The theory that keeps getting me banned from theory websites

[Chris Walters]

This is my pet theory that I’ve been working on, and I wasn’t sure if it would be more accepted here than in the subreddits I regularly get banned from. If I were to title it, it would be “Yet Another Effort” after the chapter of Philosophy in the Bedroom. This is an updated version; I am always trying to refine and reconstruct it.
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Recently, Lacanian analysis has been forced to confront the question of autism to an extent it had not done during Lacan’s lifetime. As the “autistic spectrum” comes to be accepted as a fixture of modern society with attempts made to accommodate/assimilate neurodivergence in various settings, it becomes incumbent upon social-psychological frameworks to do the same, and the omission of autism increasingly takes on the appearance of a deliberate exclusion. In the work of Leon Brenner, which draws from such previous theorists as Laurent, Maleval, and the Leforts, a Lacanian approach to autism as a distinct structure is finally made accessible to the English-speaking world.

The theory revolves around a particular constitutive exclusion which defines autism: the foreclosure of the unary trait. In Freud and Lacan, the unary trait is very importantly a single trait which symbolizes pure difference, supports imaginary identification and signification, and even represents the subject in his or her entirety. Its radical exclusion (more radical, to be sure, than even the foreclosure of the Name of the Father) therefore has profound consequences, as well as implications for the entire edifice of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

While the theory world has generally responded positively to Brenner’s work, I suspect that this is more a result of the latter’s conservatism than of any interest in new ideas that might shake up the established order of things. Undoubtedly, if it is the case that a segment of the population (one that may even be increasing in size and proportion) has foreclosed the unary trait, then it is simply impossible any longer for us to speak categorically about “speaking beings” as being subject to three registers with imaginary identifications and so forth. Brenner himself rarely draws out the more interesting implications of his theory, generally preferring a neurotic-passing model of autism in which “development” is measured by the ability to pass as neurotypical, for example through the establishment of complex autistic objects related to a synthetic, intellectually constituted Other. Nonetheless, the rather obvious conclusion to draw is that if the work of these autism theorists is correct, then it is simply no longer possible to be Lacanian in the way one might have been even a decade or two ago.

It might be said that as the “lowest stratum” of the Lacanian nosological table, autistics cannot stir, cannot raise themselves up without “the whole superincumbent strata” of Lacanian theory being thrown into the air. This structural similarity between the autistic and the proletariat interests me and takes on a number of forms, but I ultimately think the autistic is a result of the exact same process of radical deterritorialization which Marx views as constitutive of the proletariat. The proletariat, that is to say, tends toward autism, while the autistic may find a great deal of affinity with the working class “mode of being”, of jouissance, speech, social organization, and utter disinterest in bourgeois norms (including such recent developments as gender theory, identity politics—which clearly relies on the installment or real unary trait or else some synthetic, ersatz substitute—and what is generally referred to broadly as “postmodernism”). The “structural similarity” is also a kind of identity, in this case of a psychological class and a social-economic category.

Deleuzians are fond of counterposing the psychotic to the neurotic as the model for any revolutionary agent, preferring nomadic and de-individualized subjectivities such as one might find in the lumpenproletariat and corners of the petty bourgeoisie to any kind of organized, disciplined proletariat for-itself. Their model is based on the old Lacanian theory and has been fundamentally re-grounded or sublated by the work of Brenner, although this news has still not permeated the gates of the bourgeois university system, organized as it is on a fundamentally petty bourgeois, guild basis replete with lines of descent, intellectual genealogies, and group identities which admit of very little deviation from pre-established norms and ideas. The conditions of life for the academic, even the “struggling, proletarianized” adjunct and so on, simply predispose him or her to a conservative attempt to turn back or at least to hold steady the wheel of history.

The autistic has now got to be viewed as the real end of “deterritorialization”, not as the “becoming” of the body without organs (ever a horizon), but as the actual body without organs which represents the self-negation of bourgeois society as a whole (its death drive), and as the special and essential product of modern industry, the end of the line so far as our own particular historical and social-material juncture is concerned. Far from being a “more radical” advancement of or from Marx, Deleuze simply did not go as far as Marx did; Deleuze mistook the stem for the root. This is not surprising, because the recognition by the middle class of the proletariat is in most cases hampered by the active repression of the same, the Othering of the proletariat which can also be discovered in society’s relation to the autistic individual.

