Mining the Lack; Desire, Delusion and the Necessary Impossibility of Connection

There is no meaning without some dark spot, without some forbidden/impenetrable domain into which we project fantasies, which guarantee our horizon of meaning.

-Slavoj Zizek

Let’s follow the story that every thing changed for the hominid line around four million years ago. That culture grew from this change, a change in physical form as we walked away from the Garden. We didn’t get kicked out. We walked out. We strode away, or a smatter of proto Homo forms did. Maybe not in search of food, but in search of meaning. As analyzed in the human line’s fossil record,[1] coupled with bipedalism is an incredible surge in the size of the cranium.[2] To compensate for an upright gesture, as a matter of nature, the pelvis had to respond to a tremendous change in gravitational and motor forces while also tending to an increasingly large fetal brain. The female pelvis broadened and flared to make room for new musculature, for new development. In order to survive the big exit strategy of birth, the fetal cranium is forced to respond to the tension between increasing neural pathways and the physical limits of the birth canal. One strategy for surviving and thriving, then, is for the species to come into this world nearly empty, armed with nothing but potential, threading the thin line of something from nothing. The human brain—the neural circuits and inherent structure—is nothing but potential; it is nothing waiting to happen. This is culture: open code that happened when we started walking upright—when we started to seek.

Since nothing is there in the void of the open code, the organism is induced to make something, to bridge the ever-developing/enveloping gap. The environment prompted by culture provides the stratum upon which this bridging occurs, the necessary suturing tied up in learning. Culture forges the outline of intuition. This is the paradox of human consciousness; in order to connect with the world—to connect with each other, to communicate across the gap—we develop language, writing, cultural assumptions, and ways of learning how to be that are founded upon an inherent nothingness.[3] Learning how to be always, necessarily, falls short—because there was nearly nothing there to begin with.

That this gap exists, that nothing exists, initiates the desire for connection. Desire for closing a gap that can never be closed. According to Jacques Lacan, and enumerated by Slavoj Zizek, this structural disconnect initiates a dialectic of desire, Zizek’s phantasmic hypertext[4]: the desire for an apparent consistency of self. Yet the self—that is, the subject—is structurally constituted by lack, by a gap. Zizek notes that “the subject’s division is not the division between one Self and another, between two contents, but the division between something and nothing, between the feature of identification and the void” (Plague 181). This structural gap constitutes an inner-reality formed in opposition to the unknowable void of the Real. Zizek explains Lacan’s Real as “the hard kernel that resists symbolization [the Real] coincides with its opposite, the so-called ‘inner’ or ‘psychic’ reality” (Grimace 60). This inner-reality, constructed in opposition to the hard kernel of the Real[5], instigates an impossible dream, or desire, to actually understand the kernel, to fill the gap with symbolic understanding. Though the desire for apparent consistency and knowledge is ignited, the fantasy set and inflamed, it can never be fully realized, or else desire and fantasy fall apart (and with them, the subject); the impossibility of realization is the condition of possibility for both desire and fantasy—the ever-present illusion is subjectivity at work. For Zizek, the self is not merely an empty void of multiple, mutable social masks. He carries the dialectic enacted by Lacan to its furthest conclusion; the subject is substantiated as void.[6]

To Lacan and Zizek’s basic, though excessively convoluted structures, I add that desire is primal for the human organism and is based on the need to connect with each other. More than any other animal, due to our biology and subsequent development—that is due to our structural lack—we need each other for survival; we need culture and social structures in order to survive physically as well as psychically as subjects carrying with us the traces of the void. This fans the flames of the painful paradox: we need each other and we can never really connect with each other. The closest we get to connection is to project our lack, our grappling awareness of gaps, on each other, and to navigate the disconnection, the prism of psychic projection; the inner gaze that is constituted from the outside.[7] The apparent freedom associated with this inner/outer structural involution is abstract, self-reflective thought. Once-removed and turning in on itself, abstract thought has allowed the human organism to expand beyond our physical limits (such as flight and digital images) while also exploring the infinite substantial void that is the self in the mirror—all in feigned attempts to fill in the lack.

