We left off last time with the idea of closure. To recap briefly - and idiomatically - it’s when a thing becomes ‘a thing’: when something becomes distinct enough that it can be clearly and distinctly ‘picked out’ from its environment and denoted. The reason this is significant is that once closure is achieved, there is a basic, qualitative difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ or ‘here,’ from ‘there’. Today, we’re going to follow up on a critical significance of that fact, checking in on how Lacan thinks about this, and begin our reconstruction of the rhetorical situation.1
The question “Che vuoi?” names a gap, or the inability to fully reconcile oneself with another. Most plainly, it means something like ‘what are you driving at?’ or ‘what do you mean by that’ - generally, it’s something you would ask where you can’t tell if someone is putting you on or not. Lacan, in true Lacan fashion, offers a lot of connotative arguments - one can make any number of connections to other concepts, but honestly, the easiest way to capture what it means, concretely, is Comedy Central’s “Nathan For You.” Part of what makes Fielder’s character great is his world-class deadpan: when he suggests you make a Poo-flavored frozen yogurt to drum up publicity for your business, he’s telling you exactly what he means. Nevertheless, what he’s asking of you - to bankroll shit FroYo - is so unusual that you can’t help but think “wait, but really - what do you actually want?”
As viewers, this tension is sublimated into comedy, because we get an omniscient point of view of the whole thing. Nathan interacts with people, and they are baffled by his character’s off-putting directness and lack of guile. When we watch him suggest some crazy idea, we’re in a position similar to that of the person he’s talking to - literally speaking, we see the same guy saying the same thing. But simultaneously, of course, we also identify with Nathan, because the show is about him and we’re treated to his interior monologue as he explains what his character is thinking. What makes the show funny, of course, is the heavy irony which floats the whole show: we don’t have to feel any doubt about whether this guy really wants doodoo dessert because we can confront that proposition within the contained situation of a television show.2 The humor comes from watching people squirm and vacillate between resisting his obviously stupid ideas and humoring them because they’re too polite to acknowledge the stupidity. That tension is diffused for us in a kind of quasi-catharsis.
However, like all good Hegelians, Lacan’s work seems to really flourish when you can pin a sort of breakdown moment - when the logic of a situation unexpectedly bends back on itself and suddenly the whole table is turned. I am, of course, thinking of the show’s best moment, which you can watch below.
This is maybe the closest he comes to ever breaking character. It’s hilarious for us, but note that Nathan is almost upset in the moment. He’s caught off-guard, because suddenly this guy is acting weirder than virtually anything he could have scripted for the scene. Effectively, Nathan is confronted with himself: someone who appears to be genuinely suggesting something so bizarre that you can’t decide how to even interpret it - he’s got to be putting you on…right? He can no longer control the situation from behind the ramparts of irony, precisely because although this guy was never supposed to be in on the joke, he’s one-upped Nathan. He’s the funniest thing about the scene, despite being cast as the mark. In this moment, what does Nathan say? Of course:
If we had to collapse it into a single sentence, we might say that the archetypal “Nathan for You” joke is that he responds to something real by creating something fake…so that something real can happen. It’s all over the show: he fabricates a ‘relatable’ talk show story, contrives an ‘authentic’ viral video, cooks up a whole film festival to duck potential fraud charges. We cross back and forth between truth and fiction enough times that both terms effectively become meaningless.
It’s hard to talk about only a little bit of Lacan - but nevertheless, we’ll try. The thread to seize on here is the way that the subject (in the case of the show, Nathan, or in the general case, who ever is ‘asking’ the question che vuoi?) is confronted with some object, about which they have incomplete information. People lie all the time - where no corroborating evidence is available, we can’t ever conclusively rule out that we’re not hearing the truth. At the same time, however, Lacan follows this insight down into the basement of the unconscious. His famous thesis - “the unconscious is structured like a language” - replicates this problem of uncertainty. In “The Subversion of the Subject,” the essay in which he explicates our titular question, he describes it like this:
Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote), interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs
The unconscious can’t lie to you, but if it manifests itself in language - there’s the problem right there. Language is slippery and doesn’t always convey what we expect it to - people misinterpret remarks, miss the joke, and so on. So when the unconscious manifests itself at the level of consciousness - as in the Freudian slip - it’s like a submarine popping up where you don’t expect it. What’s it doing there? Well, we can’t ever really say for sure. Who is talking when the unconscious talks? It’s clearly you, but it also clearly isn’t you (“my god, I don’t want to fuck my mother, how could you say such a thing?!”).