Identifications based ultimately on the unary trait are so integral to the composition of the petty bourgeois that he sees its extinction as a literal death. Quarrels about theories, about words, are for him an issue of survival—in the most direct sense. That is to say, we are not denying the fact that our words have consequences, only rejecting this “pure difference” which is in the last analysis simply the basis for a capital, the mark of private property. The whole institution of transgenderism originates in such identifications, although the phenomenon certainly spreads out in diverse forms from this point of origin. Such phenomena as a “gay identity” with a distinct, campy sensibility also rely on such identifications, and it is my contention that even the more recent conceptions of “queerness” also rely on the symbolization of pure difference. It is not so much that autistics cannot learn to “go along” with these things or to intellectually learn the rules that will elicit some kind of recognition from at least certain peers, but it is importantly the case that the autistic will never have the same relationships to these identities and to discourse that are taken for granted by others and which ultimately produce them so that the autistic can go along for the ride in the first place.

The middle class still thinks in terms of identity in a world where indigenous and Latino workers support Donald Trump. To this, they respond: “That’s internalized racism!”. They still haven’t figured out that the unary trait means nothing to the working class. Being Black, being gay, being this, that, or anything else, simply does not carry the same significance, does not impinge on him in the same way it does on neurotics.

The term “internalized” exercises a few neat functions. On the one hand, it sets up a kind of space for pure identity (or “pure difference”). By implication, it posits an “externalizing” Other to which is then attributed whatever is being discussed. It also sends a certain message to the person who is addressed by this “hail”. It says: you know very well that this isn’t how WE talk, these are not OUR views. None of this is persuasive to the autistic proletariat. It wants to know why!

No doubt, class consciousness entails the construction of a certain identity, of establishing a We. Moreover, as Marxists, we recognize a role for authority, for democratic centralism. But communists have historically taken care to patiently explain, rather than to lay commandments on workers by the aforementioned “hailing”. The class is composed of a million different races and sexualities and languages and various ways of categorizing people, and in its ascent, it practically transcends every such identification. By becoming the hegemonic “identity”, the proletariat negates and destroys the whole edifice of identity politics, of community, of identification.

Edelman positions “Queer” as the site of bourgeois society’s death drive, but he does not go far enough. By situating the death drive in the Queer, he gets things exactly backwards. The figure of the Queer is what is actually being destroyed by the autistic proletariat: a symbol of “pure difference”. Lacan uses the term “signifierness” to describe the unique status of the unary trait as straddling the imaginary and the symbolic and ultimately grounding both. Queerness represents exactly such a “signifierness” without signification, identity-ness (or pure difference) without identity—this, in any case, is the intent, the conscious aim and self-understanding of queerness.

The proletariat and the figure of the queer are irreconcilably opposed, as each mutually represents the other’s death: for the queer, the working class is “society”, “normalcy”, “reproductive futurism”. For the worker, the queer is doing nothing but reproducing bourgeois ideology, identification, or what is more commonly referred to as bullshit. By emptying itself of all relations to its real conditions (real homosexuality) in favor of pure identity-ness as such, pure difference, queer has simply become the purest and most perfect ideology, the perfect counterpoint to proletarian consciousness, and even the potential locus for a future fascist movement. Ultimately, we are speaking of the fundamental class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Of course, the queers react by explaining that the real target of their ire is the upper middle class with its “two and a half kids”, white picket fence, and so on and so forth. Nonetheless, as soon as the proletariat steps out of line, all of these theories are suddenly used to berate it for deviating from petty bourgeois sensibilities. Moreover, the ressentiment that colors even the intra-class dispute between the lower middle class/lumpen/academic “queers” and those “reproductive futurists” who no doubt represent on some level their own parents….is it so difficult to recognize the danger implicit in these populistic, middle class-based politics which are driven by jealousy (a crucial effect of the unary trait) and a need to “stand out”, to be recognized as special, as essentially aristocratic?

While I have focused on “queerness” throughout the last few paragraphs for the simple reason that it suggests itself as the perfect distillation, the final encapsulation of bourgeois ideology reduced to its most basic thrust, I would like before closing to return to a statement I made earlier in which I emphasized the singularity of the unary trait. This is because I would like to suggest “echolalia” as the (or at least an) autistic alternative to the unary trait. Echolalia is a way of relating which celebrates difference without making an institution of it, without ownership or repression (the worker is more concerned with surplus value than with surplus jouissance; he is the repressed and works in the unconscious, the labor process being all too immediate and real, made bearable only through mutual enjoyment, jokes, laughter, and obscenities). Finally, it is not jealous of identity, of the possibility of forming a new super-individual subject (the class conscious proletariat) and of actively transforming not only society but also itself. The proletariat is not afraid to abolish itself, while queerness has no such mechanism built into it: it exists primarily to prolong the existence of bourgeois society, which the autistic proletariat will sweep away.

