Enjoyment-in-language | How Ontology Is Becoming More Important, Or This Metaphor We Call "Being"

 

I: “WHAT IS A CHAIR?” AND THE DISAVOWAL OF ONTOLOGY

 

            I recently re-watched VSauce’s video “Do chairs exist?”¹. It’s a video thoroughly and only about ontology – what makes a chair be “a chair”? Is the chair out in the universe or are there simply a bunch of atoms arranged “chair-wise”? Or what about the Sorites paradox: if I scrape a tiny bit off wood off the chair, it’s still a chair. But if I keep doing this over and over, the chair will eventually disappear, turn into nothing. At which point does it stop being a chair? Or what about The Ship of Theseus: if I slowly replace parts of the chair with new parts until this chair has none of its original parts, and then I use all the previous parts to assemble a new chair, which one is the original chair? This new one which has none of its original parts, or the “new” one composed of the old ones? Do islands exist, or are they just a bunch of land inside water, and if we accept that islands exist, why can’t we also say that “incars” are a thing – a car inside a garage? And can we even break the universe into a bunch of simples (parts that can no longer be divided into multiple parts) considering the advancements in quantum physics in the previous century that show us that atoms are not actually simples, but that once we break them down, reality starts “glitching” and, basically, the simulation we live in stops rendering properly when we get down to the sub-atomic level?

            These are interesting and important questions – but I can’t help but notice that the reaction of the everyday person towards ontology is what I can only describe as fetishistic disavowal²: “I know very well (these questions are unimportant), but…”. Especially in the reactions to VSauce’s video, I overwhelmingly saw ‘the semantics argument’: “who cares what makes a chair a chair as long as we can understand each other? VSauce was just arguing over semantics in the entire video without actually saying anything substantial about the reality he is describing, so we just should have the same (or a very similar) definition of ‘chair’ before we start conversing.” With this logic, you might as well go full Wittgenstein and assume that all of philosophy is just a bunch of people arguing over semantics.

            Obviously, ontology is semantics, but it’s never just semantics, it’s semantics + surplus-enjoyment. You could say that in ontological debates, we argue over semantics and there is so much pleasure from the boundaries and lines we draw around reality to divide it, a pleasure so intense that it’s painful, a pure form of jouissance just from knowing that we’ve defined this thing in that way. Why do I say that the layman disavows ontology? Most people would eventually respond to questions like “What is a chair?” with a form of “Who cares? It does not affect my life”. Yet replace “chair” with any human identity group and suddenly, people are ready to kill for their identities. In other words, the semantics argument does not explain why humans even have an identity in the first place, why, when we talk about ourselves, it’s never just a communication as a pure transfer of information, but an intense emotional attachment to something that seems like “just semantics”. You could say that ontology is maybe just semantics, but semantics is never just semantics. Semantics is semantics + painful enjoyment. People are ready to kill once a question as trivial as “What is a chair?” directly or indirectly relates to the question “What or who am I?”. After all, one of the most popular political documentaries of the last year (What is a woman?) is a quasi-philosophical documentary full of (bad) conservative takes on ontology³. When it comes to identity politics, everyone becomes a philosopher and starts having an opinion on how definitions should work or whether all things have an essence without which they wouldn’t be that thing anymore. So why not go back to the drawing board and do a complete revisit of ontology altogether? Maybe “what is a chair?” was an important question in the end. The semantics argument is ultimately an unfair double-standard: ordinary objects like chairs should lose their identity, but I shall not – ego death for thee but not for me.

Derrida and Foucault abandoned ontology because they viewed labeling humans as limiting in some way or another, analytic philosophers abandoned a huge part of ontology because they viewed it as a language game, but they are in many ways hypocrites because everyday they, like any other human, used some variant of the phrase “I am” which is simply the most enjoyable miscommunication invented by man. When we say “I am”, we are definitely not just communicating some information about our reality to the other as clearly as possible. As Zupancic very well points out:

 

“The antagonism conceptualized by psychoanalysis is not related to any original double, or original multiple, but to the fact that a One introduced by the signifier is always a “One plus” – it is this unassignable plus that is neither another One nor nothing that causes the basic asymmetry and divide of the very field of the One. The most general, and at the same time precise, Lacanian name for this plus is jouissance, defined by its surplus character. One is cracked by what it produces on top of what it produces – and this is precisely what incites Lacan to name this fractured, or “barred,” field of the symbolic One the Other. The Other is not the Other of the One; it is the Lacanian name for the “One plus,” which is to say, for the One in which this plus is included and for which it thus has considerable consequences.”⁴

 

            I am not saying that we can just copy everything we know from the ontology of ordinary objects and apply them to people, maybe we can apply some of it, but the ontology of ‘non-people’ can definitely give us some insight on the ontology of people, that is, on human identity.

