What is the Social?

ABSTRACT

Taking up the often referred to concept of interpellation in psychoanalysts’ ongoing discussions about the social, the author explores the ways in which the concept as it was elaborated in the work of Louis Althusser in relationship to the State, governing institutions, and capitalism may now need further exploration. Arguing that interpellation implies a technology of mediation, for Althusser, the cinematic apparatus, the author asks how digital media/technologies and algorithmic processes are presently mediating the subject in the current condition of the State, governance, and capitalism. Concluding that the unconscious is socially mediated, and as such is presently adrift in the social where it no longer is simply given over for its administration to the family or the other governing institutions of the State, the author draws out the implications for psychoanalysis including its present concern about climate change, systemic racism, violence, and the ongoing pandemic.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Kelly Merklin for her responses to an earlier draft of this paper and Stephen Hartman for his invaluable editorial comments for all following drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ It should be noted that the psychoanalytic theory most taken up in critical social theories was Lacanian-informed theory, while there was little if any reference to what was practiced or theorized in psychoanalytic institutes at the time. Disciplinary boundaries had strongly limited fuller intellectual discussions, as they still do.

² I am referring here to American academic sociologists. There are of course exceptions, among them some qualitative sociologists and theorists, who, like me, have drawn on critical theories, including Marxist, feminist, queer theories, and science studies.

³ Harris also refers to “intersectionality” in addressing race, gender, sexuality, and more. I have not emphasized it here because the concept is often (mis)taken to be a matter of addressing oppression or exploitation by adding identities to the formation of the Subject, while intersectionality points more to the complexities of these identities, precisely to the different often conflicting relations of various populations to State, governance, and capitalist economy (Harris, 374; Spade, 2013). Furthermore, intersectionality can make the boundaries of various identities seem too rigid, the various identities as givens, when it is the way in which populations are differently and variously assembled in terms of what I will be discussing as the mediation of the subject that I am proposing is now most relevant to understanding the social.

⁴ Hong (2012) argues that after 2008, with the intensification of the speculative mode of finance capitalism, not only do populations, mostly those of color but not exclusively, continue to be surplus laborers unemployable and cheapening the cost of labor but they also now are “existentially surplus” as to matters of life and death. These populations are not surplus to production but to the speculation and circulation of finance capitalism.

⁵ There is much discussion about those populations that have been excluded from the very definition of humanity, questioning whether their exclusion is rather an inclusion that serves to define the human. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, for example, refers to the “plasticity” of Blackness in being ascribed to whatever inhumanity is necessary to define humanness. As a result, there is among some critical theorists a distancing from seeking inclusion altogether (2020).

⁶ Hansen drawing on Didier Anzieu, among other psychoanalysts and philosophers, discusses the body-schema in relationship to the skin suggesting that the skin is dynamic; it touches itself and in touching itself there is a gap of time between touching and being touched, such that the skin has a temporal dynamism, opening the body-schema to different technological arrangements of time/space and related sensibilities – a capacity that Hansen refers to as the skin’s “originary technicity” (ix). Given the discussion of Fanon that follows, the failure in psychoanalytic theories to take into account the Black body or bodies other than White bodies most likely male bodies, is noteworthy and challenging. Until recently, media studies scholarship also addressed the body as unmarked.

⁷ Kara Keeling points out that Fanon recognized the phenomena explored in Black Skin, White Masks as “a cinematic phenomenon” (Keeling, 2007, p. 72.) Keeling is pointing to Fanon’s closing of Chapter Five of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Fact of Blackness,” where he comments: “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim” (Fanon,1952/1968, p. 140). Keeling notes that the interval of which Fanon speaks points to the delay or deferral of becoming for the Black man, a waiting. But the interval, the waiting, also points to a sense of possibility, of potential, as Fanon suggests in those ending sentences of Chapter Five: “I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit” (p. 140).

⁸ Silverman does not make explicit that rethinking the screen also is a revision of what she as well as other film theorists had called “the dominant narrative of cinema,” which they treated as the oedipal narrative of a heroic (male) protagonist individuating by surviving obstacles, marked as feminine.

⁹ Beyond the Lacanian abstraction of the real and the material into the imaginary/symbolic, we might consider that the gaze, or what Lacan referred to as “that ‘unapprehensible’ agency through which we are ratified or negated as spectacle,” like the phallus, stands in for the State – its Whiteness and cisheteronormativity, its presumption of the use of violence, more real and material than imaginary.

¹⁰ Stephen Hartman’s discussion of what he refers to as the “ultra-psychic” is an exception. Hartman distinguishes the ultra-psychic from what is commonly known as intersubjectivity as he explores social media communication where “contact is being made among multiple registers involving different cultural codes and dissonant temporalities,” such that “excess is a virtual and inescapable condition of reality” (2019) all of reality. Taking the individual and collective registers to “mish and mash,” as Hartman does, is very different not only from most takes on the intersubjective but also on most descriptions of the dialectic of the individual, psychological sphere, and the social.

¹¹ Even those psychoanalysts, who are concerned with the social, and who now more insistently ask about psychoanalysis in the community rather than focusing only on the individual, nevertheless, have not fully recognized the way structure now refers to the measures of populations, algorithmic processing in relationship to surveillance and criminalization often profoundly in effect when what is meant by community are specific populations, often BIPOC populations, populations marked by Blackness, including immigrant populations. Nowhere perhaps is the subject-algorithmic-assemblage more engaged with the real and the material capacities for life and death, although measures are affecting all other populations, albeit differently.

¹² Karen Barad uses the term intra-action, drawing on her understanding of quantum physics, especially the work of Niels Bohr. Following his take on measurement’s alternative constitution of particle and wave, Barad argues that all phenomena are of an intra-action between measure and the measured, where measure, matter, and meaning are inextricable. As she puts it: “Measurements are world-making: matter and meaning do not preexist, but rather are co-constituted via measurement intra-actions” (2012b, p. 6). She argues further that “Measurement is a form of touching,” suggesting that the quantum field is active with aliveness such that in the intra-action of measurement there is touching that brings about changes in the active field; measure produces a changed field (2012a, p. 208). That this idea of measure has become central to most current critical social theories occurs, I would propose, alongside an increasing awareness of the way the digital is employed to keep measuring ongoing, often without enough sense of what Barad calls “responsibility” for the entanglements that measure constitutes.

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Patricia Ticineto Clough

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ph.D., L.P., is Professor emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College (CUNY). Among her publications are The User Unconscious, On Affect, Media and Measure (2018); Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought (1994). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), and with Craig Willse, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011) She is faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy where she supervises also serves on the Training Committee, the Curriculum Committee, and the Task Force on Diversity. She is in private practice in NYC.