Chapter Nine
ENJOYABLE NEIGHBORS
Social interactions in the society of enjoyment necessarily involve an encounter with the other’s private enjoyment. Whereas within the society of prohibition subjects hid their enjoyment, fearful of violating the prohibition and enduring some form of censure, today the situation has become completely reversed: subjects feel guilty not for exposing their enjoyment publicly, but for failing to do so. To fail to enjoy publicly is to ostracize oneself, to miss out on what everyone else is accessing. As a result, we are continually confronted with the image of the enjoying other—a confrontation that produces the incivility and aggressiveness symptomatic of the society of enjoyment. Surrounded by these images of enjoyment, the subject experiences the contradiction of being enjoined to enjoy itself while feeling its own lack of enjoyment in contrast with the other.1 This is why the image of the enjoying other triggers the reactions of incivility and aggressiveness, which are symptomatic in the society of enjoyment. As Lacan says in Seminar XI, “Such is true envy—the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the objet a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction.” 2 In the wake of the command to enjoy, the subject often experiences this “true envy.” If the other appears to have the objet petit a, the secret of enjoyment that rightfully belongs to the subject—and if the other publicly parades this objet petit a—then the subject feels no duty to civility.
The absence of civility in the society of enjoyment indicates the extent to which the subject in this society remains lacking. That is to say, the contemporary subject becomes uncivil because she/he continues to be haunted by her/his own lack of enjoyment. If we were really enjoying ourselves today, we would not develop aggressiveness in response to the other’s enjoyment and believe that this enjoyment is rightfully ours. Instead, content with our own enjoyment, we would adopt an attitude of indifference toward that of the other. When I am really enjoying, I do not envy the enjoyment of the other, as the uncivil and aggressive subject in the society of enjoyment does. Incivility and aggressiveness are symptomatic of the society of enjoyment because its subjects are constitutively unable to enjoy themselves and yet constantly feel as if enjoyment is their right.
Many social commentators have recently tackled the subject of rising incivility and aggressiveness, but none has linked this phenomenon to the disappearance of prohibition as directly as popular cultural critic Stephen Carter. Carter, best known for The Culture of Disbelief, sees incivility as the product of our refusal of individual sacrifice for the sake of the society as a whole—that is, to translate it into our terms, as the result of a turn away from the prohibition of enjoyment. In his treatise Civility, he claims, “Civility is possible only if members of a community bind themselves to obey a set of rules of behavior not because the law requires it but because they understand the virtue of sacrificing their own desires—their own freedom to choose—for the good of the larger community of which they are a part.”3 As subjects refuse this sacrifice—or the social order no longer explicitly demands it—civility increasingly transforms into incivility. We become reluctant to set aside our own enjoyment and instead insist on it. This affects the way that we drive, walk, shop, talk, and generally interact with other subjects.
The experience of driving tends inherently to produce a sense of isolation. As Gary Cross points out, when they became widely available, cars added to a process of privatization. He notes, “the car culture produced a plethora of new privatized pleasures, enjoyed by millions.”4 From the perspective of the car, others exist in another world, a world wholly apart from oneself.5 Carter notes the vast difference between traveling by train (the primary mode of transportation in the later nineteenth century) and traveling by car. On the train, one must accommodate oneself to fellow passengers, and, even more importantly, one experiences others as fellow passengers in the first place. Everyone exists, albeit temporarily, in the same social world. The culture of the car represents a radical contrast. The car isolates the driver from others: others are competing drivers rather than fellow passengers. With the emergence of the society of enjoyment, this attitude has intensified—moving beyond the sense of antagonism produced by the isolation of the car itself. In the form of drivers tailgating, playing loud radios, talking on cell phones, and driving recklessly, we confront the enjoying other.
