with time. I agree this suggests a need to work outside institutions and systems. I also deeply resonated and agreed with the point that we shouldn’t reduce everything to power even while we acknowledge the role and influence of power (“Power Realists”), for if we make this mistake we give up “the universal,” and you put it very well when you said that the universal is one of our most powerful tools, that we give it up to our peril. Exactly right.
Mikey was utterly excellent, and it was really engaging how he explained the difference between the Big Other and Superego-I found that very clear. I strongly agree that we must take “proper alienation” seriously, that otherwise we end up psychotic and unable to function, suggesting a need for us to be “Prohibition Realists”-outstanding phrase. I also liked the idea that the Superego suggests to us that we should “enjoy as one does,” and I couldn’t agree more on Mikey’s closing remarks on passion and drive. Truly outstanding, and well done!
👏👏👏 MIKEY ILLUMINATING THE INTRINSIC MEANING IN PEOPLES LIVES WITH TRIPLE VOICES OF OTHER, SUPEREGO, AND CONCSCIENCE 👏👏👏
I do love how Mikey comes around to the "still small voice" and the Law of Passion at the end ... great lecture!
PS - the stuff you are doing with Mikey is super cool, congrats and good luck!!!
Fuck yeah Mikey, you're the only one I've ever heard just come out and say: this is how the super ego emerges.
Thanks! Yeah, I always had the same frustration with the lack of a theory of the superego’s emergence. So much so that I had to figure it out for myself. I do think Lacan, if we were to bug him about this, would be able to explain it in terms of the mechanism I described. I’m just saying that I was able to work it out because it is already there in Lacan’s work in larval form. I plan on expanding in this more in my upcoming Žižek course.
You mention so many great reasons why academics lack leisure time, and I think even the spirit of the profession itself (publish or parish) thwarts scholasticism from within, making leisure a constitutive impossibility in academia.
I think academia is breathing its last breath for that reason
Holy fuck the still, quiet voice of conscience AMEN
If I find this particular theme and lecture interesting and want to follow it - what is the best way to do so? I want to get more into this channel so ofcourse becoming a patreon or so seems like the end-goal, but I will say that this channel is a bit confusing with how much is uploaded to it - I like that, it's more like a library than a youtube channel... but still, it's difficult for me as a lay person to know where to hook up and get more into it
@@GiggleBlizzard that's helpful feedback. The best way is to click the get involved button from the homepage of theoryunderground.com and, instead of just becoming a patron, consider becoming a "member." The membership funds the research seminars, which are usually private but sometimes public, as with this one. We have essential playlists and there's various ways of getting into it. Someday I'd like to make it a lot more intuitive but for right now it's pretty bootstraps and duct tape! Watch the PSA at the end of this video for some extra info about the seminar subscription tiers and how to get the most bang for your buck (between me and Mikey's)
To be fair to my other comments, Mikey is getting at what I'm looking for when he says "Capitalism unleashes the superego" in terms of accounting for emergence of subjective structure.
But here I would want to bring in Critical Media Theory because I think we can answer the question of who is telling us to enjoy more precisely: first, capitalist media and especially advertisements. Second, more recently, Big Algorithms that try to directly manipulate our behavior--here we might need to go beyond the Lacanian divided subject to theorize the fractured atomic subject of social media as a correlate to Baudrillard's fractured masses.
And then we can ask the question, while understanding we are still operating within a capitalist society, how might our relationship to enjoyment change if we change our media consumption patterns? How might undergoing different forms of training change the way we enjoy? And what about training in cohorts with other individuals? (I take it that TU is an experiment that necessarily touches on these questions)
Oh fuck I’m having an existential moment with Mikey’s explanation of the emergence of the superego
Damn Mikey mf savage doing the REAL PHILOSOPHY
1:41:06 *necessity of prohibition in society*
“I don’t want to have to run through a whole list with every new person I meet, on-‘this is acceptable to me, this is not acceptable.’ No. I want a generalized field that does this for me so I don’t have to deal with this shit every time.”
2:23:36 yes, as Mikey put it thru Jay-Z-“Hov did that. So hopefully you won't have to go through that."
The community here helps each other to go thru it virtually, to surf the ocean of theory, parse the language. WWEarbuds can tune-in to you and others out here like Phil. Portal/Z&SoOn for timenergy bars-theory protein bytes that can be savored during labor. Energy bits for the spirit to become more engaged and familiar with these alien maps of the examined life.
Well said! Love it!
If I’m understanding Mikey correctly we could designate wage labor as the m(other) because it is prison to which we cling dutifully, in adherence to social norms.
Great seminar
I'm trying to think through superego but I came up with an example that seems to problematize it. So in the classic idea of "peer pressure" when growing up, you had the following situation:
The Big Other (peers) urging you to enjoy something you aren't supposed to do, such as drink or take drugs or break a rule, while a different Big Other (teachers) is telling you not to give into peer pressure.
