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Uneasiness in culture, or negotiating the sublime distances towards the big Other

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Abstract

This paper engages Slavoj Žižek's thesis that people's integration into a dominant culture requires successfully negotiating certain “distances” towards what Jacques Lacan called the “big Other,” that is, a nonexistent locus that subtly guides symbolic rules, conventions, and mandates. My main goal here is to illustrate how Žižek's conceptualizations of distance and the big Other can further our geographical theorizations of culture, especially in terms of Sigmund Freud's notion of the “uneasiness in culture.” I explore Žižek's identification of three modes of distanciation towards the big Other—“inherent transgression”, “empty gesture,” and “fetishistic disavowal,” which abound in uneasiness because they are sublime, that is, demarcated by virtuality and unfathomability. I also discuss how the demise of the big Other's authority has produced new spaces of cultural uneasiness that can be usefully understood in terms of increased interactions between everyday microcultures. © 2017 The Author(s) Geography Compass

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Book synopsis: For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to escape. As a consequence, Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring his dominance as the philosopher of the epochal historical transition to modernity. In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Žižek argues that it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.
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Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep... I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. Every word has a weight here, in this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan "lamella" (which can vaguely be translated as "manlet," a condensation of "man" and "omelet"). Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called "partial object": a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present: "'All right', said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin', thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'" The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a "something" that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal - more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the "living dead" which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void - its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die (like the wound on the ill boy's stomach from Kafka's "A Country Doctor"): when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace.
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The case of Slovenia's erased minority populations (Izbrisani) is cited as one of the worst human rights abuses in contemporary Europe. While engaging debates on the nation-state and neoliberalism, this article discusses the struggles of Izbrisani youth from 1992 to the present day through a consideration of the spatial effects of erasure, including trauma to families forced apart and young people locked in place. Theoretical insights are drawn from Agamben's ideas about bare life, Rancière's politicization of aesthetics, and Žižek's notion of radical ethical acts, which respectively provide lenses for understanding Izbrisani youth privations, awakenings, and transformations.斯洛文尼亚抹除少数族裔人口 (Izbrisani) 的案例, 被引用作为当代欧洲最为严重的侵犯人权案例之一。本文在涉入有关国族国家及新自由主义的辩论的同时, 透过考量抹除的空间效应, 包括家人被迫分离的创伤以及被禁闭的青年, 探讨被抹除的青年自 1992 年至今的挣扎。本文引用阿冈本的 “裸命”、洪席耶的 “美学的政治化”, 以及齐泽克的 “激进伦理行为” 概念之理论洞见, 这些理论对于理解被抹除的青年的剥夺、觉醒与转变, 提供了各别的分析视野。El caso de las minorías desplazadas (Izbrisani) de Eslovenia se cita como uno de los peores abusos contra los derechos humanos en la Europa contemporánea. Al tiempo que se abocan debates sobre estado-nación y neoliberalismo, este artículo discute las luchas de la juventud Izbrisani, desde 1992 hasta el día de hoy, mediante una consideración de los efectos espaciales del desplazamiento, incluyendo los traumas infligidos a familias separadas a la fuerza y el encierro de gente joven en el lugar. Las bases teóricas provienen de las ideas de Agamben acerca de la vida al desnudo, la politización de la estética de Rancière y la noción de ŽiŽek de los actos éticos radicales, que respectivamente proveen lentes para entender las privaciones de la juventud Izbrisani, despertares y transformaciones.
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This article contributes to the geographical literature on reflexivity by asking what it means to take the researcher’s unconscious seriously in ethnographic research, and proposes psychoanalysis as a theoretical and methodological resource for researching the unconscious dimensions of fieldwork. I begin by describing three moments from my fieldwork with panhandlers and drug users that evince the operation of the unconscious. I then review psychoanalytic work in the social sciences where the researcher becomes the object of analysis and situate the debate on psychoanalytic methodology as an extension of earlier work on reflexivity by feminist geographers. I outline three methods for investigating the unconscious dimensions of fieldwork: analysis, supervision, and case consultation. Summarizing my experiments with these methods, I discuss: the discovery that key elements of my research were inextricably connected to my own anxieties as a researcher, how analysis of a dream from early in the fieldwork revealed phantasies rooted in childhood and a profoundly ambivalent relationship to my informants, and I propose a dialectical method for incorporating the revelations of psychoanalytic reflexivity into research. I conclude by discussing some of the possibilities and consequences of taking the unconscious dimensions of fieldwork seriously.