Carter rightly sees this encounter with enjoyment manifesting itself most conspicuously in the noise level of contemporary American society. We live amid blaring radios, ringing cell phones, and screaming car alarms. As he points out, “The sound, the noise, the sheer unrelenting loudness of our world combine to make civility difficult to achieve. The challenge of contemporary life is not so much that we are busy as that we are blasted around the clock with the sounds of our society: raucous music, insistent telephones, cynical newscasts, angry traffic” (287, Carter’s emphasis). All of these noises testify to the presence of enjoyment—a refusal of constraint. Much more than what we see, what we hear indicates enjoyment. While we can close our eyes to sights, we cannot close our ears to sounds. The noise of the cell phone has the ability to break into any public space, and this intrusion indicates a site of private enjoyment. The person talking in a public place on a cell phone is not only engaging in a private conversation in public, but she/he is also displaying this private moment by speaking loudly enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear. This noise indicates not simply private enjoyment gone awry, but the public staging of this private enjoyment. Private enjoyment itself does not necessarily incite aggressiveness, but the public staging of it—which is the contemporary practice—often does. The open, public display of private enjoyment forces others to become aware of their failure to enjoy, and this is the fundamental dynamic of the incivility that characterizes the society of enjoyment.
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
Though the decline of the prohibition of enjoyment—and the corresponding refusal to sacrifice private enjoyment—that produces incivility is the primary target of Civility, the book inadvertently testifies to the predominance of the society of enjoyment through its underlying investment in the object of its critique. Despite his diatribe against the widespread insistence on private enjoyment, Carter betrays his own investment in private enjoyment through the personal revelations that he makes during the course of his argument, especially his insistence on keeping his children beyond the reach of public education. The prevalence of sex education in public schools, he argues, gives him the right to remove his children from that domain and its endorsement of immoral behavior. He says, “the fact that some young people might feel that birth control information or condom distribution in the schools signals state approval of sexual activity seems not sufficiently weighty for the public schools to decide not to do it. (Which is another reason my wife and I would rather not, thank you, send the state our children to educate)” (290). This parenthetical sentence represents the one point in his work that Carter’s tone becomes uncivil and even indignant. Such a moment of incivility is indicative of the crucial position that the relationship between the state and the family occupies within Carter’s discussion of civility. When it comes to the state usurping the rights of the family, he takes a position firmly on the side of the family, arguing that the family has a structural priority relative to the state. On this point, Carter is very much in keeping with the predominate attitude in the contemporary society of enjoyment—and with that society’s tendency toward incivility.6
One’s attitude toward the state and its authority has a direct bearing on one’s relationship to civility, even if this link is not immediately apparent. Insisting on the rights of the family over the authority of the state places Carter in the camp of the destroyers of civility, despite an entire book devoted to fighting this position. In every other area, he advocates sacrifice of private enjoyment for the public good, but he refuses to extend this idea of sacrifice to the family’s relationship with the state. This is not simply a minor failing within Carter’s overall argument. Because the state is the fundamental site of the prohibition of enjoyment, this blind spot actually undermines the entire call for renewed civility. If civility is disappearing in the society of enjoyment, one of the most significant indications of its disappearance is widespread hostility to the state—a hostility that Carter fully shares. Hence, reestablishing civility represents a far more difficult project than Carter lets on. The current climate of incivility is symptomatic of the society of enjoyment as a whole, and thus we cannot fight a battle against it in isolation. That said, it should not be surprising that the call for civility runs aground over the question of the state’s authority over private lives. The state demands the sacrifice of particularity for the sake of its universality—or it demands that subjects recognize their particularity through its universality—and this universality provides the basis for civility within the social order. But in the society of enjoyment, the state becomes anathema precisely because of this demand for sacrifice. Subjects increasingly view the state and its universality solely as an impediment to private enjoyment, which leads them to reject the state’s authority and value their own particular interests—or family—above the state.