            Moreover, if ontology was (among other things) a painfully enjoyable game of semantics, then we can bring in the philosophy of language into this as well, for we know very well ever since Saussure that the meaning of a word (or more generally, a signifier) exists only in relation to the other ones. Foucault had a very good analogy for this: if I have a digital picture of someone’s face that I recognize, and I apply a negative filter over it, I will still recognize the face in the picture⁵. All the white pixels turned black, all the black pixels turned white, all the pixels of another colored also changed their color, no pixel, at an individual level, looks the same anymore. Yet, they all changed in a similar way, which maintains the relations between pixels more or less intact. If we substitute “pixel” for “signifier”, this is how language works. This is why I insist so much in my articles lately on an ontology that prioritizes difference instead of identity^{6, 7}, as we must make this move not only in language, but also in how we talk about being: a thing is itself only insofar as it holds a relationship to some other thing, its status as whatever we defined it to be holds meaning only in relation to another identity. This is most obvious in political ontology: it is not only that the left and the right have different definitions of what “left” and “right” are – what came first was the difference between left and right, and we must first understand the difference between them in order to understand them, not the other way around. If a right-winger views the difference between left and right as “how much the state intervenes in the economy”, a left-winger doesn’t simply disagree with his definition of left and right, a left-winger will also disagree with his definition of the difference between left and right, because a left-winger will claim that you cannot even quantify or somehow measure how much the state intervenes in the economy, so it was never a problem to begin with (when the state lowers taxes they are intervening in the economy just as much as when they are raising them).

We must have a similar approach towards human identity: what makes me be “me” is not simply a static state of affairs that I describe by the verb “to be” in lies such as “I am” but also the relation between my multiple identities that changed over time. If in middle school I was “the loser”, in high school I was “the class clown” and in college I was “the nerd” – what I am at any one moment in time is not simply one of those three (or another), but also a very complex relationship between all my public masks, the difference between them as well as the entire process of turning one into another. This is the fundamental lesson of Hegelian dialectics: being (ontology) and truth (epistemology) are processes that unfold over time, not static and determinate in any one moment. We can say, then, not that the journey is more important than the destination (“the real treasure is the friends we made along the way”), but instead that the journey is part of the destination.

 

II: WHY “I AM” AND NOT “I DO”?

 

If communication was just a transfer of information and if words just needed to be defined beforehand then that does not explain why humans evolved in pretty much all languages to keep using verbs like “to be” to describe themselves, when in almost any case, it would be much clearer from the standpoint of mutual understanding to replace it with another verb. When asked “Who am I?”, how much is this a question about truth in the first place? Isn’t it just a violent dance between truth and value? Consider the statement “I am a programmer” – have I even learned anything useful from this person? A person who writes code 8 hours a day is a programmer, but so is someone who writes code 1 hour a day, 1 hour per week, perhaps even the one writing code an hour per month will call themselves that and we’ll accept it, but all of them ”are” equally as much programmers. There is some fiction in the reality of that statement, for I am a programmer but I am not always programming. Sure, it is useful to communicate what you are often doing when you are not always engaged in it, which is why in English we use the present simple for the former (I program) and the present continuous for the latter (I am programming). Despite this, we can here perfectly notice the inherent surplus-enjoyment of the verb “to be”. To say “I program” (that is, I engage in the act of programming on a regular basis) communicates the exact same information as the statement “I am a programmer”, yet despite this, they are not quite the same. In the rare cases in which one has an emotional attachment to the identity of the programmer, they might feel the need to defend this and gatekeep it, thus agreeing with the guy who writes code once per month that they program but not agreeing with them that they are a programmer. Zupancic and Zizek have a nice joke about this: a man enters a coffee shop and orders a cup of coffee but without cream. The waiter replies: “sorry, but we’ve run out of cream, would you like a cup of coffee without milk instead?”. The absurdity is that coffee-without-milk is the same as coffee-without-cream, but only at the material level of physical reality. The same information is inscribed within them, and yet they are not quite the same. There is a metaphysical difference between something without X and that same something without Y – what something is not is part of its identity. That’s why the difference between “I do” and “I am” is like coffee without cream vs. coffee without milk, they refer to the same thing in reality, but produce an altogether different emotional effect.

