CRITICAL TERMS (PART 4)

CRITICAL TERMS 

OTHER

A term used widely within critical theory, predominantely in disciplines such as psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. However, the term also emerges from traditions of philosophy, such as Levinas’s ethical theory. It must therefore be apparent that ‘other’ as concept will have a wide variety of applications. Although this is the case, it can be said that the ‘other’ – either as a human being or an inanimate object – exists in relationship to a subject from which it differs. The theoretical framework that surrounds the use of the term in psychoanalysis is perhaps the most extensive and cohesive in mapping out this specific relationship, though it could be said to have had origins in Alexandre Kojève’s work as much as in that of Sigmund Freud. Jacques Lacan centres this discussion around ‘objet petit a’, where the ‘a’ is a quasi-algebraic sign indicating ‘autre’ (other). This ‘objet petit a’ is a concept developed from Freud, and his term ‘object’, where ‘object’ is defined as the aim of a subject’s drive. For instance, the object of the sexual drive in a certain human being at a certain time may be an actor or an actress on the front cover of a glossy magazine, or a part of that body, such as the breast or the torso. Alternatively, the aim of a subject’s drive at a particular time may be for an object that is not human: a new house, a new car, a new dress or a new DVD.

In this way ‘objet petit a’, in Lacan, emerges from the ‘other’. However the term ‘other’ is in turn divided in meaning, becoming ‘other’ and ‘Other’ (the ‘Autre’ or ‘grand-Autre’). Lacan makes this distinction in order to indicate a radical differentiation in the relationship of the subject between these two modalities. The small ‘other’ is used to represent the mapping of the subject’s own desire onto something or someone else. For example, that boy must be in love with me because I am in love with him. In this way it can be seen that the small ‘other’ indicates that which is not really ‘other’. Indeed, Lacan’s privileged example is the mirror image, where not only identification occurs, but also alienation, due to the decentring effect of contemplating the otherness of the image of me.

In contrast, the big ‘Other’ is used to indicate the law, society, religion and other people. Or rather, the law, society, religion and other people encountered symbolically through their effects on me, the subject. In this way, ‘I’, or ‘me’ (my identity), is possible only through the symbolic order. If I am born in France of French parents I will tend to grow up French, speaking French. Thus ‘I’ am not really ‘me’ at all. My identity is an internalized version of the symbolic order, the big ‘Other’. It was this line of thought that Louis Althusser developed in conjunction with ideology (from Karl Marx) when he outlined law, society and religion as Ideological State Apparatuses and the concept of interpellation as the way in which their effects are internalized.

In postcolonial theory the term ‘other’ is more straightforward, but, perhaps because of this, much more politically immediate. It refers, in essence, to the ‘other’ as produced by discursive practices. This idea of discursive practices structuring the relationship with the other is developed from the work of Michel Foucault by Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and Trinh T. Minh-ha who use the term to capture the way in which the ‘truth’ about the East (in all its multifarious facets) is produced by the West.

PANOPTICISM

A term formed from ‘pan’ and ‘optic’ (‘all-seeing’), used by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Foucault derives the concept of panopticism from a diagram drawn up by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1791. Bentham’s Panopticon was a model prison in which supervisors could observe prisoners in their individual cells without being seen themselves. According to Foucault, this system was effective because prisoners never knew whether or not they were being watched: ‘he is seen, but he does not see . . . what matters is that he knows himself to be observed’. Foucault goes on to argue that this constant sense of surveillance and visibility is what characterizes the development of disciplinary societies in toto. In such a society, ‘the automatic functioning of power’ is guaranteed because individuals police themselves and each other. For Foucault, the notion of individualism in Western society is in fact a direct effect of panopticism. The individual is constructed by having internalized the disciplinary power of penitentiary and/or medicinal discourses, with their numerous methods of segregation and social exclusion. This is why, as Foucault concludes, modern institutions such as hospitals, schools and factories all resemble prisons.