Valuing the particularity of the family over the universality of the state is natural enough. We experience the family more immediately and earlier than we experience the state. However, this type of valuation represents a failure to see the constitutive role that the state plays in the family and in the individual. The state provides the universality that supports all particular identity, which is why the state has priority relative to the family. As Hegel points out in the Philosophy of Right, the state is not the result of particular families coming together; instead, it is the basis for the very emergence of the family. He says, “the state as such is not so much the result as the beginning. It is within the state that the family is first developed into civil society, and it is the Idea of the state itself which disrupts itself into these two moments.”7 That is, the family results from the self-division of the state; the state does not result from the accumulation of families. Without the state as a background, the family would have nothing to ensure its integrity and security. The family exists as a family because the state recognizes both it and other families—and grounds their interrelations. Consequently, for Hegel, “There is nothing that must not be given up for the sake of [the state], whereby one’s particular interest is protected and furthered.”8 As the basis for the identity of the family, the state has the right to demand anything of the family—including placing its children in a public education with which they have moral objections.This authority of the state—its ability to require sacrifice—provides the underpinning of civility. Hence, in rejecting this prerogative of the state, Carter derails the argument for civility at its most crucial point. When it comes to the relationship between subjects and the state, Civility becomes a fundamentally uncivil treatise, thereby ironically testifying to the fundamental incivility of the society of commanded enjoyment.9
What drives contemporary incivility is the sense that everyone the subject encounters is a potential thief of her/his enjoyment. This is true of the state as well. Rather than see the state as the guarantor of mutual sacrifice—and thus as a force for the prohibition of enjoyment—subjects increasingly view it as a repository of enjoyment. While no period in history has been free of feelings of hostility toward the state, these feelings become exacerbated in the society of enjoyment because the state seems not only to embody the greatest threat to our enjoyment but also to be a source of enjoyment. Thus, contemporary subjects tend to see the state as competitor for enjoyment. In giving money or control to the state, one is not performing a socially necessary sacrifice; instead, one is allowing the state to enjoy in one’s stead. When the state represents just another site of private enjoyment, our attitude toward it tends to be one of hostility.
This is especially evident in the path that George W. Bush took in promoting his 2001 tax cut. Bush did not simply say that the federal government should return some money to citizens now that it had a budget surplus. Instead, he took up a far more radical position. When campaigning for the tax cut, Bush told cheering crowds that he would tell the federal government, “It’s not your money,” thereby implying that the state had no fundamental right to require the payment of taxes.10 With this refrain, he affirmed the prevailing view of the state in the society of enjoyment. In “taking” our tax dollars, the state robs us of our potential enjoyment—all the things we might buy—in order to spend “our” money on its own senseless enjoyment (in the form of, for instance, wasteful government programs).
Figured as a thief of enjoyment, the state merely fits into the most common role of the other in the society of enjoyment. In every encounter with the other, I encounter someone or something that seems ready to enjoy at my expense and in my stead.11 Every interaction is a struggle for enjoyment. Hence, I must take precautions when entering into the social world, guarding myself against the threat that the other represents. This of course militates against civility because civility depends on not viewing the other as fundamentally threatening and on the presumption that both the subject and the other have sacrificed their enjoyment. In the society of enjoyment, civility even becomes dangerous. If I act civilly, I risk allowing the other to take my enjoyment from me and expose my lack. However, this is but the beginning of the problem. If viewing the other as a potential thief of my enjoyment has the effect of creating less civil encounters, it also has the more ominous effect of producing subjects prone to aggressiveness and violence, and we can see this tendency throughout the society of commanded enjoyment.
SUMMER OF STOLEN ENJOYMENT
The logic of stolen enjoyment finds a notable expression in Spike Lee’s underrated Summer of Sam (1999), a film that explicates the relationship between the sense of stolen enjoyment and the build-up of aggressiveness that results from the subject’s experience of the command to enjoy. Summer of Sam makes evident the symptomatic role that aggressiveness plays within our contemporary society of enjoyment. At first glance, such a claim might seem strange, given the historical nature of the film (and the way in which the film presents itself as a story of a past epoch). The film appears to be concerned with a society that has disappeared, not with the contemporary society of enjoyment. Lee grounds the film in the specific historical moment—the year 1977—that he hopes to capture: we see this through the film’s emphasis on disco dancing, the constant visual references to the 1977 New York Yankees (including numerous shots of Reggie Jackson), and, most importantly, the soundtrack that distinctly connotes the late 1970s. All of these historical markers underline the film’s remove from the present. Lee opts for this degree of historical specificity, however, not in order to emphasize that the experiences of the film no longer concern us, but in order to show that they do.