Discussion

[Matan Levin]

Thanks for the thoughtful post. My concern is that idealizing the foreclosure of the unary trait does not simply negate “absolute difference” but rather disavows it from the Imaginary and Symbolic only to see it re-emerge in the Real as effects of our speech which surprise us and subvert what we have hitherto perceived as our identity, including our self-positing of the unconscious using formal classifications. I hope that made sense.

[Chris Walters]

I wanted to respond and recognize your comment, but this is definitely something I’ll have to chew on for a while. I don’t doubt, in general, that difference would return in the Real in various ways. To some extent, I think that’s an inevitable feature of action per se.

[Matan Levin]

You are correct, it is an inevitable feature of action per se, but my point is that once someone has made this explicit, has represented this inevitable failure of action to themselves, then the foreclosure of the unary trait can not but be perceived as a feature of the unary trait itself. I will be obnoxious and quote a French guy; Jacques Alain Miller, a successor of sorts to Lacan:

“Fundamentally, the fact that contingency exists means that we cannot even say that failing is the law of the real, but, according to Lacan’s enigmatic formula, that the real is lawless. If there was no contingency to belie the impossible, we would have law in the real. We do not even have that”.

Identity therefore shifts from something which always fails to that which the failure articulates, the careful observation of which is Lacan’s specialty, and he was therefore quickest to implicate himself and his practice in a deep sense with the disorientation and impotence which we see ascribed to political enemies, the confused, those who err. Ultimately for Lacan it is the non-dupe(who)-errs. We shouldn’t just point out mistakes others make, but also seek to make a practice of fully representing the truth which these mistakes articulate, which can not take place until the biggest mistake of them all is eagerly made, of eschewing instrumentality within our own discourse because we aim at exercising our faculty of the inimitable which contemporary forms of disavowal fail at initiating us into, hence the disdain which Zizek expresses at the image of a master(here meaning any subjectivity) speaking of authenticity.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Matan Levin. Reason: Added stuff
• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Matan Levin. Reason: A rephrase of my last sentence
• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Matan Levin. Reason: Added another final sentence

[Nathan Ybarra]

I don’t think I can grasp enough of this conversation to contribute to it as a whole but these three lines of yours stood out to me, Matan.

“…from something that always fails to that which the failure articulates”

“…seek to make a practice of fully representing the truth which these mistakes articulate”

And

“…the biggest mistake of them all, of eschewing instrumentally within our own discourse”

These lines immediately brought to mind for me

The Unconscious and the act of parapraxis/slips of the tongue- A failed articulation which articulates the truth. I was wondering if perhaps there’s more there that you could speak to or use to expand on your previous thoughts

I was also reminded of a line from a song called The Contours by Owen. Where the first verse is comprised of three lines

“Lies and vanity

My worst got the best of me

It appears that I’ve lost everything”

the second verse follows

“red wine and tangled teeth

I’m having a hard time putting words on things”

The instrumental then plays on without a third line, resulting in a palpable gap between second verse and the chorus. I love how this missing third line, this failed articulation, comes to perfectly articulate how “the failure of its representation is its positive condition”.

That is- Because he’s “having a hard time putting words on things”, he fails, he’s never able to write the third line. But it is this very failure, the absence of the third line itself that becomes the third line of the verse, insofar as it is missing, or unwritten.

[Matan Levin]

Thanks for the invitation to speak a bit more, The focus on the unconscious and parapraxes is astute and is indeed indicative of what I was trying to say, but I am much less sure than you about the nature of the unconscious. I’ll point out a statement that you said with certainty; the parapraxis is a failed articulation which articulates the truth. From what I can gather, it is completely indiscernible what a parapraxis “means,” the truth it articulates. The truth that it articulates is a slight modification than the gesture of silence in the third verse of The Countours. The silent verse is used, as you put it, to lend credibility to the previous verse, to its claim to represent something deeply non-representational, a moment within a drunken stupor. A parapraxis is different in that it represents a cut which cannot be accounted for, which simply opens up a false depth in which “The Contours” of infinity are falsely posited. It’s only at this stage that we can speak of disorientation or anxiety producing some sort of truth effect, insofar as intelligence is a symptom which covers up this gap introduced by an unaccountable surplus.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Matan Levin.