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Kate Crawford has recently suggested that the everyday lived experience of big data is one of “surveillant anxiety”: the fear that the personal information that individuals disclose about themselves and that others generate about them is intercepted and analyzed by the intelligence services within emergent praxes of pervasive dataveillance. I empirically assess this notion of “surveillant anxiety” in the context of spatial big data. Drawing on the results of a small-scale survey of understandings of location data collection and dissemination via mobile devices and their contextualization against other available data, I demonstrate that individuals are seemingly more concerned with transparency in data collection and in controlling flows of personal spatial information about themselves than they are with practices of data capture or their eventual use(s). Rather than a generalizable societal condition of “surveillant anxiety,” I argue that the realities of living in a (spatial) big data present are better characterized in terms of what I designate as “anxieties of control”: the desire to discern (be aware of) and direct (determine the disclosure of) personal spatial big data flows about oneself while feeling that any attempt at exerting such control is effectively futile.
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For many of us, doing psychoanalytic geography demands something akin to a leap of faith. Questioning this assumption, the main purpose of this paper is to shift the terms of discussion about doing psychoanalytic geography from the realm of faith to critique. Drawing on Joan Copjec’s, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994), I argue that much of the uncertainty surrounding the research practices of psychoanalytic geography results from inadequate understandings of two fundamental and interrelated psychoanalytic principles. First, causes and effects cannot occupy the same phenomenal terrain. Second, the taking place of society involves a split between appearance, that is, its observable positive facts and relations, and being, that is, its generative principle and the mode of its institution. According to Copjec, a syncopated relation between being and appearance is not only central to Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire; it is also a neglected axiom that distinguishes psychoanalytic from historicist accounts of the spatial and temporal configurations of society. But what is desire and how can we become, to use Copjec’s phrase, ‘literate in desire’? To answer this question, I explore the empirical example of the fictional comic character Alan Partridge (played by Steve Coogan) who exemplifies the taking place of desire as a self-hindering process in terms of the illusoriness, opacity, and duplicity of language.
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COPJEC: Yes, I agree; my response risks obscuring the differences I want to draw. The reason for this is that I did not begin at the beginning by asking the fundamental question: what questions are gender theory and psychoanalysis trying to answer? It turns out that these questions are not the same for both and a lot follows from this. Gender theory asks: how can the subject escape the hetero-sexual normativity of the system into which she is originally inserted or interpellated? The question is one of identity; it is assumed that “the symbolic order,” or the social order, or culture is patriarchal and/or hetero-sexist and one enters it through the imperative to recognize oneself in one of the roles or identities it prescribes. The idea is that society or culture sets limits on the subject and the problem is how these limits can be overcome. The answer is found in the fact that the prescribed roles and identities cannot be imposed once and for all, but have to be repeatedly performed and thus instantiated by the subject herself. But since no role or identity can be repeated in the same way twice – that is, because exact repetition is an impossibility – difference, and thus subversion, sneaks in.