Like the great historical novels of the early nineteenth century, Summer of Sam explores the past as a way of making sense of the present. By rooting his film in 1977, Lee reveals the society of enjoyment in its incipience. We do not see the experiences of this time as those involved in them did; rather, we see these experiences as an earlier form of our own. This is why Lee stresses the logic of stolen enjoyment at almost every turn in the film. The film offers the past as the prehistory of the present—as the prehistory of the society of enjoyment. By portraying the past in this way, Lee creates an art in the manner of the historical novelists (such as Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy) whose achievement Georg Lukács chronicles in The Historical Novel. According to Lukács, “the writer would allow those tendencies which were alive and active in the past and which in historical reality have led up to the present (but whose later significance contemporaries naturally could not see) to emerge with that emphasis which they possess in objective, historical terms for the product of this past, namely, the present.”12 Both Lee and the historical novelist look to the past not in order to capture the details of an actual past experience but in order to illustrate the prehistory of present experience. In Summer of Sam, this prehistory makes evident the link between the sense of stolen enjoyment and the development of aggressiveness.
The film details life in a predominantly Italian New York City neighborhood in the summer of 1977, during the Son of Sam’s killing spree. The killings and the investigation into them take place on the film’s periphery, but the central focus is on Vinny (John Leguizamo) and Dionna (Mira Sorvino), a young married couple; Ritchie (Adrien Brody), Vinny’s friend and a former resident of the neighborhood who has returned with the dress and manner of a British punk; and a group of neighborhood men, led by Joe T. (Michael Rispoli), who are determined to apprehend the Son of Sam themselves. As the Son of Sam killings continue over the course of the 1977 summer, Vinny’s relationship with Dionna becomes increasingly strained, Ritchie’s presence in the neighborhood becomes more problematic, and the men become more paranoid about the sanctity of their neighborhood. All the story lines of the film converge when Dionna leaves Vinny after hearing of his many infidelities. The trauma of her departure pushes Vinny to the neighborhood men, who convince him that Ritchie is the Son of Sam and that he must help them apprehend Ritchie. Then, just as the police arrest David Berkowitz, the real Son of Sam, Vinny lures Ritchie into an ambush of the neighborhood men, who almost beat him to death. This outburst of violence is the culminating event of the film. It is the denouement of each story line, and the point toward which all of the building aggressiveness in each story has been leading.
The most obvious (though perhaps least important) instance of aggressiveness and violence in the film involves David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Though the film begins after he has initiated his killing spree, we see that the initial engine for Berkowitz’s outbreak of violence is the incessant barking of a neighbor’s dog. The barking drives Berkowitz to madness, and he responds by throwing furniture around his apartment and repeatedly screaming for the dog to shut up. Because it continually harasses Berkowitz and confronts him with his own failure to enjoy, the dog’s barking functions for him as the interminable enjoyment of the other—an enjoyment that seems to exist in the external world and yet remains inescapable. Even when Berkowitz kills the dog, its enjoyment continues to haunt him, and we see that this enjoyment eventually compels Berkowitz toward violence. After its death, the dog appears to him in his apartment and begins to speak, saying to Berkowitz, “I want you to go out and kill . . . kill . . . kill . . . kill.” Berkowitz engages in his killing spree because he believes that it represents the only way that he can obey the commandment that the Other (as manifested in the neighbor’s dog) has given him. He even proclaims, “I don’t want to kill anymore, no sir, no more, but I must honor thy father” (the authority he sees embodied in the figure of the dog). Despite its seemingly transgressive nature, what leads Berkowitz to the killing spree is his attempt to obey the Other’s command.