What Zizek does not confront head on,[8] and which I would like to explore is the fundamental fact that Lacan’s theories come out of the ways in which people try to relate to and connect with other people (and related to this is, again, our utter inability to actually achieve this goal) and that this always-mutable psychological equilibrium is based on an unstable subject in relation to others[9]. For Lacan, the subject is constituted from the outside, from an external gaze; every perception is doubly inscribed by an internal awareness constructed from a removed awareness.[10] This awareness necessarily plays out on the social stage, in relation to other people and society. This constructs the impossibility of connection, propelling social relations as well as relations to/through our media. What is media--that is, the myriad forms of mediation--other than multiple failed attempts to contact each other? And following from this, our media, the mediators that are constituted by our desire to fill the gap, are inherently delusional. The outer world of the social subject is as a series of delusions, since the subject is constituted by a disconnect—we play out the dramas of our own creation at every turn, deceiving ourselves entirely. We set media in motion to do the same.

“The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw”

(DeLillo 4)

Let’s sit with the substances of emptiness and disconnection. The sitting however, must, by structural necessity, involve a movement towards filling in the gap. For an example of this, we can look towards Don DeLillo’s Point Omega. This novel in particular demonstrates a Lacanian and Zizekian postulate of the substance of void and the dialectic of desire. The whole novel opens up as a site for projection; it is in many ways delusional and self-referential, to the point of meaning nothing—which means it is pregnant with possibility, pregnant with pending potential for us to inject multiple, conflicting projections regarding what it “means”. Point Omega is nothing but images, imagos, projections, delusions, lack, gaping wholes (sic). Ripe with sites for delusional projections, it naturally follows that DeLillo opens and closes the novel with an anonymous male viewer’s experience of watching Douglas Gordon’s projected art piece, 24 Hour Psycho. Gordon’s work draws out the gaping holes inherent in filmic production, slowing the frames of the film so that the 109 minutes of Hitchcock’s Psycho stretch into the expanse of a 24-hour period (the fantasy of Gordon’s work is at the onset necessarily frustrated however, since this piece in a gallery will never actually be screened in its full 24-hour glory, but is always confined by the gallery’s open hours). This simultaneously undermines the appearance of consistency of film, highlighting the voids that are necessary for filmed (and projected as well as perceived) momentum. In the slowed down frames of the art piece, the anonymous man inoculates his own perceived meanings about “an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things” (DeLillo 4).[11] In the face of a perceived void, with the discomfort of the expanse of nothingness, the man cannot help but be compelled by a desire to fill the gap, to bring meaning to the void, to read meaning from the void. He returns to the piece over and over, searching for meaning, the inability of the gap’s closure compelling his desire to look. Eventually he discovers that he is actually waiting for something to happen—he is waiting for a woman to enter with whom he can connect through the medium of art in the public sphere of an art museum. The thing the subject wants is to see and be seen, the very things that can never happen, thus one becomes caught in desire, the desire to connect, as the man does in the screening room; “He wanted complete immersion, whatever that means. Then he realized what it means. He wanted the film to move even more slowly, requiring deeper involvement of eye and mind, always that, the thing he sees tunneling into the blood, into dense sensation, sharing consciousness with him” (DeLillo 115). We could even venture that, frustrated by the inability to be enveloped in the virtual medium, he transfers the desire for connection to the flesh of a human. The man’s experience of the art piece and his realization of his desire to connect to a woman are intertwined—in both the medium and the flesh object of his desire, he ultimately seeks an impossible connection.

