Why should those alerted to the emptiness of desire not commit violence with indifference, after the path of the Bhagavad Gita? Žižek refuses that path, just as he rightly refuses the mainline Buddhist renunciation of desire as obliterating our humanity every bit as much as the abolition of sexual difference or transhumanist submission to artificial intelligence. Perhaps that is because he is more substantively Christian even than he thinks.
If we are in solidarity with the other, then this can’t be a solidarity in the abyss, which is indifferent to that solidarity. It must instead imply a lure toward ineffable community, to the possible linking through affinity of individuals and groups and, therefore, a faith in the teleological bent of matter toward a spirit that can’t be just its empty epiphenomenon.
John Milbank reviewing Slavoj Zizek’s Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist
I’m directing this post primarily to former students with whom I spent time talking about the pyschoanalyst/philosopher Jacques Lacan and as a supplement to themes I developed during the Cathedral Lectures about the Techno-Capitalism Matrix (TCM).
Lacan’s two most well known students are Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek. Until recently I found Kristeva far more interesting than Žižek because my earlier reading of Žižek inclined me to think of him as an off-the-wall showboater, but lately he’s taken an interesting turn. As Millbank says of him—
Slavoj Žižek, the wild Slovenian exponent of already wild French psychoanalytic theory, is now a notable voice of sanity.
What he’s referring to as wild French psychoanalytic theory was reflected in what I had to say about Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus in the Cathedral lectures, and the early Žižek struck me as swimming in those extreme, quasi-nihilistic, Anti-Oedipal waters. His recent book is indicative of how “secular” philosophy, which for the better part of the last two hundred years rejected religious/theological issues as irrelevant for philosophy, is realizing that it can no longer do so.
Debates among philosophers might not seem important in how it impacts the lives of ordinary people, but in the long run it could be significant, and almost everything I write concerns the long run. Such shifts in thinking among philosophers are how cultures re-orient themselves, and Lord knows we need to be re-oriented. One of the benefits of the postmodern deconstruction of Positivistic (i.e., science is the only thing that counts as knowledge) cultural hegemony is that it has opened things up so that rationalist materialism is no longer the only legitimate framework for doing “serious” philosophy.
A hundred years ago Phenomenology and Psychoanalytical Theory opened up interesting possibilities for retrieving a way of doing philosophy that actually cares about metaphysics and deep meaning, but Positivism prevailed until the 70s when the postmodern critique started to erode its legitimacy. If I’m right, we’re finally approaching a moment where Socrates and Plato might be essential reading again.
I’m seeing it, even if it isn’t front and center in the mainstream. There’s a renewed interest among philosophers in Plato, Aristotle, and the German Idealists, and Žižek’s book reflects that: It’s all about the German Idealists and Romantics particularly Schelling and Hegel with whom I spent so much time in my classes because they are so important for retrieving a sense of metaphysics of the sacred. They don’t tell the whole story, but they provide an interesting framework for thought, as Neoplatonism provided that framework for Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theologians in the first millennium CE. Milbank is himself a postmodern Christian Neoplatonist with whom I have deep sympathies.
Nevertheless, French Psychoanalytic theory for all its limitations has important insights for those who are interested in grappling with philosophical/theological issues in an intellectually honest way. Kristeva and now Žižek, while both atheists, are interested in accounting for religious experience, and I think they do it in a way that does not come across, at least to me, as reductively simplistic. Kristeva even wrote a novel about the great sixteenth-century Spanish mystic (and doctor of the Church) Teresa of Avila.
In another post I’ll have more to say about what I think is significant about Zizek’s turn, but I want to review here some ideas from Kristeva. In my Human/Transhuman/Posthuman class, I talk a lot about how Kristeva and Baudrillard are basically saying the same thing, the first from a psychoanalytic point of view the second from a sociological one. In the Cathedral Lectures I went into some detail explaining Baudrillard’s distinction between symbolic and semiotic. Kristeva makes the same distinction using different terms—’genotext’ and ‘phenotext’. One way of conceptualizing the crisis of meaning that we are currently experiencing lies in the gradually drying up of our capacity to respond to genotextual significance. That’s the argument I was making using different language in the Cathedral Lectures. This is a process that has accelerated since WWII for reasons I lay out in those lectures.
