3/13/22: Development and Desire
Number Nine
Welcome back! Been a while. I’m writing this post in Brooklyn, after a week in Mexico City, a few days in Los Angeles, and then a few days in Austin for Vibe Camp. And what a wild time Vibe Camp was, meeting the Twitterati in person! I enjoyed every “OMG YOU’RE [SUBSTACK] SNAV!” and every chance I got to go “OMG YOU’RE TWITTER GUY!!!” I was going to write this post on Vibe Camp and social phenomenology, but I ended up not doing it, a sort of failure, a missing two weeks of blogging, and I feel no guilt nor shame about it. All that’s left is to return, continue where I left off. But if you want to read my straightforward Vibe Camp impressions, I wrote them up here:
What I really want to do with Vibe Camp is jump off, to use it as a jumping-off point for the topics I really want to discuss in my post today. Here’s the tl;dr in a brief thread, you can stop reading if you feel satisfied with it, but my guess is that it’s too dense, you feel unsatisfied, etc, so here I am to unwrap this gift (of questionable value) for you:
On Developmental Narratives
Let’s jump off. My friend Rival Voices did a juxtaposition of a tweet about Kegan Stages and a tweet about vibe camp:
Now, I’ve written about Kegan Stages before, a long time ago, but today I want to ignore their content and instead focus on their form (form vs content, another topic I talked about before). What is the form of Kegan stages, or Kohlberg stages, or stage models in general? The most general version is the “Constructive Developmental Framework” which puts the idea right up and center: these stage models take the form of a developmental process or a process of maturation. The early stages are immature and childlike, later stages mature and adult.
I’ve written a few times before about Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which my book club finally dispensed with finished reading. This idea of developmental processes appears over and over throughout the text, specifically in the context of ethics and (un)belief. Taylor saw much of the draw of unbelief (read: atheism) as coming from a sort of ethics of “maturity”, in that faith seemed “childlike” while materialism is the proper “adult” perspective. I quote (p. 363-366):
[T]he success of science built on and helped to entrench in [many people] the sense that the Christian religion they were familiar with belonged to an earlier, more primitive or less mature form of understanding.
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A religious outlook may easily be painted as one which offers greater comfort, which shields us from the truth of an indifferent universe, which is now felt as a strong possibility within the modern cosmic imaginary. Religion is afraid to face the fact that we are alone in the universe, and without cosmic support. As children, we do indeed, find this hard to face, but growing up is becoming ready to look reality in the face.
Of course, this story will probably make little sense to someone who is deeply engaged in a life of prayer or meditation, or other serious spiritual discipline, because this involves in its own way growing beyond and letting go of more childish images of God. But if our faith has remained at the stage of the immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible. And if in addition, one has been convinced that manliness is the key virtue, then the appeal to go over can appear irresistible. The appeal of science for Mill was precisely that of “good downright hard logic, with a minimum of sentimentalism”; it enables you to “look facts in the face”.
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[T]he story that a convert to unbelief may tell, about being convinced to abandon religion by science, is in a sense really true. This person does see himself as abandoning one world view (“religion”) because another incompatible one (“science”) seemed more believable. But what made it in fact more believable was not “scientific” proofs; it is rather that one whole package: science, plus a picture of our epistemic-moral predicament in which science represents a mature facing of hard reality, beats out another package: religion, plus a rival picture of our epistemic-moral predicament in which religion, say, represents true humility, and many of the claims of science unwarranted arrogance. But the decisive consideration here was the reading of the moral predicament proposed by “science”, which struck home as true to the convert’s experience (of a faith which was still childish—and whose faith is not, to one or another degree?), rather than the actual findings of science. This is the sense in which what I’ve been calling moral considerations played a crucial role; not that the convert necessarily found the morality of “science” of itself more attractive—one can assume that in a sense the opposite was the case, where he bemoaned loss of faith—but that it offered a more convincing story about his moral/spiritual life.
