I Lacan Quit Any Time I Want

What exactly is Lacan’s idea of the Other? A short and surprisingly faithful gloss of the concept might be that the Other is absolutely everything. The Other affects subjectivity and the properties of language. For example, words can only be defined through other words, each in turn only definable through still more words, ad infinitum. This is what Lacan calls “the metonymy of speech,” yet the ultimate consequence is a radical division and subjectivity of virtually any concept that is verbalized or written (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 188). Even more importantly, the Other is the vehicle, locus, and meaning of the unconscious. As Lacan writes, the unconscious is “that which is inside the subject, but which can be realized only outside.” (147). Of course, the Other is also essential to a Lacanian understanding of drives, since “transference [is] no more than the concept of repetition itself.” (129). Furthermore, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other” and there is a “handing back of truth into the hands of the Other.” (115, 36). Today’s episode of Dr. Phil—like most episodes—seemed to contain a vast amount of Otherness, though latent. The show introduced America to two “pill popping” twins, Yvette and Yvonne. Early on, it was clear how each subject “realized” herself in the opposite twin, trying to get out and pull free (188). This is not so simple in a Lacanian universe, where every subject is divided and significant only through outside forces. This is quite evident in the fact that, according to Dr. Phil, the twins “enable each other” which we might more usefully read as enabling each Other. It is not simply their identity as sisters that requires an appreciation of the Other to be fully understood, but rather the entire circular logic of addiction. As Dr. Phil explained to either Yvonne or Yvette—both were so high on Xanax, it’s hard to tell the difference—such behavior is entirely “outside the limits of acceptability.” However, one questions to what extent that alone is a problem. Would it be okay to be a drug addict if everyone saw such behavior as acceptable? Anyone who says “yes” should read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, paying close attention to the passages on “soma,” the wonder drug of the future that makes everyone feel great with no apparent negative side effects. A Lacanian, though, would still see the potential dangers in such a drug, and a society that accepts it, since it represents an act of uninhibited surrender to the Other, comprehensively ingesting part of which must remain outside. Instead, the morality and safety of the act itself has little to do with societal values or conventions. It is precisely through the twins’ intentional internalization of such outward unacceptability that their identity, moral culpability, consciousness, and drives are formed—regardless of any moral or empirical absolutes. While Dr. Phil seems to criticize the drug use because of the “side effects” on the children, physical and mental states, and so on, Lacan point to the drug abuse as the effect of the twins’ untenable, ill conceived Others. Thus, while Dr. Phil suggests: “you need to create order, standards,” Lacan would much more likely find that it is the very social, economic, political, and psychic order which, through the standards of the Other, has forced the two to seek out such an unhealthy, precarious existence. If it is clear that the Other reveals a deep and powerful aspect of the sisters’s relationships toward each other, larger societal mores, and their drugs of choice, it should also be unmistakable that the Other is governing many more relationships in this situation. For one, I find it difficult to find drug use blameworthy through the rational of moral absolutism. Foucault, for example, called an LSD trip in Death Valley National Park the greatest experience of his life. For each religion-based system of morality that condemns such chemicals one could no doubt find an equal number of traditions that condone, or encourage the behavior. In relativist terms, however, it is precisely through the mechanism of the other that such behavior is portrayed as damaging. For example, Dr. Phil often reminded one of the Y sisters that “your husband drove high: two people are dead!” Still more frequently Dr. Phil, or one of the more conventionally well-behaved family members would says something like “drug addicts cannot raise children properly” or “this is not the right way to raise children.” It is impossible to point directly at the twins’ drug use and say, “look, look what it’s doing to you!” The other effectively converts such criticism into the positive building blocks of drives, identities, and interpersonal or communicative relationships. Similarly, one cannot point to a perfect way to raise children, but it is much more easy—in fact, one could say it is even Dr. Phil’s ultimate goal—to show the world exactly how not to handle kids, so as to inspire Others positively. However, most of this analysis has focused on how the other “can be realized only outside” of the subject, though it is equally true that it is “inside the subject.” (147) Therefore, one must question exactly how drug and child abuse are present in Dr. Phil’s personal psyche, and, of course, one’s own. The Other also blurs the line between who and what is at stake to the point that, when Dr. Phil brought back the usual refrain that “I’m doing this for the kids...obviously” it was, in all actuality, far from obvious that he wasn’t doing it for himself, the audience, or more abstractly all non-children anywhere since, of course, one would be hard pressed to find a 7 year old on Xanax. It is in this way that, from a psychoanalytic point of view, common sense, all of Dr. Phil’s suggestions, and even trips to qualified detox centers are all useless unless the analyst can help the patients in “the reopening of the shutter” to reveal that which has been there in the unconsciousness of the actor from the very beginning, without being fully known (131, 130).

(Ben)Jamin' with Dr. Phil: part 2?