Genotext is language or any form of symbolic expression that is saturated with energy and meaning that come from extra-conscious, i.e, extra-linguistic, sources into a liminal zone of consciousness that a person then attempts to give linguistic form. Sometimes it results in one having an insight that feels deeply original even if not significant for others. Sometimes this results in great art. It can be the language of poetry and religious ecstasy. Hence Kristeva’s interest in Teresa and what Lacanians call jouissance. This is also the territory explored in Peter Shaffer’s Equus and Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who’s Silvia?
Phenotext is very close to what Baudrillard calls the semiotic—it’s propositional language like 2 + 2 = 4 or factual statements like ‘The weather is warm and sunny today’. It’s the use of language to clearly and logically say what we want to say. Ideally genotext and phenotext work in partnership, the second unpacking and interpreting and clarifying the first by integrating it into the existing linguistic symbolic system to the degree that’s possible. Jouissance by definition always exceeds or overflows any attempt at verbal articulation, but we humans must try to articulate the unspeakable if for no other reason than simply to affirm that something extra-linguistic exists.
Phenotext without genotext is all about facts and accuracy—but it’s boring and meaningless in any felt, significant way. Genotext is all about felt meaning, but it easily goes off the deep end if it isn’t critiqued, evaluated, and integrated into the existing cultural knowledge. Theology and biblical exegesis done in a living way is about the partnership of genotext and phenotext. It’s religious experience grounded in genotextual symbolic expressions seeking understanding through ongoing phenotextual interpretation. Genotext becomes a parody of itself when it is reduced to propositional “truths” in fundamentalism and dogmatism. Genotextual language is true in a different way, and cannot be reduced to propositions. It often can only point to the existence of a truth that cannot be fully verbally articulated.
The problem with mainstream philosophy after the mid-19th century is that in its enshrinement of Positivism, it mirrored fundamentalism and dogmatism in its rejection of genotextual meaning as too “subjective” and so philosophy, especially in the Anglo-American world, focused exclusively on Positivist, propositional phenotextual knowing. That was not true for philosophy for most of its history, and as I said above Psychoanalytical Theory and Phenomenology kept the door open for taking genotext seriously philosophically.
My argument in the Cathedral Talks focused primarily on Baudrillard’s ‘Precession of the Simulacra’, which, translated into Kristevan terms is the slow shriveling up of the primary legitimacy of genotext as it gets supplanted by phenotext after the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, and later in Capitalism and its Transhumanist project. For our ancestors genotext is what gave language its felt legitimacy, but our condition as postmoderns lies in that very few of us have any feeling for genotext anymore, and so we don’t have any sense of what is True anymore, and this is largely why we live in a post-Truth world. So let’s explore how this distinction between genotext and phenotext play out in our current political crisis:
Liberals insist on the legitimacy of phenotextual statements because they are fact-based.. Conservatives don’t reject facts so much as they refuse to accept phenotext as having anything really meaningfully truthful to say. Truth is about meaning not facts. Facts become meaningful only when they fit into a meaningful pattern—there has to be some meaningful narrative that organizes the facts, and they see Liberals as blabbering phenotextual platitudes that have no real meaning that they recognize as legitimate.
They see Liberals as lacking depth, as having no convictions except as they change from minute to minute according to what might be the latest intellectual fashion. They see Liberals as caring only about horizontal, phenotextual meanings, not vertical genotextual ones, i.e., meanings that have metaphysical heft. And I think that conservatives are correct insofar as they are pointing to the way that the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is all about eliminating genotext’s depth because it obstructs the TCM’s project to create a closed system in which transcendence can play no obstructing role. Liberals are more comfortable with this aspect of the TCM than conservatives are, and that’s what makes Liberal cooptation by the Techno-Capitalist Matrix something I think Liberals should see as more problematic.