So isn't the Big Other urging you BOTH to enjoy and not-enjoy at the same time? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the Super Ego is redundant here if we just assume that our internal representations follow the contradictions in the social field. Or maybe the superego represents that point of contradiction in the Big Other itself?
I'd think about this peer pressure scenario a little differently. The peers are the figures of the superego pressuring one, demanding one, to "Enjoy!", that is, they are embodiments of the obscene underside of the law (inherent transgression). The teachers are the figures of the big Other who educate the subject in the official mandates and explicit values of the symbolic order. The trick is to always keep in mind how most teachers turn a blind eye to rebellious acts of enjoyment, e.g., excessive partying, so long as it doesn't truly undermine their authority nor the functionality of the educational institution.
@@TheDangerousMaybe That's plausible. But consider a different situation:
Evangelical parents and most who attend my family's local church don't believe in evolution, so they undermine the authority of the biology teacher and to some extent the public schooling system in general. It's not possible to please both parents and teacher. So are there now two Big Others? Or do we view this as the internal contradictions of the Big Other?
In terms of enjoyment and peer pressure, my question is whether there is a difference here between enjoying and pretending to enjoy. For example, I think most of us who tried beer as kids thought it was gross. But I'm not sure enjoying beer matters when you try it out, it's the performance of the rebellious act that matters more.
So my thought is: what if enjoyment is irrelevant to peer pressure, what if what matters is simply the performance of ritual transgression as part of the group, and not the subjective position towards it. In this case, wouldn't one then by following the dictate of the Big Other -- I drink to fit in because I know that all my peers drink. I'm simply following an unwritten rule. Is it necessarily the case that the superego is involved in the peer pressure situation?
My suspicion is that the command to Enjoy comes almost exclusively from advertising, media, and pop psychology, and it's really just a command to consume more. At least this imperative to enjoy is not something I've really experienced in my personal life that I can recall, so I can only relate it obviously to media messaging.
But maybe this is also because I grew up evangelical and my parents prohibited everything, not allowing me to "do the things one does" as a kid in relation to my peers (specifically I was not allowed to play D&D, listen to secular music, go to the movies, go to dances). So I don't have the experience of the permissive dad or whatever.
4:20 start
40:13 capitalist realists are the biggest dreamers ironically-believing things will stay the same in a universe of flux.
@@nightoftheworld idk man, the reason capital is so powerful is because it embraces the flux. Capitalism is change. that's why D&G celebrates it in some ways, which Nick Land then takes to a whole other level.
I think what confuses me about the Zizekian approach is it is so strongly committed to looking at immanent internal divisions that for me it actually fails to account for the particular ways that subjects in an antagonistic monopoly capitalist system are internalizing social antagonisms. I guess I am a skeptic about the political conservatism implied by locating the source of contradiction as ESSENTIALLY within the subject in some primordial a priori sense.
I like the explanations with examples of Zizekian concepts, but every time I find myself asking: why should I believe this is true of humans in general and not just true of humans at a particular time and place? And based on McGowan's conversation with Cutrone, I almost want to say that there might be a fundamental split between those influenced by Marxism who see changes in the subject happening in parallel with changes in the social system, and structuralist influenced accounts that are aiming at a static ontology. I might even want to be a heretic and say I'm even tempted to go with late Foucault as actually presenting an important alternative perspective on the forming of subjects.
Both the subject and the Other are contradictory/split because they are both determined by language. This is why it is universal. Where there is a linguistic system, there is a split subject.
@@TheDangerousMaybe I grant there is some kind of primary alienation and that language causes a "primal split".
My skepticism is about what FOLLOWS from this fact: how important is the (ontological) primal split versus historically generated social antagonisms that are mirrored within the subject's structure?
Basically, I'm arguing against an ontological and for a more historical account of different kinds of subjects. As an old Gen Xer, I would perhaps go so far as to say that changes in technology have changed the structure of MY OWN subjectivity over time. I think technology is that important to subjectivity and it's the key thing that is missing in a Lacanian account.
Language and writing are just one form of technology, but I think that Stiegler shows that we can generalize beyond language to think about how technology as such structures subjectivity in different historical epics.
It's interesting actually just to put it this way: "Both the subject and the Other are contradictory/split because they are both determined by TECHNOLOGY. This is why it is universal. Where there is a human technological system, there is a split subject."
@@TheCyborgk What you’re calling subjectivity is what is referred to as subjectivization, that is, the process through which one gains a symbolic identity via interpellation, which is always historico-cultural. This, however, is the opposite of Real subjectivity. What is universal about humans across all cultures is not their specific and culturally relative modes of subjectivization, but, rather, their inability to be fully identical to these symbolic identities. Real subjectivity is the non-substantial cogito that always stands in contradiction to symbolic subjectivization.