The narrative of maturation and development repeats itself on a larger scale (p. 716, emphasis mine):
In virtually all pre-modern outlooks, the meaning of the repeated cycles of time was found outside of time, or in higher time or eternity. What is peculiar to the modern world is the rise of an outlook where the single reality giving meaning to the repeatable cycles is a narrative of human self-realization, variously understood as the story of Progress, or Reason and Freedom, or Civilization or Decency or Human Rights; or as the coming to maturity of a nation or culture. The routines of disciplined work over the years, even over lifetimes, the feats of invention, creation, innovation, nation-building, are given a larger meaning through their place in the bigger story. Let’s say I am a dedicated doctor, engineer, scientist, agronomer. My life is full of disciplined routines. But through these I am helping to build and sustain a civilization in which human well-being will be served as never before in history; and the perhaps small discoveries and innovations which I manage to make will hand on the same task to my successors at a slightly higher level of achievement. The meaning of these routines, what makes them really worth while, lies in this bigger picture, which extends across space but also across time.
This second quote contains the contrast I specifically wanted to point to: that “maturation” and development weren’t always fundamental narratives, but arose in contrast to earlier narratives of cyclical or higher time.
I see these “developmental” stories over and over again, especially in the realm of psychology. Any stage model is an obvious form of it, but some ideas like “emotional maturity” evoke this sort of ordering through development and “facing the facts” directly, as an unquestioned good. The question that lingers for me is, “why?”, or alternatively, “why is this what it means to be an adult, to be a Man?” This has a close relationship to question I’ve already touched on, “what does it mean to be a man?” but I now plan to unravel the causality and form of potential answers, rather than provide a positive answer. To do this, and go further than Taylor went, we need to take a little detour.
A Psychoanalytic Twist
J.A. Miller, Lacan’s successor, seems to cover the same ground as Taylor in his essay “A Fantasy”, but in a novel, psychoanalytic way. I want take a closer look at the connection between the two. You may find the following quote mysterious at first, but I promise I can help make sense of it. Miller writes (p. 5-6):
Agricultural civilization finds its bearings through nature, through the invariable cycle of seasons. Of course, there is a history of climate that some well-intentioned people are now reconstituting. But this history changes in no way the invariable cycle of seasons that gave its rhythm to agricultural civilization, so that, in fact, it was possible to find one’s bearings and one’s symbols in the seasons and the skies. The agricultural real is celestial; it is a friend of nature. With industry, with what has been called the industrial revolution, all that was washed away, little by little. The artifices were multiplied. And now we are forced to notice that the real is devouring nature, that it is being substituted for it and is proliferating. Here we have a second metaphor: the metaphor that substitutes the real for nature.
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So, my fantasy continued along these lines, with a question: if we are without a compass, as my friend Jorge said, does that mean we are without a discourse? Does that mean we are chaotic, schizophrenic, as Deleuze and Guattari, who were generously discussed this afternoon, proposed? And to begin with, are we really without any compass at all? Perhaps we have another compass.
There is a phrase of Lacan’s, which was cited twice yesterday and which formerly had served as my compass in the course I did with Éric Laurent on “The Other who does not exist and his Committee of Ethics.” It is the phrase that signals the rise to the social zenith of the object small a – the zenith and the nadir are two locatable points in the sky, the zenith the highest point and the nadir the lowest point. This phrase acted as my compass, for me at least, because it signaled that we had touched the sky. We had touched the antique and immobile sky, the immutable agricultural sky that societies that were immobile or slow to change, societies that were cold or lukewarm, had as their reference. What this phrase of Lacan’s signaled was that a new star had risen in the social sky, in the sociel — socielo in Spanish. And this new sociel star, so to say, is, as Lacan had remarked about the object small a, always the result of a forcing, of a passage beyond limits, which Freud discovered, in his own terms, precisely in a beyond. It is an intensive element that makes any notion of measure obsolete, that goes in the direction of the always more, that goes towards the measureless, following a cycle that is not the cycle of the seasons, but a cycle of accelerated renewal, of frenetic innovation.