Now the problem with Conservatives is that if Liberals are all phenotext and little or not genotext, conservatives are all genotext and little or no phenotext. Conservatives are all about felt meaning with no interest in critique or integrating what they feel are genotextual meanings with established knowledge. They reject established knowledge as the product of Liberal bias, hence Stephen Colbert’s famous mot, “Reality has a well known liberal bias.”
There is some truth in conservatives suspicions of liberal bias insofar as “reality” is shaped by the presuppositions of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, but that does not mean that conservatives have permission to believe the opposite of whatever Liberals believe. For Conservatives, If it “feels” meaningful, it must be truthful—or “truthy”, to use another Colbertism. Demagogues understand this, and they exploit it. The result is the absurd conservative proclivity to be seduced by demagogues like Trump and his clownish imitators.
Right-wing demagogues have demonized Liberals as Technocratic elites who want to run the lives of non-elites and impose their anything-goes “emancipatory”, i..e., ‘anti-Oedipal,’ values on them. They see all Liberals as rejecting traditional values as repressive, and promoting an anything-goes cultural-values chaos. I would argue that this ‘anything-goes’ chaos is not so much the Liberal Project as it is the Techno-Capitalist project, and while many Liberals are as uncomfortable with the TCM as Conservatives are, the Democratic Party is correctly perceived as the party dominated by the culturally Libertarian Technocrats who run the TCM. I vote Democrat, but for this reason do not identify as a Democrat.
The irony of course is that too many conservatives in blaming Democrats for the cultural chaos that the TCM causes, justify their embrace agents of anti-institutional chaos who are far worse. The extreme wing of the cultural Left in the media and universities might be anti-Oeidpal in a cartoonish, superficial way, but most Liberals are very rules- and norms-oriented institutionalists who see, correctly, that the GOP has been hijacked by radicals who want to tear down traditional civic institutions and impose their own anti-democratic, authoritarian, sharia-style rule.
Democrats, as the party of phenotextual meaning, see themselves as reasonable and orderly, and they see Republicans as the party of irrationality and delusion. They are correct. Republicans, as the party of genotextual meaning, see themselves as the party of metaphysical depth and the Democrats as the party of superficiality and trendiness. They, too, are correct. I hope you can see why the only solution in the long run is that both recognize their need for the other, but in the short run why we need to vote for Democrats.
Why is this election so close? The vast majority of sane people in the middle are either not paying attention or say a pox on both their houses, but “independents” tend to lean Republican because it feels more comfortable for them because most Americans, including black and brown Americans, are culturally conservative in a center-right way—the traditional meanings are deeply felt. And if Trump wins in November, it will be because these independents see the Cultural Left as more threatening to their sense of right order than they do those on the Radical Right, whom many of them see as wanting to restore a sense of traditional order that feels more in sync with their fundamental values.
If the Democrats win, it will only be because the real truth that Trump is a vulgar, sociopathic, wannabe Putin will become more visible for voters than the positive symbolic role he has played for so many as resistor-in-chief of establishment elite sanctimony.
But who knows? In a sane, orderly world, it shouldn’t be this close, but because it is this close, insanity and chaos are very much a possibility. And even if the Dems win, it won’t have solved the underlying problem, which is that the Democrats are a hollowed-out hodgepodge that nobody feels represents their deepest hopes for the future, and who, especially in their Neoliberal wing, remain largely co-opted by the TCM. Republicans might have been hijacked by a crackpot personality cult and policy-averse performance artists, but they provide a sense of meaning and purpose that Democrats cannot. For most people It’s the meaning, stupid, and it will continue to be.