@@TheDangerousMaybe Ok I think this probably means I'm no longer on the left, but I'm with Sloterdijk on the idea that a new subject emerged in the Axial age as humans developed new modes of subjectivization, where there was the process to "secede" from the symbolic order and instead engage in some kind of process of becoming that doesn't lead to a fixed identity. I think that the spiritual exercises of the Stoics and buddhists are examples of what I'm talking about.
So this theory basically says the subject emerged out of specific types of practices that allowed individuals to secede from the symbolic order, at a specific point in time--the Axial age.
So from this point of view we could say that the Subject as we know it was a virtual potential that become actualized during the Axial age via specific anthropotechnics. And I don't think the virtual subject is as interesting as the exploration of the kinds of subjects it is possible to create via various forms of practice.
As opposed to your idea of , I would posit that what we share is the Freudian "instinct poverty" which means that we are dependent on society for our survival when we are born. What follows from this is actually that we have a debt from past generations that we have to pay forward to future generations. For me what is universal about humans is existing at the crossroads between heaven and hell (best and worst potentials we could realize), past and future, and having to make existential decisions with no guarantee of their outcome, but with knowledge of the debt we owe to the ancestors and the obligation that entails. (This is an idea drawn especially from African spirituality btw)
And we constantly have to roll the dice and take a leap of faith into an unknown future.
@@TheDangerousMaybe Thinking about this a bit more--Actually I would say the subject is the one who CHOOSES which of the available forms of subjectivization to engage in--some practices will reinforce symbolic identity. Other practices undermine identity.
And the Actual subject only emerges via the application of historically available practices--whether they move towards or away from identification with the symbolic order.
Thus -- Descartes meditations can be seen as a psychotechnology that creates a new possibility for subjects to undermine their symbolic identities in a particular way.
But Stoic spiritual exercises also did something like this, in a radical way.
I think that "Real subjectivity" is only a potential that you still have to choose to actualize, and when you do, in order to successfully create an alternative to your identity in the symbolic order, you will have to use whatever practices exist in your time and place.
Otherwise, I think any insight into the freedom of the subject is an illusion: you think "I am free!" and then, because you have been conditioned to behave a certain way your whole life, you go back to acting exactly as if you are unfree. This is why I believe practices that form new habits are necessary for any substantial break with a symbolic order by an individual.
Mikey's examples are usually amazing but the idea of living with a tribe just didn't work for me: I don't believe that it's true that there is no room to assert individuality within a tribe because it is fundamentally governed by so many prohibitions.
This just seems wrong. Surely every social structure is a balance of prohibition and commandments to be followed, and within that there are different opportunities for subjectivation within those constraints. A liberal subject might find it difficult living in a tribe, but that's not saying much, because an American might find it difficult to adjust to the culture in Spain or Nigeria, and a working class person with no college may have difficulty adjusting to norms of college educated professionals.
But ALL of those things exist within the framework of global capitalism--including most existing tribal communities. I think there is some missing mediation between CAPITAL and SUBJECT so it's confusing to me when the mediations are left out, as to which subjects of capitalism we are actually talking about. And I guess because I grew up evangelical, whenever the example is supposed to be the "average" normie capitalist subject I don't entirely relate because my family was not like that and I didn't internalize the same subjective structures.
Think about societies like ancient India where assertion of individuality was ~included within~ the social structure itself. Eg forest dweller was considered an ordinary phase of life
@@matthewpaluszak9937 The purpose of the Bhagavad Gita is to argue that people should fulfill their role in the social order. But the fact that such a book had to be written is evidence of just how disruptive buddhism was to the existing social order.
It is also the case that historians aren't really sure how ubiquitous and strict that caste system actually was in ancient India.
Anyway the point is you won't find any noncontradictory social order, and ancient India was made up of many different societies, I think it's a modern projection to imagine ancient India as a unified society where everyone had their place.
There is no such thing as "tribal society" and "traditional/feudal society" -- these categories are themselves the product of liberal thinking. To the extent that there are relatively closed communities ruled by prohibition, such communities still exist within capitalism, because I grew up in one. And despite the formal legal possibility to leave such a community, in reality it is often quite difficult to break with such a community.
Anyway, it cannot be the case that capitalism is incompatible with prohibition as such.
In fact, the Puritans were successful capitalists precisely BECAUSE they prohibited the forms of Catholic enjoyment that involved sacrifices of capital for religious celebration, and instead took up an asceticism of hard work and the accumulation of capital.
It is only much later in history, when overproduction is a problem and supply-side economics becomes important that consumers (with the help of credit cards) have to be commanded to constantly ENJOY as much as possible via advertising.
So one interesting possibility here: what if we said that PROHIBITION is on the side of production, and ENJOYMENT is on the side of consumption, and the split subject in this case mirrors a structural split in the process of capital reproduction itself.
💢
Hiya