That’s why Zupancic said in the paragraph I quoted earlier that “one is cracked by what it produces on top of what it produces”, it’s precisely this surplus-enjoyment of words like “I” and “am” that makes the statements so pleasurably painful. We already had enough words, enough signifiers to accurately communicate whatever we are doing, but on top of all of them, words like “I” and “am” were added, a few extra signifiers absolutely useless from the standpoint of communication, but useful from the point of view of self-esteem, regardless. The “I” hangs on top, it is extra, a surplus. Hence why difference comes first: in the acronym “LGBT+”, the “+” is the most important identity, not in this strict nominalist sense, it shall not be interpreted as an “etc.”, as a way of saying that there are 30 more gender identities but we didn’t have space to list them all so we added “+”. The philosophical point I am making here is that the “+” comes first. We don’t first have identities of “man” and “woman” and whoever doesn’t fit this binary is the “+”, no, first we have the “+” and out of this plus, out of this very non-belonging, this very category of not-being-equal-to-oneself, the individual identities emerge.

 

“In the same way that for Marx “class antagonism” is not simply conflict between different classes, but the very principle of the constitution of the class society, antagonism as such never simply exists between conflicting parties; it is the very structuring principle of this conflict, and of the elements involved in it.”⁴

 

When people have a public intellectual that they do not like, and if that public intellectual happens to not have an academic degree in philosophy (but in something else), it’s common practice to say that they are not a real philosopher. The naïve mind would be tempted to ask them to properly define what a philosopher is in order to avoid misunderstanding and miscommunication, yet this was precisely the point, the value-judgment hidden as a truth-judgment, insofar as the miscommunication is not a bug but a feature, the very goal from the start. No one will disagree with stating that the respective person writes philosophy books, or even with a statement like “he philosophizes”, but when it comes to a statement starting with “he is”, hell breaks loose. One time on Reddit I’ve heard that we need to have some sort of definition of a philosopher, because if we don’t draw a boundary, then anyone who writes some random stuff about life can call themselves a philosopher and the word loses its meaning. But those lines shall not be drawn beforehand, the lines have a magic aura around them, a sort of mana (with the risk of going full-Jungian here): the lines have a life of their own almost, it’s the coming to life of the signifier. In other words, it is not that we are arguing over semantics, but the semantics are arguing over us. “Language speaks the subject”, like Lacan says.

This may become clearer (as well as a more useful conversation) when we are dealing with issues surrounding self-identification in the sphere of psychology and mental health, and with all the automatic thoughts involving a fluctuating self-esteem. Take any positive or negative attribute and ask yourself whether there is a difference between “being” that thing and engaging in that thing at a regular interval. When I have disappointed a lot of people in my life, I might think to myself “I am a disappointment”, but a therapist might encourage me to instead tell myself “I have disappointed some people”. Where are we arguing over semantics, then? Because at the level of “cold” exchange of information, the two statements clearly communicate the same message, since the definition of “a disappointment” is a person who regularly disappoints. At the same time, the two are not really the same, the difference between them, again, is like coffee without cream vs. coffee without milk. What is the difference between telling oneself “I am dumb” vs. “I have done something dumb” or “I do dumb things”? What is the difference between telling oneself “I am charming” instead of “I charm people”? Am I a successful person or did I just have a lot of success lately? The more you use the verb “to be”, the less clear it is what you are trying to communicate. If humans have evolved to use language in order to convey information clearly, it does not explain why humans always engage in intentional misunderstanding by getting so fixated on the verb “to be”. It seems instead that humans have evolved to use language in order to chop our heads off in the name of symbolic identities. Maybe all conjugations of the verb “to be” are to an extent metaphorical.