Beyond the pure medium of the film/video piece, in both the original and Gordon’s appropriation, DeLillo’s narrative deployment of a series of projections relating to psychosis and the extremes of attached-detachment (within the content of the original Psycho) highlights projection as inherent in the communication tangle of the symbolic order, the psychic prism that mediates all experiences and ultimately prevents pure connection from ever being realized. [12] The way we come to know ourselves is through the external shells that we navigate the world with; our sense of self as subjects in the civilized, symbolic order is as lacking individuals. This is a world of myriad projections, deceptions, and delusions. The delusion that is the consistent self marks the Lacanian subject as the ever-present movement to close the black hole of the impenetrable domain, the very gap with which we feign at understanding. But, as Zizek notes, it is part and parcel of a universal principle that it is impossible to reach, that it by necessity contains a contradiction that keeps it from being fully realized: “the absolute certainty, that within the field of a universal Lie the ‘repressed’ truth will emerge in the guise of a particular event” (Plague 165). This necessary contingency ties back to fantasy, in a Lacan-via-Zizekian sense, as the illusion that completes, compels, and distorts all attempts at consistency; “The Lacanian formula of fantasy, $ <> a, the confrontation of the empty subject with the amorphous presence of the real…is what confronts this relationship with its antagonistic tension” (Grimace 55). The very thing we hold at bay (Lacan’s l’objet petite a, the little other) in order to constitute a sense-of-self surfaces in the presence of others and our responses. For instance, the response of not liking perceived character flaws in other people speaks mostly to the flaws we have ourselves that we consistently working to not see,[13] but which become highlighted in our projected perception. What we can’t directly see, the little a that gets in the way, we do everything we can to ignore; this particular presence of absence impacts us at every step. We will never see properly, because our entire vision is caught up in the external gaze, caught in webs of the symbolic, and we can only perceive each other and react to each other through this prism, this mal-aligned projector, dirty as it is by its symbolic nature.

The impossibility of connection is typified in all of DeLillo’s fictional relationships in Point Omega. We can break down each major relationship, between father and daughter, the daughter and the visitor, the visitor and the father, the anonymous man and the daughter; within each one is a desperate attempt at connection and the absolute impossibility of its realization—a tension that holds each relationship together, until one of the characters (the daughter, Jessie) suddenly disappears.[14] Death, that is the permanent absence of someone to whom we have negotiated an ordered a-connection, is traumatic for the fact that it surfaces in the heavy presence of absence the terror that there was no connection to begin with—the Real slides into view, and the subject has no choice but to fall apart at the seams in the face of the traumatic void; the illusion no longer holds, and a new illusion must be built anew from the pieces. With Jessie’s disappearance, Elster, a man comprised of words, becomes undone. The fundamental illusion of the makeshift reality he built for himself, one comprised of words, theories, and abstract concepts, is revealed, and Elster faces the harsh un-knowability of connection and the Real. He looses his ability to function in the physical and symbolic world. Magnifying his trauma, and possibly all of ours in the face of loss, is that Elster dreamed and conceived of the Great Void profoundly—he existed to put words to the unknown, and theorized an “extinction”; that is, he thought of nothing but death and the loss of consciousness. Thus, when faced with the profoundly terrifying void—that is, Jessie’s sudden disappearance—his grief takes on a pathetic ecstasy. As Zizek explains, pathetic ecstasy is the “forced actualization of the phantasmic kernel of my being in social reality itself [as] the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity (of my self-image)” (Plague 242). Had Elster not dreamed of it, put words consistently to the void in a conscious movement of externalized repression, his grief may have been less unraveling. What Elster constructed to understand, to keep at bay and repress through conceptualization, ultimately reared its monster head. And sent him to pieces.

“When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror”

(DeLillo 45)

In addition to the interpersonal connections, Point Omega also highlights the relationship between the characters and the landscape, and the psychic, subjective prism still at work. Scenes in a museum (the MOMA) bookend the novel, but the kernel of the plotline takes place in an un-locatable desert (it must, naturally, remain unknown). The interactions between Elster, Finley, and Jessie play out in the wide expanse of this desert landscape, a place of deep and expansive voids (DeLillo describes the void as “distances”) and therefore the locale is rife with projections. The desert provides Elster with tremendous expanse. Expanse initiates a desire to bring the void into symbolic order; it must be bridged, to be understood by the reader, the author, and the characters who populate the story. As a man of words—the non-matter par excellence of the symbolic order—Elster simply cannot exist in the desert without filling the terror of the void with words. Elster builds abstract theories about the “True Life” where humans no longer live in the void of self-consciousness, but fill the gap entirely and become reduced to absolute being (seemingly, this is realized by involution, by giving way to consciousness). Related to his theory of the “True Life” is the extinction of human consciousness, where we can become nothing but stones—heavy with a filled in lack—something akin to pure substance, unruffled by the crenulated lack and realized by a pure surrender to consciousness (the dialectic at play again).