[Nathan Ybarra]

From what I can follow, I think we’re on the same page. I do take the unconscious to be primary, but I don’t believe the truth that it articulates is a Truth of Certainty. Like you said, its meaning is indiscernible. It is in this momentary lapsus that reveals what is in fact a fundamental Uncertainty, an encounter with the enigmatic otherness within our own discourse that dislodges our sense of control over speech and meaning. This is what I took you to be pointing out in regards to the effects of speech/subverting our perceived identity, as well as where you reference Zizek about the Master of Authenticity. How we’re not even master in our own house and covering over this traumatic kernel with sense/Intelligence/meaning. I take you to be emphasizing this moment prior to the reincorporation of any given blunder into intelligible meaning to produce a truth effect (like when a slip is accounted for and given a reason/explanation). The Dream’s Navel as it were in terms of Dream Work. This is the sort of truth I understood you to be talking about when you mentioned making “a practice of fully representing the truth that our mistakes articulate” Although, I could use more elaboration on what you mean by that statement. The “truth” I meant when characterizing parapraxis as “a failed articulation which articulates the truth” was referring to this more abyssal truth than a Substantive Truth. Although, I do see a reading of my failed articulation statement that would imply the same sort of “self positing of the unconscious using formal classifications” that I think you were criticizing.

[Matan Levin]

We are mostly on the same page, I will possibly frustrate you by doing a 180 spin from my earlier position with one disagreement: Once all the above has been articulated, then there is a newfound certainty in a subjective position which qualitatively alters and dismisses the previous metaspeculative “black holes” into, to steal and poorly paraphrase an idea from Fredric Jameson, new sensory regions of the body, saturated with what the subject experiences as semblances of non-authoritative information. What I had in mind with my previous comments was to emphasize that psychoanalysis concerns itself with new ways subjects talk about self-relating(i.e. emotion, sensation, expressivity, etc…), seeking mastery, and consequently failing but gaining an unexpected proficient manipulative prowess over something that had hitherto been considered non-productive

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Matan Levin. Reason: reworded

[Sean Mittelstaedt]

I am not totally sure I’ve kept up with you, Matan, but I thiiink I have…. Focusing in on a single phrase:

“idealizing the foreclosure of the unary trait”

My emphasis there. I have another question for Chris in light of Matan’s comment. Do you see the proletariat as autistic as more literal or more metaphorical. I took your original post as open to be taken either way. You imply that diagnosed autism is increasing (which I’m not entirely sure is true) leading me to think that you might be somewhat literal about this, but I could also read you as saying that the proletariat is simply behaving somewhat more like autistics do, in their relationship to language/signification. I find the latter, metaphorical reading to be more persuasive, which seems to allow more for interpreting in the modern proletariat a foreclosure of the unary trait without idealizing this process. I hope that makes sense. It resonates with me to think of the proles as culturally autistic in some sense, not as actually or diagnosably autistic.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Sean Mittelstaedt.

[Sean Mittelstaedt]

Fuck there is a lot in here, a lot I agree with too. You are barking up a fascinating tree. Why would you say you are getting banned from theory websites? I mean I could guess, but hearing from you would be preferable. I’m gonna be thinking on these ideas though. I gotta digest this a bit more, we should talk, but this is really thought provoking for me. I think that the type of queerness you talk about here is a lot like the experience I’ve had with self proclaimed anti-racists. I’ve been in circles with anti-fascists who are essentially nostalgic for the late 80s as the good old days when there were still Nazis around to smash in street brawls, and so they go around manifesting Nazis where there are none, finding a moral justification for their violent, cocaine-alcohol induced behavior through the excuse that so-and-so is a fence jumper cause he’s friends with one proud boy on fbook (or whatever).