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This paper explores the emotional geographies of State of the Heart and Larry's Kidney—two nonfiction narratives about medical tourism wherein American patients and their caregiver companions travel abroad for life-saving surgeries. The paper has two main goals: first, to illustrate the importance of emotional geographies in medical tourists' lived experiences of travel and tourism, as well as the giving and receiving of transnational health care and second, to generate empirical, theoretical, and methodological discussions between geographical, travel, tourism, and health studies on the relevance of emotional geographies. Medical tourists' experiences of travel and health care have been usually examined as spatially distinct rather than as entwined phenomena. We address the above goals by discussing how the narratives of traveling thousands of miles to a radically different socio-cultural milieu in order to receive essential medical care produce two interrelated emotional geographies: first, they demonstrate the existence of ‘emotional amplification’ (increase in the intensity of emotions) and ‘emotional extensivity’ (increase in the range of emotions) and second, they show how anxiety is underpinned by proximity to Otherness, uncertain boundaries, and isolated decision making. We conclude by briefly addressing how our examination of these narratives can be usefully expanded.
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Jacques Lacan coined the neologism ‘extimacy’ (extimité) in order to theorize two interrelated modes of psychical apprehension: first, how our most intimate feelings can be extremely strange and Other to us. Second, how our feelings can be radically externalized on to objects without losing their sincerity and intensity. Attending to the socio-spatial dimensions of extimacy, this paper provides insight into the importance of topology in Lacan's work. In so doing, the paper challenges the enduring doxa in geography that Lacanian theories ultimately devalue the intricacies and liveliness of space. To substantiate this claim, I explore the extimacy of the most popular vehicle accessory in the USA since the 1980s' ‘Baby on Board’ signs: the ‘ribbon magnet’. Specifically, I elaborate the extimate contours of two ribbon magnet slogans, ‘Half Of My Heart Is In Iraq’ and ‘I Support More Troops Than You’. Affirming a recent critique that social and cultural geographers have ‘tamed’ psychoanalysis, that is, shied away from working through psychoanalysis's allegedly unseemly conceptualizations of politics and subjectivity, this paper suggests that we have yet to catch up with some of psychoanalysis's most fundamental and valuable theorizations about space itself.
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The reconceptualization of 'culture' in the 'new cultural geography' has been important for turning attention to processes, politics and interrelationships with other 'spheres' of social life. But for all the important theoretical and empirical advances this reconceptualization has induced, cultural geography still reifies 'culture and assigns it an ontological and explanatory status. In this paper I argue that such a reification is a fallacy and that cultural geography would be better served by following the 'new cultural geography' to its logical conclusion: a recognition that there is no such (ontological) thing as culture. I argue instead for a focus on the material development of the idea (or ideology) of culture. Such a further reconceptualization of the object of study in cultural geography may be undertaken in many ways but, by way of example, in this paper I suggest only one: how the idea of culture functions within systems of production and reproduction in the contemporary city. Through this example and the discussion that precedes it, I show that the recognition that there is no such thing as culture allows us better to theorize the workings of power in systems of social reproduction.
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This paper takes up the attempt to theorize the relation between the subjectivity of the political actor and the ideological aura of the monumental site. It does this with reference to the spatial history of Strijdom Square in Pretoria, South Africa, a cultural precinct and monumental space which was the site of a series of brutal racist killings committed by the Square’s unrelated namesake, militant right-winger Barend Strydom. This troubling intersection of subjectivity, space and ideology represents something of an explanatory limit for spatio-discursive approaches, certainly in as much as they are ill-equipped to conceptualize the powerfully affective, bodily and fantasmatic qualities of monumental spaces. In contrast to such approaches I offer a psychoanalytically informed account which grapples with the individualized and imaginative identities of space, with space as itself a form of subjectivity. I do this so as understand the ideological aura of monuments as importantly linked to the ‘intersubjectivity’ of subject and personified space. I then turn to Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a theory able to explain a series of disturbing affects of monuments, such as those of ‘embodied absence’ and ‘disembodied presence’. These and similar affects of ‘ontological dissonance’ (such as unexplained instances of doubling or repetition) may function in an ideological manner, both so as to impose a ‘supernaturalism of power’, and to effect an uncanny form of interpellation.
