Notes on Slavoj Zizek's lecture, 'Object petit a and Digital Civilisation', 2014 - and a literary prehistory as seen through psychoanalysis

(Southern Courtship, by Eastman Johnson)

'Freud in civilization and its discontents deploys the concept of a human being as a prosthetic god'.

- The blessed finitude of the space of the human.

: When we can cause changes in objects directly with our mind, we enter in the terms of Kant - intellectual intuition, or the closing of the gap between mind and reality. This however is also the space which, or the site if you prefer, which Kant identifies as the space of the human - and the beginning of some kind of god. ie. Humans live in a gap between inside and outside, god however directly manifests reality through thought. 

Humans experience this as a loss however as this gap is also the resource of our creativity.

In other words, Zizek''s argument is that the site of human agency is precisely the gap that separates us from reality. This is the space for the assessment of potential, possibility, and consequence, allows us to reflect self-consciously regarding what we are doing. This site, Lacanians may argue, is the very site of philosophy. 

We may see how this may be homologous, to use a term from Zizek's lexicon to the structure of fantasy in Lacanian psychoanalysis. A foreigner is never simply a foreigner to us. What we perceive spontaneously in a foreigner is also our own set of ideological prejudices.  These as it were provide the coordinates of how we apprehend the other. In courtship for instance I never directly choose that this is a woman that I am attached to. There is always a feature that I am attracted to. There is always a feature or a gesture perhaps presented when someone makes a pass, even if it were an aspect of the background which appeals to and operationalizes the phantasmatic nature of love. 

Is this facet not what any artist would recognize? Here, I think it is imperative that we pay our dues to the modern novel, even as opposed to or even a development upon the earlier bildungsroman or novel of maturation. The author of a properly post-modern text, such as 'After Dark' by Murakami, makes every effort possible in the representation of singular and distinct contexts, which act almost as stage scenes in drama, but devoid of characters. Here, the isolation and experience of let us say a dark room illuminated only by the electronic glow of a screen, and the passage of time in it acts almost as a therapeutic relief from the work and life culture of a city such as Tokyo for instance which has a population density of six thousand people per square kilometer. 

In fact, any good love story is in the final analysis the search of two lovers for a site for the couple to consummate their association. Indeed, such a plot is very easily flipped into a real estate battle over this site itself. Victorian novels such as Jane Eyre are particularly adept at mobilizing this sub-text.

Here we could say elements of the lover, say their voice and standing form a melange with aspects in the background, such as their class or property which the plot tastefully reveals; and it is the ensemble of these partial objects in the story, to use Melanie Klein's term, whose effect - creates in the mind of a would-be besotted the transference of consideration essential to the appraisal or dare I say the love of a potential mate.

And honestly we see how Walter Benjamin's thesis that every document of culture is a testimony of barbarism holds here. In other words, we do not require a highly specialized deconstructive reading to understand the implications, indeed the dire necessities of property exchange which usher forth the lubricant of love as it were. This naked class dimension would have been readily apparent to any Marxist reading such as that of Raymond Williams or Terry Eagleton today.

In fact, would not Zizek's joke of an ideal date today make sense here? Instead of confusing base and superstructure what if Elizabeth Bennet had just sat across the table with Darcey and put forth a claim for his house and estate, and he a claim for the right to fuck her because fo her beauty and intelligence. Countless useless tea parties would have been saved, and we could have had a plot where they fight off zombies or something, as seen in the film 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies', released in 2016. The problem is a real one, for as any successful courtship would reveal, there needs to be a way in which I am allowed to present myself as a suitor, without totally instrumentalizing myself to the gaze, so that a modicum of dignity may persist in a world where relations are brutally material and relations economic. In other words, this is the gap where selfhood proper persists; the place where we can reflect upon our agency and choices. 

To reiterate my position, the point of critique, even a Marxist critique of the relations of production is not to lay bare what really is. No one except a stupid Buddhist who believes there is no self would require that. The point is to redeem the strategy of courtship so we may understand who the person positing is and indeed, what may be the relationship between them and their practice.