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin asserts that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” (Illuminations 220). Benjamin goes further, pointing out that reproduction through mechanical processes also removes itself from the original and places the subsequent copies “into situations which would be out of reach for the original.” (Ibid). In the case of Dr. Phil episodes, this is particularly true. Imagine a guest sitting down and watching the show they appeared on during a repeat, a year or so later. If symptoms and psychoses have intensified, it is easy to see how the patient would feel manipulated, abandoned, and like a failure. If the condition originally complained of has improved, it is likewise easy to comprehend how a repeat could retrigger or reshape a latent disorder. This is, of course, not exactly replicated when an average viewer watches a repeat, or a first-run example of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin is adamant, however, that this is as true for a spectator as it is for a participant. It is what he calls the “aura” withering, becoming alienated, and losing its uniqueness (222). While this idea has comprehensive implications for all arts and communicative media, Benjamin is focusing on film. Just as film loses ritualistic value and the ability to interact with an audience, Dr. Phil’s program—as compared to a heretofore non-existent live theatre version of Dr. Phil—is embroiled in difficulties since Dr. Phil is psychoanalyzing and performing, not for real live people, but to a camera. The audience, as Benjamin points out, is put in the position of the critic, identifying with the unseen cameraman, seeing Dr. Phil only through his mechanical, impersonal eyes (228). While Dr. Phil claims that his show aims to help viewers at home (particularly children) as much as he tries to help guests, this is of course impossible in a true psychoanalytical sense. Dr. Phil has the most powerful and oppressive bodyguard conceivable in the camera, taking away the audience’s freedom and preventing two-way communication. Benjamin describes a consequence by positing that “the aura that envelops the actor disappears, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.” (229). The mechanical reproduction inherent in the television industry seems to analogously extinguish the aura to the person, the real humanness, of Dr. Phil. What is left? According to Benjamin it is the “spell of the personality” and “the phony spell of a commodity.” (231). The difference between a person and a star has nothing to do with their ability to communicate artistically and everything to do with whether or not they are being filmed. Film’s salvation is that it changes the methods of participation in a way that has positive, as well as negative, effects. It can be personal in a new, mechanical way in the sense that it is perhaps better adapted than any artistic medium to “mobilize the masses.” (240). If the Dr. Phil show is unsuccessful, then, it may have less to do with the capabilities and disabilities that follow the camera, and more to do with the limits of psychoanalysis. Unless one is speaking of a mass psychosis, a public and communal therapy is useless by its very nature. Benjamin ends his essay with a rather curious epilogue. Thinking of the essay as a quarreling over semantics or an arcane argument about aesthetics is shown to be completely false. In fact, as Benjamin makes clear, what is at stakes is far more serious: fascism, modern society, and war. Benjamin (a Marxist, of course) has a simple solution: “politicizing art.” (242). Dr. Phil’s politics are about as personal and overt as is his contact with the television audience. Following Benjamin’s model, Dr. Phil’s vague and cautious political aesthetic—“children are important!” and “craziness is bad!”—is the perfect fodder for a war-mongering fascist. The only question remaining is whether the aggressive Fascist of the future is today’s Dr. Phil or the viewers of his enduring repeats.

The Myth of Sisyphil

Tonight’s episode of Dr. Phil brought us back to an episode that first aired 3 or 4 weeks ago. Using the unique medium of the Dr. Phlashback we can refamiliarize ourselves with the episode: “Ken’s got enough money for fancy cars, cruises, and air hockey machines and I’m on welfare” “Keri makes the kids afraid to come visit and lies to the police” “He hits them” “She’s on drugs” “Well, I’m just gonna sit back and let ya’ll work this out.” Apparently Dr. Phil’s strategy didn’t work the first time, but this most recent encounter was equally hostile and ineffective. Dr. Phil summoned all his reproductive futurist gusto and teleological bourgeois might to reminded Ken and Keri that he wanted to “restore order” and “come down on the side of the kids.” Numerous times the bickering between Ken and Keri (with wife and boyfriend respectively) got to the point that Dr. Phil just stopped. Resuming, he always called their interactions “infantile” (which we’ve already discussed elsewhere in some detail) and “absurd.” This should immediately bring to mind Camus’s famous concept of the Absurd, especially since it is best expressed in the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” where he uses the example of the mythical Greek who, as punishment for his wily and deceitful feats, had to push a huge bolder up a hill daily, to watch it roll back down and start over again. Here, there seems to be a little of Sisyphus in syndication. The question is, then, does Dr. Phil’s interpretation of the absurd have anything to do with Camus’s Absurd, and is there, indeed, anything absurd or Absurd about the situation at hand? First, it should be noted, that to Dr. Phil and many laypeople, absurdity is a bad thing, equated strongly with misery, unfairness, and weirdness. To Camus, though, Absurdity is a very normal, ethical, and happy idea. He famously writes: “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” because “happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness.” The core elements of Sisyphus’s (and Camus’s) Absurdity do not seem absurd when viewed through the lens of Dr. Phil and those like him because they do not speak of, or with, the same Absurdity. To Camus, coming face to face with the Absurd is becoming “convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human” whereas to Dr. Phil it might be something like: ceasing to be human (and instead infants, animals, monsters, et cetera). The absurd hero looks at the world and, especially at the height of its absurdity, thinks: “all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems…neither sterile nor futile.” To Dr. Phil (who is not, like Sisyphus, the “wisest and most prudent of mortals) to think of life without order, end, and meaning is a tragic punishment. Thus, we might even say that Dr. Phil does not meet the first criterion of the Absurd hero, that of consciousness. We can say of Sisyphus, but not Dr. Phil: he “knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.” For Dr. Phil—and by extension Ken, Keri, and the whole gang—the Absurd epiphany has not been reached and cannot be built on until there is the realization that objective success is hopeless. The only hope, for Sisyphus and Phil alike, is not to put the rock down, but rather to keep going while consciously embracing, not maligning, the Absurdity inherent within the system. To try and “fix it” is worse than going against the natural order of things or defying the gods because it is to miss out on the possibility that “the lucidity that was to constitute…torture at the same time crowns…victory.” To Camus, life and its Absurdities are worth living again and again. For Dr. Phil, we must consider the possibility that his show is, in a very real way, the locus of many suicides, perhaps chiefly his own.