Lacan’s answer is complicated, to say the least. But the skeleton key, I think, is his observation that “the unconscious is (the) discourse about the Other.” He means this in two senses, which don’t completely come through in the English, since they rely on a double sense of the French “de l’Autre”:
Desire is the desire of the Other: we feel desire for another person
Desire is the desire belonging to the Other: when we want something, it’s partly conditioned on what we believe the Other wants us to want.
It is this second sense which is condensed into "che vuoi?” - whatever we’re ‘getting at’, it’s inevitably also tangled up in whatever they’re getting at. Here, we can think of the problem so frequently faced by students - confronted with an assignment, a first impulse is often to try and divine what the teacher ‘wants’ them to write. When the teacher says “express yourself!” the problem only deepens: if one expresses oneself by saying “fuck this, school sucks, fuck you,” it’s unlikely to garner a good grade. It’s here that we see the sort of ping-ponging Nathan grapples with up above: students may express themselves, but only in a form which they believe the teacher will find appropriate, and arguably that’s the truest form for the student to express themselves because what they really want is just to check the box and get out of a boring required course, but if that’s true, then they don’t actually want an education, and…and…and…
Thus, Lacan argues:
that it is qua Other that man desire’s…this is why the Other’s question [la question de l’Autre] - that comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply - which takes some such form as ‘Ché vuoi?,’ ‘What do you want?,’ is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire'
Whatever it is that we ‘really’ want - the perversities of the unconscious - might be kept crammed beneath the trapdoor of consciousness. Nevertheless, one may be entirely capable of confronting (even enjoying!) this desire if it is beamed back to us from somewhere else. Thus, when Tony Soprano confronts his high school football coach in a primal scene-type locker room in S5E11 “The Test Dream”, what he can confront (fig. 3, above) is that he’s essentially a bullshitter, a manipulative sociopath who willingly and capably ‘reads’ people and maximizes his own returns.
What we should seize on here is - again - the ambivalence between two equal, yet opposite readings. On the one hand: Tony very correctly describes his own character: he flatters his coach because he knows the desire of the Other - what the coach wants of him (to be a leader, to be a good guy, to not be a criminal). This flattery is, itself, what Tony wants - he’s a bad person who wants to get one over on you, to ‘shine people on’.
But at the same time, if this is all contained inside his head, he’s effectively confronting himself, in the phantasmic form of the coach. If we follow that path, it’s quite clear that Tony can confront his own shittiness only through his failure to be what an early authority figure (and surrogate father) wanted him to be. He’s keenly aware of his own rottenness, but he can’t consciously reckon with that - hence the endless futility of his therapy with Melfi - he can only do so in a highly contrived form in which his own self-loathing is reconfigured as shrewd manipulation. We would say, then, that Tony’s repressed hatred and guilt is something that can come to him only insofar as it comes to him as the desire belonging to the Other - that is, he can only admit it to himself in the form of how he fell short of what was expected of him. In this moment, he can accept it, but only in a sandbox sort of way: the coach never appears in any other episode, and the scene is entirely inconsequential to the plot of the show, in which Tony consciously says and does all sorts of things.
Lacan’s insight, then, is that to carve the subject at the joints, one has to look at the gap between the subject and the expectations others have for them. That is, you learn something about yourself when you look at the maladaptive tics by which you deal with things you don’t like to think about. At the same time, though, one necessarily has to admit that there’s no guarantees of any kind - when one is dealing with some closed system (another person, for example), one cannot ever close the gap. Truth is defined by breakdowns, which is perhaps why in talking about Lacan, it always feels like you’re perpetually on the edge of really pinning your point down…and then it dips around the next corner. One passes, perpetually, from one mask to the next; your true face is nothing but the whole series.
When a system is closed, then, we mean that its output can never be predicted for a given input. It will always ‘process’ it in some way, or interpose something of itself between the two, and one can never be sure exactly what that something is.
Next time: why people are Ashby Boxes.
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I realize that name-checking Bitzer is a slightly retro move. However, part of what I want to show - eventually - is that rhetorical ecology isn’t opposed to situation, and that the move to ecology doesn’t dissolve the basic problem which is captured by the situation.
This, incidentally, is a good example of how films/TV tell viewers how to watch them.