Summer of Sam makes clear that the violence in and surrounding the Son of Sam murders stems from the command to enjoy. Images of enjoyment dominate the film, and these images force subjects to become aware of the enjoyment they’re missing, as we see in the case of Berkowitz. He describes his life as a life deprived of the enjoyment that others have: “Papa Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can’t get out. I look out the attic window and watch the world go by. I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength than everybody else.” Everyone else is enjoying except Berkowitz, leaving him isolated with his own sense of lack. But violence holds out the promise of accessing this elusive enjoyment of the other. The act of killing—especially killing lovers having sex in the backseats of cars (the Son of Sam’s prime target) —both eliminates the other’s enjoyment and provides an enjoyment of its own. But no matter how often he kills, Berkowitz cannot escape the imperative to kill more—and thus the sense that he himself remains bereft of enjoyment. Through the figure of Berkowitz, Lee demonstrates the hopelessness implicit in the turn to aggressiveness and violence. One never escapes nor arrives at the other’s enjoyment. This is the contradiction from which the aggressive subject in the society of enjoyment cannot escape.
This feeling of being on the outside of enjoyment looking in is in no way confined to the film’s titular character. One could say that the other characters in the film experience the horror of the enjoying other even more than Berkowitz, as we see in the case of Vinny, the film’s central character. Vinny feels torn between his investment in the idea of a pure wife and the enjoyment he derives from perverse sexual practices. To solve this contradiction, he constructs a double life, having a series of sexual liaisons with other women while maintaining a passionless sex life with Dionna. These liaisons bring Vinny tremendous guilt, but they also represent his attempt to access the enjoyment of the other that his proper married life lacks. In fact, Vinny’s sense that the other has stolen the secret of his enjoyment drives him inexorably to affair after affair. When the two strands of Vinny’s life come together—he and Dionna end up at a sex club one night when they are out together—his life falls apart.13 Even though Dionna only remains at the club in an effort to please Vinny, the image of her enjoying herself with another man traumatizes him.
While driving home from the sex club, Vinny accuses Dionna of enjoying too much—enjoying sex with the other men and women at the sex club more than sex with him. To Vinny’s mind, Dionna’s enjoyment has come at his expense. But Dionna meets Vinny’s accusation with the revelation that she knows of his past infidelities. Knowing that the image of her enjoying herself with another man enrages Vinny, she describes just such an image in order to avenge herself for Vinny’s betrayals. She jumps out of the car and says to Vinny, “I’m going to wait here until some soul brother comes along in his big black Cadillac. And you know, and I know, that he’s got a big black dick, too.[. . .] You want to watch while I suck a big black dick in the back of a big black Cadillac?” Here, Dionna taunts Vinny with the image of what is for him the ultimate transgressive enjoyment—his wife sucking “a big black dick.” At this point, confronted with this image, Vinny feels his failure to enjoy most intensely, and hence he responds with aggressiveness. He says, “Don’t make me have to hurt you,” and he appears ready to erupt with violence. As we saw with Trigger Effect in the previous chapter, we see in Summer of Sam that for the white man the image of the sexualized black man represents the apogee of male enjoyment. This is thus one of many instances in which the command to enjoy has the effect of exacerbating racist feelings precisely because racism is itself structured around the idea that one’s enjoyment has been illegitimately taken by the other. This burst of aggressiveness doesn’t end up turning directly into violence on Vinny’s part, but it does eventually play a role in the climactic violent outburst that concludes the film. Rather than erupting in violence toward Dionna, Vinny allows himself to be used by the neighborhood men in their assault on Ritchie and his excessive enjoyment.
