The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

Chapter Five. Interpretation under Duress

THE VANISHING UNIVERSAL The distance that prohibition provides for subjects offers them the space for critical reflection. Through this distance, the structure of the society of prohibition thus allows for subjects to make sense of it. When this distance collapses under the weight of the imperative to enjoy, we lose our ability to interpret events occurring in the world—to connect isolated events to the larger social order. Interpretation requires distance and separation, and the society of commanded enjoyment allows us neither. We become so caught up in the immediacy of events that we lack ability to reflect on the mediations that underlie this apparent immediacy. A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible. In his account of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson describes the widespread failure of interpretation symptomatic of the society of enjoyment, a failure he links to the contemporary collapse of distance. This means, first of all, that we lack the ability not only to interpret events but even to locate ourselves in the world. According to Jameson, “this latest mutation in space— postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable 95 Chapter Five Interpretation under Duress external world.”1 Unable to discover how our spatial world is organized—to perform what Jameson calls cognitive mapping—we experience events as random and disconnected. Cognitive mapping relies on the universalizing, seeing the necessity at work within the seeming randomness of events. But the ability to universalize is precisely what the society of enjoyment militates against. As a result, interpretation appears only in disguised forms. Jameson sees conspiracy theory as one of these forms. The conspiracy theorist attempts to interpret events, to plot their connection to the whole, and this act involves universalizing. Jameson says, “conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.”2 Grasping the totality is impossible today because, paradoxically, global capitalism is authentically total: we can’t access the point beyond it that would allow us to see it as a totality. However, conspiracy theory makes an effort at universalizing, even if this effort involves a fallacious belief in its own transcendence. That is, the conspiracy theorist believes that she/he can attain the (impossible) perspective of an outsider, one looking at the contemporary world system from a point beyond it. But despite this fundamental error, the very prevalence of conspiracy theory indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment resists the act of interpretation. Today, interpretation finds itself denigrated to such an extent that it appears only in the form of paranoia. Contemporary works of art frequently display the society of enjoyment’s resistance to meaning and interpretation. As Jameson points out, modernist art, despite its difficulty, is nonetheless fundamentally directed toward the act of interpretation. In fact, the difficulty of modernist art is an index of its interpretability . The difficulty allows for—and even invites—the act of interpretation . With postmodern art (or, to translate into our terms, art in the society of enjoyment), interpretation becomes beside the point. According to Jameson: We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism , which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts—such is the logic of postmodernism in general, which finds one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video.3 In video and other contemporary art, the resistance to interpretation does not appear as part of the work’s content. It is instead a matter of form. While experiencing the continuous flow of experimental video—just as when watching television or surfing the internet—it becomes difficult to isolate a text for 96 The End of Dissatisfaction? interpretation. Art becomes an experience rather than a text...