This is the grave mistake of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which does not make a distinction between thought and language. For the Cognitive Therapist, ontological statements about the self (ex: “I am an idiot”) are either true or false, and the patient is just transparently sharing their worldview with the therapist. The Cognitive Therapist, like an AI chatbot who does not understand context, subtext and implications, interprets every statement literally and has to demonstrate to the patient that they are objectively wrong, so they might give the patient an exercise in which they have to list 10 situations in which they were not objectively idiotic, in which they did something smart. For the CBT practitioner, human thinking is like a linear programming code that must be “debugged”, the therapist has to find the logical error in the algorithm and correct it until the information runs smoothly again. Like a robot, all humanity in the patient is lost, and one is left to wonder what really separates us from an actual AI chatbot. David Ferraro makes a really good point when he says:

 

“Moreover, just as dream symbols are strictly non-generalisable, so are depressive complaints and symptoms. Beck would be suffering from cognitive distortions of his own if he thought that he could magically divine the proper meaning of utterances in experimental subjects whom he did not know. For Beck, symptoms, symbols and signifiers all become mere units that take on a bland, meaningless equivalence, with the necessary consequence that his ‘refutation’ of psychoanalysis actually has nothing to do with psychoanalysis.

Beck apparently saw (and sees) language and thought as interchangeable, when patently, they are not. If Beck had considered that others’ ‘cognitions’ were by definition unknowable, and had instead focused on patients’ discourse, he might have been able to see beyond a one-to-one correspondence with speech and subjective suffering in depression. For instance, in a given context, a depressive self-reproach may have little to do with a patient’s worldview, but instead be an invitation to an interlocutor to offer praise or comfort. The nature of language is exchange, not cognitive ‘information’. Moreover, Beck’s explanation for the statements of his depressives is hopelessly tautological. It is definitional of melancholia that the subject experiences subjective misery, and, in general, that he or she says unkind things about self, world or future. One of Molière’s doctors, when asked how it is that opium causes sleep, says that it is due to the ‘sleep-inducing faculties’. Like the good doctor (and like psychometricians), Beck attributes depression to the depression-inducing faculties. Of course, such answers belong in comedy.”⁸

 

III: MARRIAGE AND SEXUAL IDENTITIES

 

Isn’t marriage the example of enjoyment-in-language par excellence? To refer to my partner to a third person as “my husband/wife” brings a different kind of enjoyment than if I were to refer to them as “my boyfriend/girlfriend”. Even the social effects are different: imagine a woman who tells her friends “My boyfriend is such a mess lately, he stopped doing chores altogether, got fired from his job, and all he does is come home, drink and watch TV all day”. Her friends will very likely be tempted to tell her to break up with him. Now, replace “my boyfriend” with “my husband” in the previous sentence and the probability that they will be unforgiving towards the man decreases.

In a lot of countries that legalized homosexual marriage, there has been a weird transition period in which they legalized “same-sex civil union which grands homosexual couples the exact same legal rights as heterosexual married couples”, but not marriage. A simplistic Freudian reading would invite us to believe that before we accept an uncomfortable truth about ourselves, we repress it, and the repressed content returning in encrypted or “symbolic” form, like a euphemism. Hence “civil union” being a euphemism for “marriage” insofar as the two had, in those countries, the exact same legal effect. But again, be careful, because the difference between the two is like coffee without cream vs. coffee without milk. There is simply something pleasant in calling your boyfriend “my husband” that has no legal effect despite how you refer to them to a third person in conversation, as well as it undoubtedly having an effect on the reactions of those other people, even if it’s an unconscious effect (as shown in the example of the previous paragraph). That’s why the gay rights movement is fully justified in legalizing not only civil union, but marriage altogether, for this pure symbolic effect. When marriage is also legalized on top of that civil union, they gain no new legal-practical rights, but they gain the right to refer to their boyfriend as “husband” to others while also avoiding annoying conversations as to why they are doing it.

