All posts filed under: Issue 10

Introduction/Issue 10: The Symptom

Issue 10: The Symptom (Spring 2006) Linda Edwards and Michael Williams Our patient suffers a symptom – a repetitive hand-washing that pervades his everyday life. Anguished, frustrated, trammeled by it, our patient is also inextricably entwined with it. Despite his attempts to transcend it, his compulsive handwashing has become indispensable to his assertion of self and identity, and he fears he will be at loss, lose something, fall apart, without it. What motivates our patient’s symptom and what does it want to say? How should our patient reply? How does – indeed can – our patient overcome this intolerable, yet embodied, compulsion? And what awaits its dissolution? In psychoanalysis the symptom occupies a central position – both theoretically and practically. The symptom grounds the play of latent and manifest levels that are the condition of possibility of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice. We approach our patient’s hand-washing as an indicator for, and confrontation with, something else: abjected, forbidden, unfulfilled, improper, obfuscated. As a “sign and a surrogate,” as Freud says, for the “known of old and …

Contributors/Issue 10: The Symptom

Dale Bradley is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.  His research interests include the discursive analysis of contemporary technoculture and the historical emergence of cybersociety. He can be reached at dbradley@brocku.ca. Sudeep Dasgupta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His current research and teaching interests include: aesthetics and migrant subjectivity, art history and contemporary visual analysis, and the relevance of postcolonial theory for media studies. He is editor of Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critque (Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2006, forthcoming) and recent publications include: “Visual Culture and the Place of Modernity” in Internationalizing Cultural Studies, edited by Ackbar Abbas and John Erni, London, Blackwell, 2004; “Gods in the Marketplace: Refin(d)ing the Public under the Aura of the Religious” in Religion, Media and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2006; and “Suspending the Body: Biopower and the Contradictions of Family Values in Les Terres …

The Return of the Repressed: Cybersubjectivity in RoboCop

Issue 10: The Symptom (Spring 2006) Dale Bradley Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film RoboCop presents us with a question about the possibility of an individual subject’s psyche surviving in the form of a cyborg. The ostensible answer is “yes”, but the cyborg’s (RoboCop) process of rediscovering of his/its previous psyche (Murphy, the human cop) reflexively interrogates the initial question in a manner that problematizes the legitimacy of an inherently human-organic psyche. The question is not the obvious one—can or will the human spirit survive the onslaught of techno-capitalism?—but a much more fundamental one: is subjectivity an inherently human phenomenon, or might it be somehow “ported” to non-organic forms of being? Pursuing the question produces a problem: if subjectivity is merely an epiphenomenal trace—a symptom, as it were—that emerges from the interaction between being and environment then does it not logically follow that it may be differentially constituted in different, perhaps non-organic forms of being? Beginning with Freud, but reaching its apotheosis in Lacan, the psychoanalytic discourse on the construction of the self via language and socially …

Bewilderment and Suspension Bridges: The Joke as Symptom of Language

Issue 10: The Symptom (Spring 2006) Shane Herron According to the Executive’s Handbook of Humor for Speakers, “The speaker on serious themes, who’s going to use humor to help him pace, lighten and highlight his talk, has got to take that as another fundamental—he’s got to be sure his humor never overwhelms his subject. Humor is an adjunct—an aid. It’s Worcestershire sauce and good, sharp mustard. It’s never the meat and potatoes!”1 What stands out in this reading of the aim of humor is its dramatic opposition to the way in which humor is deployed by Lacan. Not only do jokes not help Lacan lighten and highlight his talk, but it also seems as if he deliberately employs them in order to confuse and confound the reader. Whereas a more conventional author or presenter explains the major point that she has been developing, Lacan almost never concludes his discourses without a decisively non-illuminating joke or comic twist. The result is rarely “satisfying” in any standard sense of the word. Of course, Lacan was quite conscious …

Multiple Symptoms and the Visible Real: Culture, Media, and the Displacements of Vision

Issue 10: The Symptom (Spring 2006) Sudeep Dasgupta The enigmatic character of culture resides in the latter’s inability to directly represent the social malaise of which it is the visible symptom. In psychoanalytic terms, the meaning of the symptom is not directly accessible on the surface, and the visual cannot guarantee an adequate decoding of the manifestation of the symptom in all its meaningfulness. Freud underlines the necessity of analysis by insisting that “the causation of those symptoms without taking into account the mechanism of the formation of the … symptom…involves an inevitable loss of completeness and clarity…”1 Psychoanalytic analyses of visual culture are generally structured along a topology of depth and surface: the manifest symptom and the latent cause, the visible symptomal culture and the invisible Real cause. This essay interrogates precisely this topology: does this logic of a surface symptom and a Real depth withstand critical analysis? This essay argues that a historical and conceptual rethinking of visible culture results in the Symptom and the Cause appearing next to each other. A lateral …