DeLillo’s Elster dreams of the “True Life”, but he can only do so through words. He claims that “words were not necessary to one’s experience of True Life” (34), but according to Zizek, Lacan, words are necessary for some semblance of true life to even be dreamed about by a symbolically encrusted subject; for the fantasy of emptiness to even exist as such, it requires words to fill the gap and provide it with its phantasmic apparent wholeness.[15] Of course, Elster must come to terms with this when he actually faces the “True Life” revealed in Jessie’s disappearance, which is, again, why he looses words. DeLillo demonstrates Elster’s dissolution as a subject as his inability to continue working within the symbolic order. The creation of the symbolic inaugurates the void, so we can reverse Lacan’s subjective opening, Zizek’s radical reading of non-foreclosure, and state that along with the emergence of the subject comes the emergence of absence. Not just awareness of it, but actual absence as such. Because not only does the empty subject require the void, but the void requires the subject; the subject must remain as the symptom[16] that makes the void possible in the first place.

To take this one step further, the void, the radical emptiness of our synap-mapped electrobyte hyperreal void that emerges as technology and media requires us as the negative correlate, the inverse—the empty subject. And in the grossest perversion of all, we need technology in all of its rearing of the Real in order to hold our sense of selves together. Why do we even turn to media in the first place? Because we consistently seek a closing of the gap and tied into this, coupled with it intimately, is the desire to connect with another person, to people—to see, be seen, and to be a part of the conversation. Something that is, at the onset, impossible out of structural necessity and thus it remains as the propellant that provides, consistently and in myriad formations, remediations, premediations,[17] and meditations; meaning within the void. Least we forget, media and the outgrowth of technology are at their foundations communication systems.[18] The thrust of technology, which is certainly over-fed by capitalistic desires at this point, is to connect humans to humans via the symbolic order. Either individual to individual, self to self, or subject to civil society. At this point, our technology—our media—sustain our fantasy of connection; which means that we are simultaneously hyper aware of their utter inability to help us achieve that goal even if we unknowingly repress this flaw. This tragic flaw must remain, it must continue to promise us a deliverance and simultaneously, consistently fail; technology, and our media, are mirrored constructions of the aware subject. Zizek looks at ‘cyberspace’ as something that lacks lack (and he goes on to state that in all of its lacking lack, it contains something uncannily real for us), and in many ways I agree, however, what he misses is the way that ‘cyberspace’ is also a psychotic delusion,[19] that is it is modeled upon our perceptual, sensual, and psychotic faculties. These delusions are necessary in order for us to be normal, or normalized. Normal builds from the pathological. As Lacan emphasizes, normal is the pathological civilized, socialized. We need the thing that is meaning chained on meaning, that is self-referential, that seems to exclude us in order to know that we exist, or else we fall into the black hole of non-meaning, of non-subject-hood, and disappear.

Notes:

1 Lovejoy, Owen C. Natural History.

2 Maybe the reason why the Homo brain burgeoned is because we moved into the beyond, past the known world.

3 For instance, the Jewish Yahweh is the substantial void birthed from the head of an abstract alphabet.

4 This desire is an anxiety-based response to the depth and unfathomable trenches of Lacan’s Real…that which is unknowable and remains terrifying—this awareness remains oppressed by the apparent cohesion of the symbolic order, yet the repression comes from an intense desire to fill the void, because as Zizek states, “There is no reality with out its phantasmic support”, that is the fantasy of a filled in lack (Zizek, Plague 185).

5 Zizek moves back and forth between his own “real,” with a lower-case “r” as his interpretation of Lacan’s “Real”, and Lacan’s own Real, both with the uppercase “R”, to denote the ever-unknowable. In order to keep some consistency of terms here, I will appropriate their terms, and Real will either refer to Lacan directly or Lacan summarized by Zizek. Zizek’s real will also rear its head a few times, and this denotes my interpretation of Zizek. And, since the real is unknowable, it resists symbolization, so it doesn’t really matter.