This is the trick around identity – we aren’t only dealing with an ontology of the self (“Who am I?”) but also an ontology of relationships (“What are we?”). Facebook introduced very early into its release a multitude of relationship signifiers in order to more accurately and clearly (mis-)communicate your relationship status: single, married, in a relationship, in an open relationship, friends-with-benefits, it’s complicated, etc. From what source to what destination does the transfer of information even go in the difference between the signifiers “open/polyamorous relationship” and “friends with benefits”? Clearly not speaker -> receiver, but undoing onto itself from “inside-out” and “outside-in”, perhaps. There is and isn’t a difference between the two, simultaneously.

In my previous book “Love, Politics, Social Norms and Sex”, I advanced early on the hypothesis that the language of relationship signifiers isn’t only a way of describing reality but also a way of changing it, that is, it is not only that we change the words we use to talk about our relationships in order to more accurately reflect their reality, but the opposite as well: we change our real relationships in order to more effectively fit into those pre-existing labels. Perhaps I was not radical enough on this: all enjoyment was tied to symbolic enjoyment from the very start. If the Hegelian dialectic teaches us that defining oneself only makes sense when defining the other (“Who am I?” depends on “Who are you?”), then we should go a step further and say that defining a relationship between two people only makes sense when it implicitly defines a third, or the entire rest of the world (notice the implications here for the Oedipus complex as well). Just like Hegel taught us that a human would have no sense of self when stranded alone on an island, isolated from everyone else (because the very reason we use the word ‘I’ is to differentiate ourselves from ‘everyone else’, that is, the Other with the capital ‘O’), then maybe two people would not be able to relate to each other properly on a stranded island if there is no third person to communicate their relationship to. The question “What are we?” only makes sense when there is at least a third person who could intervene in the relationship. This may seem obvious since of course there wouldn’t be more types of relationships when there are only two people in the universe (and hence, only one relationship), but the implications are immense. The Hegelian dialectic shows how every identity hides its own opposite inscribed within it, this is what the determinate negation is about: “Who am I?” implicitly says who “Everyone else other than ‘I’ is”. Then, “Who are we?” is at the same time a definition of the entire universe other than we two, it was precisely a question about “everyone else”.

This may explain the function of weddings, when the couple redefines their relationship: weddings has been consistently, across cultures and time, a social phenomenon which was precisely about everyone else other than the married couple. At the wedding, everyone is invited, the relatives, the priest as a representative of the church, the lawyers as a representative of the state and the law. Perhaps the desire to “be” in a relationship is tied to the desire to tell everyone else that you are in one, and the desire to “be” married is tied to the desire to tell everyone else that you are married (as we see in weddings, when the state and the church must know, as well as the entire city perhaps, a wedding must necessarily be noisy, there must be fireworks, it must announce the new status of the relationship, everyone must know). The phrase “tied to” is incredibly important here, when two things are inseparable that does not mean that they are one and the same, but they are inseparable regardless. The enjoyment of being in a relationship of course does not limit itself to telling everyone else that you are in a relationship, but it is quite the opposite: I cannot enjoy some of the other pleasures that come when being in one if I don’t first tell everyone else in some sort of way (similarly with identity: the enjoyment of being whoever I claim to be is tied to the enjoyment of telling everyone else that identity in some sort of way, but it is not one and the same, I must first communicate it, and only after everyone registers it I can resume enjoying the other parts of being). Even in the case where the couple has to hide their relationship from the world for whatever reason, then the situation is the same but negated: I must first enjoy everyone else not knowing, not symbolically acknowledging the status of our relationship in order to be able to enjoy the other benefits of being in that relationship.

Again, we are not arguing over semantics, the semantics are arguing over us. This is the same trick with identity, even when I am deliberately identifying with some label such as to provoke a negative reaction from others, that could be the point as well, identity can be enjoyed even not in spite of but because others deny that I am whoever I claim to be.

One of the fundamental lessons of Lacanian psychoanalysis is that identities don’t simply describe behavior, they change behavior. I don’t first do stuff, and then say “I am” to most accurately describe that stuff, quite the opposite, I change how I act in order to be able to keep on saying that I am whoever I think I am. Consider the obsessional neurotic: “I am a model student, therefore, I must only get perfect grades, because good students always get perfect grades” – first I am, then I act in accordance to who I am. I don’t first think, therefore I am. Instead: I am, therefore I act, and I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think⁹.

Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of sexuality. Sexual activity is first and foremost dictated by sexual identity, not the other way around. I’m not this kind of person because I have sex in this kind of way, instead I have sex in order to be, to exist in a particularly determinate way. I am not a player because I have many one-night-stands, instead I have many one-night-stands in order to be a player, to call myself one. I am not a virgin because I don’t have sex, instead I abstain in order to remain “pure”. I’m not a certain kind of lover because of the relationships I have, instead I modify my relationships in order to be that kind of lover. This is why I say that enjoyment-in-language is not the only one, but it is primary. Of course, people enjoy sex in the sense of the physical rubbing of two bodies together, but what makes that physical touch more pleasant at a metaphysical, abstract level is being able to assert one’s identity beforehand. One doesn’t have sex because they like having sex, because it would not explain what separates that physical touch from masturbation or using sex toys or sex dolls. Instead, one enjoys that physical touch even more because they are a certain kind of person by virtue of having sex in a certain kind of way. Marriage is more than the act of telling other people I am married, but I can only enjoy those other parts of marriage if I first tell other people I am married. Language comes first.

This is how we must interpret Michel Foucault’s assertion that both homosexuality and heterosexuality were socially constructed in modernity. When Foucault says that no one was homosexual in pre-modernity, he does not say that people did not have sex with others of the same sex. Instead, he means that there was never a word to describe sexual identities. People did not refer to other people as straight or gay, instead “homosexuality” was an activity, something that someone does, but not something that someone was, and it was lumped in with other activities as “sodomy”. There weren’t any words for describing what people were depending on who they had sex with. But he wasn’t simply arguing over semantics, because when we use an identity like “homosexual” or “heterosexual”, we are engaging in a certain type of being with its own enjoyment. In other words, perhaps the very fact that I can call myself “heterosexual” to other people changes the very way in which I am attracted to people of the opposite sex, for example. The very fact that people did not have a word for “straight” or “heterosexual” in pre-modernity might imply that the very way they experienced that opposite-sex attraction was drastically different from today. When men had sex with other men, they did it for other reasons and they were attracted to other men in a different way than today, because they could not gain the enjoyment of calling themselves “gay”. This Lacanian reading of Foucault prioritizes language as the driving motor of sexuality. All of it was semiotics from the very start: signifying chains unfolding themselves infinitely. Sexual activity precedes sexual identity, and sexual difference precedes both. “I’m sexed, therefore I am”. Or, more precisely: I’m sexed, therefore I have or don’t have sex in a particular way, therefore I am (difference -> activity -> identity).

 

IV: WHAT IS A BOOK?

 

            We can have emotional attachments outside the identity of humans and onto the identity of objects too.

            If a chair is just a bunch of atoms arranged in the form of a chair, and a strict definition of ‘chair’ does not matter because it is just stupid semantics, then is a book just a bunch of atoms arranged in the form of a book?

            This does not explain the enjoyment-in-language of telling myself that I have read this number of books. What does it mean to have finished reading a book? Again, we meet the Sorites paradox: if I take a grain of sand out of a heap of sand, it always remains a heap, but if I do this infinitely, it will disappear. So, if I skip a few words or even 2-3 paragraphs of a book, everyone will say that I have finished the book. But what if I skip a few pages? 10 pages? An entire chapter? At which point am I no longer justified in saying I finished the book? How much % of a book do I need to read in order to say that I have read that book? If I read 75% of a book, can I say that I read that book? If it’s not enough, can I read 95% of that book and say that I read that book? Clearly, if I had read 99.9% of the book, everyone will say that I finished the book.

            Again, a naïve interpretation will miss the point and say that this is a stupid game of semantics that must be ignored, that we must first define what we mean by “book” and/or what we mean by “finishing one” / “having read one”, and only after we have clearer definitions of that we can answer those questions. But we aren’t speaking words here, the words are speaking humans. For me, it has always been around 75% for me to having “counted” a book as being “read” or “finished”, but I never asked myself where this 75% came from, nor what “counting a book as finished” even means. Again, just like with the word “I”, we already had enough signifiers to communicate all the possible ways in which you can read a book, but on top of all the ones, a surplus was added: the irrational and seemingly unnecessary concept of “counting a book as having it been read”.