What does this mean? What is the object small a, or objet petit a, as Lacan called it? For a start, we can read Isabel Millar’s summary of the above, from her recent book The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence (p. 57):
[T]he new compass of civilization, since its unmooring from the celestial rhythms shown to us so gracefully by nature, must be the object a, which is reliable and dependable in that it always maintains its place as a crack in reality.
So the “compass of civilization” has shifted from the ever-repeating celestial rhythms, to this objet a, this “crack in reality”. Again, the terms are abstract. We need to go deeper. What is the objet a? And how does it relate to “civilization”, and to these broader narratives of maturity or development?
It’s a difficult to explain concept, objet a, especially without being fully immersed in Lacan’s ideas. So rather than explain, I will try to illustrate. A friend was telling me their feelings around a particular desired object, and they described it as “The Thing that will [finally] make me happy, a big catharsis”. What the objet a is, then, is the formal position that this object occupies, in the sense that any desired object can occupy such a position, but each promises to be “The Thing that will finally make me happy”.
And, as we know, it never quite lives up to expectations. The objet a is always absent, missing, a lack or void rather than a “positive” object that we experience without mediation. Lacan claims that the original objet a is the breast, which has gone missing (for most of us, at least), and it is that satisfaction we aim for when we desire (and yet, we somehow always miss). The concept has much more richness in the context of the rest of Lacan’s work, but this provisional elucidation should be enough to move forward in our attempt to understand Miller’s claim.
Let me rephrase Millar, without the term objet a, and see if it makes sense:
The new compass of civilization… must be the concept of The Thing that will finally make one happy, the image of the big catharsis, which is reliable and dependable in that it always maintains its place as a crack in reality.
In other words, the development and continuation (compass) of civilization is oriented toward producing new Things which promise to make us happy, and yet which do not exist, which always miss. We as desiring subjects find ourselves within “a cycle of accelerated renewal, of frenetic innovation” on the one hand, with suffering and depression on the other, as the result of its failure to fully satisfy. It is in this way that the objet a is a surplus of enjoyment, a new location beyond where we currently are, always promising more but never quite living up to it. And our desire, our jouissance, pushes us toward the absolute limit.
Hopefully lines of convergence have begun to appear, but in an undeveloped form. To fully tie Miller’s claim about civilization to Taylor’s ideas, we’ll need to make a little detour, and go back to “Papa Freud”.
Development and Repetition
Recalling the above discussion on the objet a, we can find a clue in Freud’s discussion of the “impulse toward perfection”, apparently a critique of Nietzsche, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (p. 33-34 in this pdf, emphasis mine):
Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation, and from which it might be expected that his development into superman will be ensured. But I do not believe in the existence of such an inner impulse, and I see no way of preserving this pleasing illusion. The development of man up to now does not seem to me to need any explanation differing from that of animal development, and the restless striving towards further perfection which may be observed in a minority of human beings is easily explicable as the result of that repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive after its complete satisfaction which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction: all substitution- or reaction-formations and sublimations avail nothing towards relaxing the continual tension; and out of the excess of the satisfaction demanded over that found is born the driving momentum which allows of no abiding in any situation presented to it, but in the poet‘s words ‘urges ever forward, ever unsubdued’ (Mephisto in ‘Faust’, Act i. Faust’s study.). The path in the other direction, back to complete satisfaction, is as a rule barred by the resistances that maintain the repressions, and thus there remains nothing for it but to proceed in the other, still unobstructed direction, that of development, without, however, any prospect of being able to bring the process to a conclusion or to attain the goal.
To summarize the important aspects: that which is “most valuable in human culture” is the result of a repression of instinct, which pushes us to continue our “development” as we strive for a complete satisfaction that can never be obtained. Does this not sound like a transposition of Miller’s claim that “the compass of modern civilization is the objet a”, that object of desire that promises a complete satisfaction, and yet pushes us further and further in its failure?