The neighborhood men assault Ritchie because he tops their list of “suspects” in the Son of Sam killings. Of course, they place Ritchie at the top of this list simply because his behavior makes him an anomaly in the neighborhood, not because of any actual link between Ritchie and the killings. What makes Ritchie a “freak” in the eyes of the neighborhood men—and thus what makes him the most obvious candidate for the Son of Sam—is the extent to which he seems to be enjoying himself in a way that they cannot. To them, Ritchie’s punk-style dress and haircut suggest a perverse enjoyment that threatens their own. They even take offense at Ritchie’s voice and his feigned British accent for its hint of an alien enjoyment. When they learn that he performs at a male strip club and in porn films, this merely confirms their estimation of him. As an ensemble, they list to Vinny exactly what repulses them about Ritchie: “killer, fag, pimp, punk rocker, queer, pervert, homo, degenerate, whatever the fuck it is.” All of the indications of Ritchie’s difference are, to the men of the neighborhood, also indications of his enjoyment, that is, of his refusal to accept the restrictions that they have accepted. The image of Ritchie enjoying himself looms constantly before them and only his destruction appears to promise relief. Through the relationship of the neighborhood men to Ritchie, Summer of Sam reveals precisely how the image of the enjoying other leads subjects to violence in the society of enjoyment.
The threatening nature of Ritchie’s enjoyment becomes evident as the men begin their search for Ritchie. Two of the men enter the punk bar CBGB where Ritchie’s band performs. They don’t find Ritchie there, but they do encounter ear-splitting punk rock, a screaming audience, and hundreds of people dressed in punk attire. In short, they encounter precisely the kind of perverse enjoyment that they detest in Ritchie. As the men walk through the bar, we see them recoil from and guard themselves against this enjoyment: one puts his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, while the other puts his hands over his ears. Wandering through CBGB, they experience the other’s enjoyment as a lethal abyss that threatens to engulf them. The aggressiveness and violence that they later direct toward Ritchie is an attempt to relieve themselves of this danger. Like Berkowitz, they experience the horror of the enjoying other, and this forces them to become aware of their own failure to enjoy. In this situation, violence becomes the only remedy because it promises to wipe out the other’s enjoyment and simultaneously provide enjoyment as one performs it. With the help of Vinny, who lures him out of his apartment and into the street, they jump an unsuspecting Ritchie. For the men of the neighborhood, Ritchie’s status as the Son of Sam allows them to unleash an assault without any concern about repercussions: they finally feel free to enjoy. This is what the outbreak of violence provides in the society of enjoyment and why violence in this epoch seems like such an attractive avenue.
Lee shoots the final confrontation between the neighborhood men and Ritchie with the music of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in the background. As always in Spike Lee’s films, the choice of music plays a crucial role in the scene. In her discussion of Lee’s earlier film Do the Right Thing (1989), Victoria Johnson points out that Lee uses music “as interactive with and an essential component of visual representation and thematic, political concerns.” 14 The underlying political valence of the music is just as apparent in Summer of Sam. In opting for “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Lee indicates the central place that the logic of stolen enjoyment plays in this act of violence and in the violence of Summer of Sam as a whole. In this context, The Who’s song expresses the rage that stems from having long been duped out of one’s rightful enjoyment, and it also expresses the desire to access the enjoyment that we have been missing as members of the “hypnotized.” Lee uses the song to suggest the belief that we can right our relationship to enjoyment: whereas before we have allowed the other to steal our enjoyment, now we are seizing it for ourselves.15 As the song plays during a sequence near the end of the film, we see the neighborhood men pummeling Ritchie—kicking and beating him repeatedly. The music and the image both indicate the enjoyment they derive from attempting to reclaim what they believe Ritchie has stolen from them. They turn toward this extreme violence because it seems to offer a path through which they might themselves find the enjoyment that they see in Ritchie. This turn makes them representative figures in the contemporary landscape. This kind of aggressiveness and violence constantly threaten to erupt in the society of enjoyment. The pressure to enjoy, combined with the pervasive images of enjoyment that bombard contemporary subjects, lead us to outbursts such as the one that concludes Summer of Sam. Violence appears to offer the elusive enjoyment that the other has taken from us.