            In a recent conversation with a friend, they told me that they record every book they read on goodreads.com – and created a reading challenge for themselves, that’s recorded on that website, to read a certain number of books per month. Immediately the ontological question arrives – “what is a book?”, or more precisely, “what counts as a book?”. What’s the point in reading a certain number of books? Why not a certain number of pages? Why not quantify it as the number of lessons learned, or the number of times I have applied that knowledge in my life? Why is a 1000-page book counted in the same way as a 40-page book? If I get so emotionally attached to this goal of reading 10 books per year, it is even possible for me to ‘cheat’ my way into it by switching the books I am interested in reading such as to read books as short as possible, just to have that enjoyment of ‘knowing’ that I’ve read these many books? At that point, it's not even necessary to brag to others about the numbers, there is a dopamine rush just from seeing the number of books under “Read” on that website, even if I’m the only one knowing that information. Maybe I’ll even rush through a book just to see it on that list, just to up my numbers. The signifier does not describe reality here, it controls it. In a way, it is the reversed of what Marx called commodity fetishism, a signifier that merely records reality but presents itself as controlling it (ex: we say that money “makes the world go round” when in fact it is labor that makes the world go round and money/capital simply records the surplus of that labor). Instead, here the signifier came to life. I must get recognized by the big Other, that invisible presence always watching me, that person that does not even exist and whom to I still have to prove my worth towards. ‘I read 3 books this month, therefore I am.’ Before we have finished defining what we “mean” by those words, those words have already finished defining us.

These psychological implications of the ways in which we use language are usually ignored by classical ontologies and epistemologies. This may have been harmless if it wasn’t for therapies like CBT borrowing their philosophy of a very literal interpretation of what “truth” and “reality” are. Quite paradoxically, these philosophies that cognitive therapies play with, by seeking to stay as anchored as possible in what they call “reality”, are as removed as possible from the ‘real fictions’ of symbolic/social reality. They are in the fiction of reality. But beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of fiction. The reality of fiction is the real, that ideal point of impossibility that must be assumed in order for us to even understand anything about reality, even if there is no representative of it in empirical experience:

 

“What science distils as “objective reality” is becoming more and more an abstract formal structure relying on complex scientific and experimental work. Does this mean, however, that scientific “objective reality” is just a subjective abstraction? Not at all, since it is here that one should mobilize the distinction between (experienced) reality and the Real. Alexandre Koyré pointed out how the wager of modern physics is to approach the real by means of the impossible: the scientific Real, articulated in letters and mathematical formulae, is “impossible” (also) in the sense that it refers to something we can never encounter in the reality within which we dwell. An elementary example: based on experiments, Newton calculated how fast, with how much acceleration, an object will move in free fall in an absolute vacuum, where there are no obstacles to slow down its movement; we, of course, never encounter such a pure situation in our reality, where tiny particles in the air always slow down the free fall, which is why a nail falls much faster than a feather, while in a vacuum the velocity of their fall would be identical. This is why, for modern science, we have to begin with an impossible-Real to account for the possible: we first have to imagine a pure situation in which stones and feathers fall with the same velocity, and only thereafter can we explain the velocity of actual objects falling as divergences or deviations due to empirical conditions.”¹⁰

 

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES:

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE

2: https://nosubject.com/Fetish/Fetishistic_disavowal#In_the_work_of_Slavoj_.C5.BDi.C5.BEek

3: Was Lacan a prophet on the hysterical question, then? Who would have predicted that half a century after Lacan’s lectures, the least sublime hysteric would go around asking random people what a woman is and never be satisfied?

4: Alenka Zupancic, Sexual Difference and Ontology (2012) - http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8948423.pdf

5: Michel Foucault, The Lost Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoOhhh4aJg

6: How difference precedes identity | The fiction of identity politics: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/06/how-difference-precedes-identity.html

7: Identity politics is an obsession over labels: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/06/identity-politics-is-obsession-over.html

8: David Ferraro, “The Founding of CBT, and Beck’s Foundational Errors: A Critique of CBT as Ideology (Part 2)”, in “Archives of a divided subject”, 2014; https://melbournelacanian.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/the-founding-of-cbt-and-becks-foundational-errors-a-critique-of-cbt-as-ideology-part-2/

9: Jacques Lacan, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious

10: Slavoj Zizek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, Introduction