We’ve all met that “queer” person who is holding on, similarly to the unary struggle with a heteronormative order which (to certain extent) no longer exists, or that feminist going to war with a patriarchy that (more or less) already died with the end of fordism. How that relates to your idea of the autistic proletariat vs. the neurotic bourgeoisie is that in this context the “queers” “anti-racists” and “feminists” haven’t gotten the memo that god (the unary trait) is dead and neoliberalism has killed him. The New Proletariat is already (not entirely, but significantly) post-racial, post-sexual, post-gender, so the rad-lib interventions are falling on deaf ears. The project of deconstructivism has been completed not by anti-capitalists but by capitalists, after all, it was Marx who said of capitalism that “all that is solid melts into air.” So what the deconstrucivist, post modern types, inasmuch as they were political actors, were raging against, was not capitalism, but the labor-capital compromise, in other words, social democracy.

With social democracy eroded, we can now turn to them and say, so this is what you wanted? Congrats, we have women in the workforce, only now they must be in the workforce, and for a fraction of the pay… and we are calling that progress? This is not to side with the old social democratic patriarchal order (which would be the position of conservatives if they were logically consistent at all) but to say that if political post-modernism was anything, it was little more than accelerationism. It is finally up to Marxists, communists, labor republicans — not as in the republican party, but as in the old Knights of Labor, a workerist philosophy I’m toying with resuscitating — constructivist, world builders, to pick up the pieces and forge a new world in the ashes of the old. This time I think we should build a new world without patriarchy, racism or heteronormativity, to be sure, but I’m simply not interested in fighting a war that is already won… by the capitalist enemies of the working class no less. “Fight the real enemy,” as the song goes.

The real enemy is the bourgeoisie, not the “white working class,” even when the functionaries of capitalism are pretending to be on your side, and even when the workers aren’t being perfect little agents of revolutionary struggle. Progressives have always been the enemies of Marxists and other working class radicals, we have to scan the progressive movement for the modern day corollaries to the old progressive eugenicists and literal, actual fascists. We have to look out for bureaucratic narcissists, and technocratic, perverse, neoliberal functionaries, who want to take power from us, and say they are doing it for our own benefit, or in the name of fighting racism, homophobia etc, etc. The progressive movement was crawling with these in the 20th century, and they are back with a vengeance in the 21st. The starting point for constructivism is the objective self-conception and self-development of the diverse modern proletariat, that project has to separate completely from the visible hand of the PMC, operating through various corporations NGOs, academia and the Democratic Party, ultimately in the interest of the corporations themselves.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Sean Mittelstaedt.
• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Sean Mittelstaedt.
• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Sean Mittelstaedt.

[Sean Mittelstaedt]

One note to add, in my experience, being a queer once was historically, a working class idea. It was all the gay misfits, which until they could conform, enabled by becoming protected by bourgeois law, comprised the entirety of the gay community: everyone was a political, radical queer, cast out from polite society, from both the elite boredoms and the working-middle class suburbs. During the famed age of the stonewall riots, there was no such thing as L.G.B.T.Q.I.A+, there was just a big “queer” melting pot of cast out sexual deviants, even if some of (mainly) the white males among them aspired to middle class respectability. Getting into the 80’s to be working class and “queer” meant to be one the gays who refused to assimilate to polite society — despite the increasing protections of bourgeois law — retaining a kind self-actualized, but not necessarily any less working class, identity, precisely against the conformism of many professional class gay white males to bourgeois moralities.

This just to say, the academic use of the term “queer” here strikes me as a case of elite capture. I haven’t read Edelman, for instance, but I know a Gen-Xer who used to identify as “queer” cause that meant you were a fighter, when he was growing up… but he no longer really identifies with that word because now it has come to mean, you’re a weirdo for the sake of being weird… you’re deletant, a Deluezian, or a shrill rad-lib… that you’re certainly not working class or lumpen, but an entitled upper middle class college kid. Back in the days of Queer Nation and ACT UP, most of these “queer” radicals were from working class families, (fist) fighting for survival, for the politics of living another day, as opposed to today, when we are consumed entirely by politics as spectacle. All that to say, queerness as an intellectual category for academics, I hate, but there is a scrappy, youthful, lumpen-proletariat history to the word, harkening back to stonewall and to the days of 80s teenage runaways, fleeing abusive homes and forming chosen families to fight for, that really has nothing to do with the words absorption into academia. Part of worker self-actualization, after all, is reclaiming our own history…. This is somewhat off topic, but I’m increasingly seeing it as very important to be clear that the project of awakening the new proletariat needs to be an alliance between the proletariat and the lumpen-proletariat… but that’s a longer discussion for another time.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Sean Mittelstaedt.
• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Sean Mittelstaedt.
• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by  Sean Mittelstaedt.

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