OUTBREAKS OF AGGRESSIVENESS
If Spike Lee illustrates the prehistory of contemporary aggressiveness and violence, school shootings represent the full development of these phenomena. The latter half of the 1990s witnessed a spate of school shootings, incidents in which students came to school with guns intent on shooting as many fellow students as they could. The most well-known (and most deadly) of these took place at Columbine High School in Colorado, where two students (Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, members of a group calling themselves the “Trench Coat Mafia”) killed twelve classmates and a teacher. Exiled as “freaks” and “losers” at Columbine High School, Harris and Klebold experienced their castration—their enjoyment deficit—on a daily basis and, like Berkowitz in Summer of Sam, responded with violence.
In a society that commands enjoyment, every relationship with the other produces a fear of the potential theft of one’s enjoyment or the sense that the other has already stolen one’s enjoyment. It is this attitude that brings aggressiveness to the pitch that we find in the hallways of Columbine. The prevailing command to enjoy creates a life-and-death struggle to enjoy. Those who come out on the losing end of the struggle to enjoy often respond with aggressiveness toward those who seem to have made off with their enjoyment. An enjoyment deficit prompts the subject to see the enjoyment of the other as a stolen enjoyment that must be reappropriated. The targets of the Columbine shooters are instructive in this regard. Not only did the shooters target popular students and athletes, but they also singled out minority students. This combination seems to defy a political analysis of the shooting. If we see it as a pseudo-revolutionary activity conducted against the powerful in the school, this explains why the shooters shot the popular students but not why they shot the minority students. Such an interpretation must downplay the importance of the minority student targets. If we see it as a neo-fascist activity conducted against the marginalized, this explains why the shooters shot the minority students but not why they shot the popular students. Like the first interpretation, this one must also downplay one group targeted by the shooters—in this case, the popular students. Both lines of interpretation run into significant stumbling blocks: the variety of targets seems to detract from their power to signify. But there is something that unifies all the targets at Columbine. What both popular and minority students seem to share, at least in the eyes of white outsiders (like the Trench Coat Mafia), is a privileged relationship to enjoyment. Both groups seem to be enjoying themselves—and even enjoying themselves at the expense of the members of the Trench Coat Mafia. The shooting is a response to this stolen enjoyment, an attempt to wrench it back from the other.16
The public reactions to the Columbine shooting completely missed this jouissance factor at the heart of the event. The post-Columbine outcry sought to identify the source of the aggressiveness and violence that manifested itself in this and so many other school shootings. Two primary reactions developed along party lines: liberals linked the violence to the widespread availability of guns, and conservatives linked it to moral decay in the culture.17 In the former camp, Rosie O’Donnell began openly campaigning on her talk show for a ban on handguns, even going so far as to openly berate guest Tom Selleck, on her May 19, 1999 show, for his ties to the National Rifle Association. In the latter camp, Dan Quayle attacked liberal groups promoting a cult of self-esteem in education that weakened school discipline. Both of these reactions, despite their obvious differences, do have something in common: they share a fundamental belief that the violence has arisen in the absence of (paternal) authority. As a result, they advocate extending the law—either through passing new gun-control legislation, on the one hand, or through providing a more rigid upbringing in the home, on the other—because they are premised on the conviction that violence emerges only when the law is absent.18 Without the law, according to this view, people feel free to do as they please, and doing what they please often includes shooting other people without any pangs of conscience.
It has, in fact, become a truism among conservatives to link the contemporary rise in aggressiveness and violence in contemporary society to the absence of prohibition and the decline of authority. The fight against aggressiveness is often couched in terms of parents and societal authority figures once again reasserting definite rules and laying down a strict prohibition. According to this logic, the sorry state of contemporary authority has produced subjects who don’t know that they must accept limitations and who refuse to compromise their own enjoyment for the sake of societal restrictions. We are experiencing so many outbreaks of aggressiveness, according to this view, because parents have not taught their children the word “no!”—or they haven’t been there to teach them this. If we want to avoid incidents like the mass killings at Columbine High School, we must have parents who are more present in the lives of their children. This position represents the prevailing conservative response not only to increases in aggressiveness and violence, but also to the society of enjoyment as a whole. And it has its basis in the widespread view that authority is our only possible salvation.