PASTICHE

Whether applied to part of a work, or to the whole, implies that it is made up largely of phrases, motifs, images, episodes, etc. borrowed more or less unchanged from the work(s) of other author(s). The term is often used in a loosely derogatory way to describe the kind of helpless borrowing that makes an immature or unoriginal work read like a mosaic of quotations. More precisely, it has two main meanings, corresponding to two different deliberate uses of pastiche as a technique. There is a kind of pastiche which seeks to recreate in a more extreme and accessible form the manner of major writers. It tends to eliminate tensions, to produce a more highly coloured and polished effect, picking out and reiterating favourite stylistic mannerisms, and welding them into a new whole which has a superficial coherence and order. Unlike plagiarism, pastiche of this kind is not intended to deceive: it is literature frankly inspired by literature (as in Akenside’s poem ‘The pleasures of imagination’). The second main use of pastiche is not reverential and appreciative, but disrespectful and sometimes deflationary. Instead of ironing out ambiguities in its source(s) it highlights them. It cannot be distinguished absolutely from parody, but whereas the parodist need only allude to the original intermittently, the writer of pastiche industriously recreates it, often concocting a medley of borrowed styles like Flann O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). A closely synonymous term, nearly obsolete, ‘cento’ or ‘centonism’, is relevant here: in its original Latin form it meant a garment of patchwork and, applied to literature, a poem made up by joining scraps from various authors. Many of the specialized uses of pastiche are reminiscent of this literary game: it may give encyclopaedic scope to a work, including all previous styles (Joyce’s Ulysses); it is used by writers who wish to exemplify their ironic sense that language comes to them secondhand and stylized (George Herbert’s ‘Jordan I’). And a general air of pastiche is created by many writers who, for various reasons, refuse to evolve a style of their own, and who (like John Barth) employ other’s cast-off phrases with conscious scepticism.

Fredric Jameson argues that parody has been replaced by pastiche in postmodernism, where all the cultural styles of the past are open to cannibalization and appropriation: ‘Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter’.

PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY

The principle of performativity is used, if not always explicitly, by such thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller and Michel Foucault. In one of its most important aspects, the principle of performativity has come to replace traditional notions of identity. Who, or what, one is is no longer based on the notion of an existing core identity, something in each of us which remains the same throughout all our changes in life, nor on teleological becoming in which one develops one’s natural predisposition into a fully fledged character. Overall, what the principle of performance reveals is the absence of any natural order that would constitute the ground for one’s identity. In a more complicated argument, it can be shown that any proclaimed natural order hides its own performative dimension and thus the fact that it is constructed. Here the space opens for ideological criticism and, accordingly, contemporary theory suggests that identity is based on enactment, i.e. on the performative construction of one’s identity by following culturally derived patterns of behaviour. Derrida and Miller emphasize the importance of language as a means of constructing identity. Miller’s concept of ‘prosopopeia’ (personification) in particular underlines the performative dimension of language. Here, we do not exist as meaningful beings apart from our enactment in language. Foucault and Butler, on the other hand, are more interested in how identity is generated within culture, or, more precisely, in the discursive formations which are constitutive of identity. According to Butler, for example, we are constantly forced to re-enact and reconfirm our heterosexuality.

PHALLOGOCENTRISM

A combination of the terms phallocentrism and logocentrism, which is used to critique psychoanalysis as a phallus-centred discourse that locates truth in speech. For French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who coined the term to critique Freud and, especially, Lacan, psychoanalysis positions the phallus as the origin of both sexual difference and the use of language. Derrida argues that by giving the phallus such a central role, psychoanalytical explanations of sexual and social development continue to reproduce patriarchal norms. Furthermore, as a ‘talking cure’, psychoanalysis grants speech privileged access to the truth of a patient’s internal consciousness while simultaneously determining what that truth is. Critics of Derrida’s attack on psychoanalysis argue that he confuses the phallus with the penis, asserting that the phallus is a signifier of desire that no-one possesses. Some feminist criticism uses this symbolic reconceptualization of the phallus as a point of departure for a radical reappraisal of the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Other critics have used ‘phallogocentrism’ to theorize more generally the ways in which phallocentric discourse is made to seem natural in order to perpetuate patriarchy.

POWER

In the most general terms, power can be understood as the ability to effect change. Typically, this is thought to be achieved through the domination or control exerted by one individual, or group, over another in a power relationship. In this traditional understanding of the term, power is conceived as the end result of a difference in status between the two parties. The sovereign, or king, for example, is understood to be of a different status to his subjects and is therefore in possession of power over them. This asymmetrical and one-directional model of power was traditionally understood to be replicated in all social relations, so that the landlord has power over the tenant, the parent over the child, and so on, each possessing power in a manner similar to the sovereign. As a static model, this traditional conception of power proves inadequate to explain the means by which subjects gain status (and hence power) in the first place, or the tendency for power to shift, often through resistance.