6 Zizek sees that the postmodern obsession with absolute emptiness of meaning, the death of the author, the loss of Master, does not entail absolute freedom from ideology, but is actually ideology in its most pure, immediate, and therefore most dangerous form. What postmodern framing does is deny the substance of the lack; it denies the paradox inherent in the structure and thus becomes an all-consuming monster—a reminder of the real, and therefore absolutely terrifying. Zizek sees this as a tear in the symbolic order, one that might be bringing us to the end of history. I would say the tear remains necessary, however, and initiates our desire again, to suture the tear.

7 I am using Lacan’s Gaze here. See Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis “The Line and the Light” and “What is a Picture?”

8 Unless the Real strikes again, and in not confronting it head on, he cannot help but hash it out in some symbolically distorted and ever-present way.

9 Sherry Turkle iconizes the terror inherent in our disconnect, as she feigns at trying to establish the fantasy of a relatively recent Eden, when/where we were more psychologically sound and able to communicate directly with each other. This is a farce, an impossible dream, one who’s thrust and intention is understandable, given our nature. See Turkle, Sherry.

10 This is the basis for Lacan’s mirror stage. See Lacan, Ecrits.

11 Here, we can see McLuhan’s hot vs. cool media at play, as the black and white film, especially one void of sound, impels us to interact with it, to search for meaning; thus, 24 Hour Psycho exemplifies a cool medium—it doesn’t show us everything and so we see more in it. That Gordon takes a hot medium and transfers it into something akin to cool, that becomes ever-cooler as it is written into a novel, an even ‘cooler’ medium than a slowed down video projection of a film. See McLuhan Understanding Media.

12 I could almost go so far as stating that the central part of the novel, the part that takes place in the desert, is all told in the past tense as a first person recollection of Jim’s memories. Jim cannot come to terms with Jessie’s sudden disappearance, and so the whole novel is about Jim’s attempts to fill the gap; Jim is the one who frames the story with 24 Hour Psycho and the anonymous man’s experience of the piece as well as the man’s interaction with Jessie, to point us in the false direction that the man killed Jessie—but this is just Jim’s attempt to bring the terror of the real surfaced in the awareness of loss into the symbolic order, to make sense of something that never will actually make sense. It follows then, that Jim is the phantasmic projection of DeLillo.

13 These are Zizek’s “unknown knowns” and Lacan’s objet petite a. See Zizek “In Conversation”, as well as Lacan Ecrits 78.

14 Jessie does not die. She involutes on herself, a radically internally facing subject who lacks lack, she gets taken in by the void.

15 This is Zizek’s phantasmic hypertext.

16 In symptom, I am of course referring to Zizek’s symptom, as the contradiction that holds logic together—the structurally necessary paradox that unifies a principle. Zizek Plague 161.

17 The terms remeidations and premediations are taken from Grusin and Bolster’s books of the same name (though Premediation is Grusin’s alone.)

18 The term “technology” has roots in textile, or the weaving together of disparate elements, similar to a story—text. And what are stories and myths other than attempts at closing the gap through communicating symbolic fantasies? And what separates fantasy from delusion? (Etymology of technology comes from a private conversation I had with Barry Katz, February 2012).

19 I use delusion the way Lacan delineates psychoses; the psychotic speak the same language as us, but their language becomes entirely self-referential, and therefore becomes unhinged from the subjective frame—for Zizek this lacking lack is akin to information anorexia. See Lacan Freud’s Paper 31, and Zizek Plague 200.

Works Cited

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999. Print.

DeLillo, Don. Point Omega: a novel. New York: Scribner, 2010. Print.

Grusin, Richard A. Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. Basingstoke [England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books, 1979. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: a selection. New York: Norton, 1977. Print.

Lovejoy, Owen C. “The Natural History of Human Gait and Posture. Part 1. Spine and Pelvis.” Gait Posture. 21 (2005): 95-112. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994. Print.

Turkle, Sherry. “Connected, but Alone” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. Feb. 2012. Web. 17 Apr. 2012.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. [2. ed. London: Verso, 2009. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Grimmaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears.” October 58 (1991): 44-68. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. “In Conversation with Roy Eisenhart.” City Arts and Lecture. Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. 23 Apr. 2012. Lecture.

Works Consulted

Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj, Rex Butler, and Scott Stephens. Selected Writings. London: Continuum, 2005. Print.