Columbine-style aggressiveness and violence, however, is not performed in defiance of authority (or in the absence of it) but in obedience to it. Symbolic authority in the society of enjoyment commands enjoyment, and thus when subjects react violently against the supposed theft of their enjoyment, they obey this imperative. School shootings are not the result of authority’s absence but its presence—its presence in the form of the imperative to enjoy. The problem lies in an excess of obedience—and an excess of authority—rather than a lack of it. In fact, Lacan even goes so far as to suggest that “social conformity” itself has a “tendency to induce aggressiveness in the subject.”19 By grasping that aggressiveness is grounded in widespread obedience rather than transgression, we can respond to the conservative calls for increased prohibition by laying bare their fundamental error. If the contemporary epidemic of obedience has gone largely unnoticed, this only indicates the extent to which it has successfully disguised itself as transgression.
There is a temptation today to view outbreaks of aggressiveness as subversive activity, as a challenge to the forces of power. Hence, certain Leftists, during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, hailed Slobodan Milosevic as a bastion of resistance to the hegemonic onslaught of global capital, thereby overlooking the nationalist and racist dimension of this “rebellion.” Similarly, some also embraced the two Columbine shooters as subversives, fighting against the power of the social order as it manifests itself in the high school caste system.20 Such interpretations of contemporary aggressiveness and its attendant violence succumb to the thinking of the perpetrators—that is, to their belief in the transgressive nature of their activity—failing to see that they remain wholly within the orbit of authority. Rather than putting the symbolic identity of the subjects at risk—and thus moving beyond the confines of symbolic authority—these actions reaffirm that identity—and thus reaffirm that authority as well.21
Incivility and aggressiveness seem to us as if they are fundamentally antisocial behaviors. When we experience outbursts of incivility or aggressiveness, we feel as if the social fabric is in the process of collapsing, as if we are descending into anarchy. But the contemporary uncivil or aggressive subject evinces, in most cases, an allegiance to the fundamental commandment of the society of enjoyment—the command to enjoy. We must reinterpret the incivility we encounter in light of this prevailing commandment. Subjects have become increasingly uncivil not because they have divested themselves from authority figures and social rules but because they have invested themselves most enthusiastically.
Whatever the underlying causes behind them, incivility and aggressiveness seem to have an unambiguous—which is to say, unambiguously negative—status. Of all the symptoms that characterize the society of commanded enjoyment, incivility and aggressiveness are clearly those that receive the most universal criticism. It is not only cultural critics that decry contemporary outbreaks of aggressiveness, but almost everyone living in this society. Whereas one might potentially see something appealing or liberatory in the transformation of paternal authority, the rise of the image, the shrinking of distance, or even the retreat into privacy, the same could not be said of incivility and aggressiveness. These symptoms seem to have no positive valence, and we cannot easily imagine someone who might celebrate their emergence.
Nonetheless, incivility and aggressiveness do have another side to them, a side that has remained largely unexplored. These symptoms are indicative of a subjective disposition within the society of enjoyment willing to challenge the dictates of symbolic authority. In this sense, contemporary incivility and aggressiveness hold out the possibility for producing radicalized subjects, subjects unwilling to accept injustice or a lack of freedom simply because symbolic power authorizes it. This dimension of subjectivity in the society of enjoyment manifests itself, for instance, in the protests that have met the recent meetings of the World Bank. Such protests stem from an ability to be uncivil and a refusal to accept enforced dissatisfaction that the turn to the society of enjoyment informs. The problem is, however, that we too often direct our incivility toward the wrong targets, not toward the figures of symbolic authority but toward the victims of it. The contemporary tendency toward incivility has the ability to assist us in contesting and freeing ourselves from symbolic authority, but only when we first recognize the extent of our allegiance to this authority today in the society of commanded enjoyment. Too often incivility is nothing more than the contemporary expression of complete docility.