What allows us to tie Miller back to Taylor is Freud’s usage of “development”: is this “[urging] ever forward, ever unsubdued” not the same as Taylor’s “helping to build and sustain a civilization in which human well-being will be served as never before in history”, “a narrative of human self-realization”? Is the idea that “the small discoveries and innovations which I manage to make will hand on the same task to my successors at a slightly higher level of achievement” not a form of “development, without… any prospect of being able to bring the process to a conclusion or to attain the goal?” When will “the [stories] of Progress, or Reason and Freedom, or Civilization or Decency or Human Rights” end, in their promise of full and total satisfaction?1
We can thus interpret Miller’s statement on two levels: first, “our society” (civilization) itself, considered as a whole, seems to be engaged in some kind of never-ending developmental process, which promises some ultimate future satisfaction, but will never achieve its goal. Second, our “personal compasses”, given by society, orient us toward personal development or progress. We are driven by endless fantasies of total satisfaction which we can never achieve.
Before I discuss these two ideas further, I want to also call attention to the “earlier” mode evoked by both Taylor and Miller. Both of them make reference to the cyclical nature of time, driven by seasons, celestial bodies, etc. Freud sees this sort of repetition as the fundamental nature of instinct itself, from humans all the way down to the amoeba. Freud writes (p. 29):
In what way is the instinctive connected with the compulsion to repetition? At this point the idea is forced upon us that we have stumbled on the trace of a general and hitherto not clearly recognised—or at least not expressly emphasised— characteristic of instinct, perhaps of all organic life. According to this, an instinct would be a tendency innate in living organic matter impelling it towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition, one which it had to abandon under the influence of external disturbing forces—a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation of inertia in organic life.
This conception of instinct strikes us as strange, since we are accustomed to see in instinct the factor urging towards change and development, and now we find ourselves required to recognise in it the very opposite, viz. the expression of the conservative nature of living beings. On the other hand, we soon think of those examples in animal life which appear to confirm the idea of instinct having been historically conditioned. When certain fish undertake arduous journeys at spawning-time, in order to deposit the spawn in certain definite waters far removed from their usual habitats, according to the interpretation of many biologists they are only seeking the earlier homes of their kind, which in course of time they have exchanged for others. The same is said to be true of the migratory flights of birds of passage, but the search for further examples becomes superfluous when we remember that in the phenomena of heredity and in the facts of embryology we have the most imposing proofs of the organic compulsion to repetition. We see that the germ cell of a living animal is obliged to repeat in its development—although in a fleeting and curtailed fashion— the structures of all the forms from which the animal is descended, instead of hastening along the shortest path to its own final shape. A mechanical explanation of this except in some trifling particulars is impossible, and the historical explanation cannot be disregarded. In the same way we find extending far upwards in the animal kingdom a power of reproduction whereby a lost organ is replaced by the growth of a new one exactly like it.
Freud further splits the instincts into “self preservative” or “death” instincts, and “sexual” or “life” instincts, the former maintaining individuals of the species, and the latter maintaining its continued existence as a whole. I don’t have the space for a deeper explanation today, of Freud’s life and death drives (although I went into some detail in an earlier post), but according to Freud, both aim repetitively at “the reinstatement of an earlier condition”. Does this not sound like the earlier condition, of “repeated cycles of time” (Taylor) and “the invariable cycle of seasons” (Miller), before “that [fundamental] repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built” took place?2
Two Compasses
In this final bit, I want to explore “the two levels” of Miller’s claim a little deeper. I said earlier that:
We can thus interpret Miller’s statement on two levels: first, “our society” (civilization) itself, considered as a whole, seems to be engaged in some kind of never-ending developmental process, which promises some ultimate future satisfaction, but will never achieve its goal. Second, our “personal compasses”, given by society, orient us toward a sort of personal development or progress. We are driven by endless fantasies of total satisfaction which we can never achieve.