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Cloverfield, the movie, was premiered on January 16 2008 and went on general release the day after. It was not the biggest or best movie of 2008, though it is to date the largest grossing January release ever – taking about 40millioninthefirstweekendalone,eventuallytaking40 million in the first weekend alone, eventually taking 170 million (easily recouping the $30 million spent on it). My interest in this movie is its undisguised re-presentation of some of the key visual and experiential tropes of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 9, 2001. The puzzle for me lies in two directions: first, why “repeat” 9/11, if only in fantasy; and, second, how is it that the trauma of 9/11 can be so accurately re-presented? One way I seek to think this through is by using Freud’s notion of the uncanny. The uncanny is a likely candidate for understanding the horror both of a monster flick such as Cloverfield, and also of many of the stories that were told about the attack on the World Trade Center. The problem is that uncanniness does not quite cover Cloverfield, nor indeed 9/11 after 9/11. So, I turn to Freud’s notion of the “compulsion to repeat,” to see if this has some purchase on the re-presentation of a trauma – as in Cloverfield’s case – in only a slightly modified form. The product of this investigation is to help us rethink the relationship between cities and affect, and how we view cities as sites where there are “intensities of feeling” (see Massey et al., 1999).
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Slavoj Žižek is one of the most interesting and important philosophers working today, known chiefly for his theoretical explorations of popular culture and contemporary politics. This book focuses on the generally neglected and often overshadowed philosophical core of Žižek’s work—an essential component in any true appreciation of this unique thinker’s accomplishment. His central concern, Žižek has proclaimed, is to use psychoanalysis (especially the teachings of Jacques Lacan) to redeploy the insights of late-modern German philosophy, in particular, the thought of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. By taking this avowal seriously, Adrian Johnston finally clarifies the philosophical project underlying Žižek’s efforts. His book charts the interlinked ontology and theory of subjectivity constructed by Žižek at the intersection of German idealism and Lacanian theory. Johnston also uses Žižek’s combination of philosophy and psychoanalysis to address two perennial philosophical problems: the relationship of mind and body, and the nature of human freedom. By bringing together the past two centuries of European philosophy, psychoanalytic metapsychology, and cutting-edge work in the natural sciences, Johnston develops a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity—in short, an account of how more-than-material forms of subjectivity can emerge from a corporeal being. His work shows how an engagement with Žižek’s philosophy can produce compelling answers to today’s most vexing and urgent questions as inherited from the history of ideas.
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This book brings together two of the most influential thinkers in critical theory. By unmasking reality as contingent symbolic fiction, the authors argue, Foucauldian criticism has only deconstructed the world in different ways; the point, however, is 'to recognize the Real in what appears to be mere symbolic fiction' (Žižek) and to change it.
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In a letter written in October 1818, Keats famously describes Wordsworth’s ‘poetical Character’ as an instance of the ‘egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone’. Drawing on the classical understanding of sublime with its connotations of grandeur, nobility and elevation (from Longinus’ first-century rhetorical treatise Peri Hypsous or, On the Sublime), but also with a sense of the word’s more recent association with ‘ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible’ Wordsworth emerges in Keats’s account as a singular and formidable presence, the ‘strong precursor’ against whom the younger poet struggles to distinguish himself. Established as a key term in aesthetic debate in the early to mid eighteenth century, by the time Keats came to write his assessment of Wordsworth ‘sublime’ was routinely used to describe not only literary and artistic accomplishment but a range of extreme and often unsettling experiences: from observations of the grand and terrifying in nature (storms, volcanoes and alpine landscapes being the most popular examples) to descriptions of the power and majesty of the divine. As popularized in the early to mid eighteenth century by influential literary and cultural critics such as John Dennis, Joseph Addison, Lord Shaftesbury and Edmund Burke, and also in ambitious cosmographical poems by James Thomson and Mark Akenside, by the end of the 1790s the discourse of the sublime was in danger of becoming a hackneyed means to inflated ends. Where once Milton - for most eighteenth-century writers the poet of the sublime - had sought to ‘raise a secret ferment in the mind of the reader, and to work, with violence, upon his passions’, now poets - seeking to indulge bourgeois fantasies of ownership and command - provided readers with unintentionally bathetic descriptions of rugged and notable views.
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