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

Chapter Four Shrinking Distances

TRANSCENDING TRANSCENDENCE While the society of commanded enjoyment is one based on the image and its overproximity, the society of prohibition is a society of distance. The explicit prohibition of enjoyment makes possible the idea of transcendence— the idea that in the distance or beneath the surface there exists something radically different. Prohibition establishes a barrier that one must not transgress , but in the process it also establishes a space beyond that barrier (even if that space exists only in our imagination). Through the act of prohibiting, as psychoanalysis has long pointed out, we carve out a transcendent space that we know only through its absence: it exists in a negative way, as that which we don’t have access to. We lack immediate access to objects of desire, and thus a distance exists between subject and object. This distance can be spatial or temporal: either the subject must travel through space in order to approach its object or it must wait for the object to become available. The necessity of traveling and waiting—what we must do because we do not have a direct experience of the object—produces the idea of a beyond: the beyond houses the object that the subject will travel toward or wait for. But without the explicit prohibition, this beyond begins to disappear, and, more importantly , all distance and depth disappear with it. Without the idea of a transcendent beyond, all objects seem present and accessible because they lie on the surface, readily available. This is what Jean Baudrillard calls “the ecstasy of communication.” As he puts it, “There is no longer any transcendence or 75 Chapter Four Shrinking Distances depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication.”1 The absence of transcendence consigns us to a world of total presence, where both spatial and temporal distance evaporate. As we turn from a society that overtly prohibits enjoyment to one that commands it, we begin to feel the suffocating effects of this increasingly total presence. Baudrillard is most well known as the theorist of simulation.2 But he has also—and perhaps more significantly—recognized more clearly than anyone else the revolutionary effects of the system of universal communication. Simulation works to liquidate all reference (or to make evident the hitherto obscured absence of reference), but universal, instantaneous communication leaves us without any distance—and thus without any sense of transcendence.3 Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication is his response to the evaporation of distance and transcendence. Here, Baudrillard focuses on what we lose with this transformation—and what we lose is value. In a world of instant accessibility where nothing is off-limits, all value flattens out.4 Objects derive value from their inaccessibility, from the dimension of the Real we attribute to them: the most valuable objects are always the most inaccessible. But when universal communication renders everything accessible, then nothing retains any value. Universal communication, like universal commodification, reduces even the most valuable object to just another object in a series. In this way, the process of symbolization fills in the gaps within the symbolic order, thereby occluding the Real. We are left without a gap, a void, indicating what cannot be symbolized (which is how Lacan defines the Real, as that which resists symbolization absolutely). For Baudrillard, this elimination of the Real manifests itself most conspicuously in the emergence of sexuality and the discourse of sexuality into everyday life. Today, sexuality has become increasingly less a taboo subject, no longer confined to hidden, private moments. From television talk shows to college classrooms, sexuality has become viable subject matter for discussion, and this discussion has become normalized to such an extent that it now raises few eyebrows. The sense of sexuality as a forbidden topic—as something to be discussed privately, if at all—has largely disappeared, resulting in a specific instance of the disappearance of the transcendent. According to Baudrillard, “Sexuality itself has become part of life, which means that it, too, no longer has transcendent value, neither as prohibition, nor as principle of analysis, pleasure, or transgression. It has been ‘ecologized,’ psychologized, secularized for domestic use. It has become part of the way of life.”5 One can now speak publicly and openly about sexuality, but this liberation of sexuality destroys the transcendent position—and thus the value—that it once had. It is the very distance between sexuality and everyday expression that gives sexuality its allure, and this distance...