The first level: society itself. Notions of “progress” seem core to the current social order, both at the ethical level, of progress toward e.g. broader human rights, and also at the scientific (academic) and technological levels, with new discoveries engendering new possibilities and potentials. These discoveries, of course, never quite live up to the hype, and similarly, new scientific discoveries never deliver the promised wholeness, the absolute knowledge that the endeavor aims at.
In her book I mentioned earlier, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, Millar explores the relationship between science, technology, and desire in some depth, albeit with far more Lacanian terminology than I can easily provide you with the tools to decode. However, her summary of Freud’s discussion of Man as “prosthetic God” in Civilization and its Discontents is worth quoting, as it leads us from the first level into the second (p. 59):
In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (2004) delivers his brief but sceptical vision of modern subjectivity; man as a Prothesengott or “prosthetic God”. Thanks to the reification of science by technology, the human subject, in a quest to become omnipotent and omniscient, is now endowed with various auxiliary organs. These prosthetic organs however do not fulfill their promise. Man does not become a real god and is constantly chasing new ways to transcend his bodily limitations. Freud remarks that this is testified to by the fact that these auxiliary organs are not one with the organism and can never become such. The prosthetic god is by nature flawed and carries with him an inherent lack. He eternally fails to achieve the fantasy of potency and enlightenment he imagines, and instead employs his auxiliary organs to circulate perpetually around the objects of the drive.
The second level concerns each individual’s relationship to development, as mediated by the contrivances of science, technology, society, etc. Starting from grade school, each of us are put through a progression of stages, leading toward development, both in terms of advancement through grades, but also through institutions, from the nursery, through elementary, middle, and high school, then college and career and finally retirement. Life is conceived as a process of developing through ascending stages.
This idea of development extends into the psychological and ethical domain, where it takes root most deeply. We each see ourselves as engaged in a process of maturation and development, ending only in death. The never-ending nature of the Hero’s Journey testifies to this: no sooner do we return home, then do we set out again, to continue building ourselves. We ascend through Kegan, Kohlberg stages; we read more books, “develop ourselves” to “reach our potential”, “grow out of” certain beliefs and pursuits (such as religion, as in the Taylor quote at the very beginning of this post). Oh, how we bemoan “gifted kid burnout”, that failure to attain a total satisfaction we were long ago promised!
The idea of living in a more cyclical, seasonal fashion seems archaic and quaint to our eyes, because who wouldn’t be striving to reach their potential? And yet, do we not romanticize simpler times, simpler “peoples”, like in the parable of the fisherman? And so, we see what Taylor calls a “cross-pressure” emerge, where we are, on the one hand, always striving, always wanting to achieve more and more, and on the other, perpetually unsatisfied with the flatness, the unattainability of our goal, its ultimate meaninglessness. For Taylor, this opens the space where a faith in the transcendent can emerge, in the form of religious faith, perhaps as a way of sustaining our desire, despite knowing it points to something quite “beyond” ordinary human achievement.
It is this broad idea, that of developing toward potential, which lies at the heart of our modern morality, our idea of what makes the good life. Once you start noticing it, you will see it everywhere. Perhaps we can trace this back to Plato and his parable of the cave, emerging from the shadows into the light of the Good, but “progress” and the corresponding unsatisfiable desiring is deeply entwined with capitalism, as Žižek often notes. For a fascinating Marxist read on the connection between capitalism and the modern subject, I recommend this essay, “Vandalizing the Subject”, by Ulysse Carrière. But that’s where I’m going to leave it for now; as usual, I’ve gone on too long, it’s time for me to go home, to bed.
Miscellania
I’ve said quite enough this week. No need for anything else. See you next week!
Song of the week:
These words, which justify themselves in terms of their value, are what Žižek might call “ideology”, or more specifically “master signifiers”.
Perhaps we might locate this fundamental repression with the sacrifice of the primal father, as Freud describes in Totem and Taboo.