Within critical theory, the work of Michel Foucault provides the most thoroughgoing analysis of power. For Foucault, power is not conceived as residing in a single source, as the possession of the king, but is rather diffused throughout the social structure and is exercised within and through it. All social relations are relations of power, but, in this instance, power is a causal factor for social asymmetry, rather than its peripheral end result. In his historical analysis of the development of modern institutions such as the asylum or the prison, Foucault demonstrates the mechanisms of power which operate by means of the constitution of the modern autonomous subject. The shift from sovereign to state control in the last 200 years has not, Foucault argues, brought about the liberation of individuals from relations of power. Instead, we have seen a transferral from a sovereign power located at a remote distance from individuals to one of state power in which the individual is constantly subject to discursive mechanisms of regulation and control. These mechanisms take the form of modern classificatory knowledge regimes such as medicine or psychiatry, which work, at a discursive and institutional level, to identify and regulate the movement of subjects, taking effect even at the level of the body through the techniques of ‘bio-power’. This process is exacerbated by the tendency of modern subjects to regulate themselves, collaborating in their own subjection. Foucault’s best-known metaphor for the process by which individual subjects internalize the mechanisms of social control is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (see panopticism). A nineteenth-century architectural design for prisons, Bentham’s Panopticon works on the principle that individuals, isolated from one another, and open to the gaze of an unseen central power, need only perceive that they are under surveillance for them to regulate their own behaviour in the service of social control. The selfawareness and apparent autonomy of the modern subject is thus conceived, by Foucault, as the outcome of new levels of visibility and surveillance engendered by the explosion of discourse around the newly autonomous subject at the end of the eighteenth century. New regimes of knowledge thus resulted in the formulation of ever more powerful techniques for social control. Thus, in Discipline and Punish Foucault shows that the new disciplinary regimes of the nineteenth century which sought to reform prisoners rather than punish acts were just as repressive as earlier systems. The complex structure of medical and juridical observation required to assess the reformation of the individual soul exemplifies Foucault’s observation that ‘the soul becomes the prison of the body’ as the power of modern governments is internalized by its subjects.

While Foucault ably demonstrates the networks of power relationships which operate within modern society, and the complex interface between power and knowledge, in his earlier writings he still conceived of power as both controlling and prohibitive, operating through the exclusion, for example, of unsanctioned behaviour. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault sought to revise this, conceiving of power instead as strategically dispersed throughout all social relations, located only in temporary shifting effects, and he included in his analysis what he termed micro-power or ‘power from below’, and the tendency for power to include resistance. In this aspect of Foucault’s work it may be possible to trace the influence of Nietzsche who, in searching for the causes for human action, claimed that a ‘will to power’ operated as a continuously dissembling field of effects, motivating behaviour. Foucault’s own influence has been diffuse, provoking new examinations of micropower and resistance, particularly, for example, in gender studies, while feminism had already noted the distinction between power and authority which makes such analysis possible.

RHIZOME

In origin a botanical term classifying the growth and organization of tuber plants, the rhizome entered critical thought in French poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980). They develop a ‘rhizomatic’ model of organization in terms of material, nonhierarchical relations and apply it not just to organic but also to cultural, biological, and geological phenomena. A rhizome grows in multiple directions without following any predetermined plan or reaching a predestined ideal end. The importance of this concept for critical theory is that it provides an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition of thinking in terms of unities, fixed subjects and transcendent essences. Thus the meaning of the term ‘rhizome’ is given as part of a critique of the long theoretical domination of tree-like models of thinking in which central unities subordinate real plurality and difference. Subsequent critics have often used the term loosely to describe everything from grassroots political movements to the internet, seeing a rhizome as an inherently libertarian, anarchic resistance against oppressive, totalitarian structures. However, for Deleuze and Guattari rhizomatic and tree-like types of organization are constantly shifting. They are inseparable processes, rather than empirical or political entities to be described or judged.

SCHIZOANALYSIS

Coined in French poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (first published 1972), this term distinguishes their analysis of the unconscious from that of psychoanalysis. They argue that psychoanalysis treats the unconscious as a dangerous disruption to the unity of an ideal subject (psyche) and to the capitalist society by which this kind of subject is constituted. Continuing a long tradition of Western thinking about the subject and desire, psychoanalytic interpretation constructs the Oedipus complex to give the unconscious a single, mythical meaning. In the process, desire becomes a private melodrama, played without any social or political significance. It thus no longer threatens the subject or society. Extending French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s analysis of desire as a constitutive lack, schizoanalysis rejects this domesticating interpretation of the unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari make the splittings or ‘schizzes’ that constitute unconscious production the object of their analysis. Desire is understood as a process in which unconscious differences simply produce rather than meaning anything. Where psychoanalytic interpretation tries to reassure a fixed, unified subject with a metaphysical ontology, schizoanalysis attempts to continue the process of desiring-production. Rather than interpreting, it constructs a rhizomatic unconscious which further undercuts the subject’s supposed rationality and unity.

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