Chapter Four
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 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 has disappeared.
What Baudrillard calls the obscene nature of the contemporary world is not the result of sexual liberation but of this destruction of the space for transcendence. In a society of prohibition, transcendence is predominantly imaginary—an illusory beyond—but it nonetheless provided a gap within the functioning of the social order so that everything did not have to be revealed. That is to say, imaginary transcendence sustained the Real gap within the functioning of the symbolic order. The illusion of a beyond allowed subjects to recognize the prevailing social order itself as limited, as not the only possible social terrain. The absence of the Real gap produces the obscenity of the society of enjoyment. As Baudrillard puts it, “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication.” 6 Theater and illusion sustain depth because they allow for the possibility of something hidden that remains behind the spectacle they present. Universal communication, in contrast, penetrates behind every illusion and exposes every secret. Obscenity is the result of this total exposure. Such total exposure is the sine qua non of the society of enjoyment. To keep something hidden is to violate the imperative to enjoy because the hidden object always embodies the enjoyment that we are currently missing. As a result, the society of enjoyment involves subjects in an unending parade of revelations of what the society of prohibition kept concealed.
The hidden object is, as we have seen, what Lacan calls the objet petit a. It is the object that holds out the promise of the ultimate jouissance for the subject. And yet, at the same time, it is an impossible object: it remains always just out of reach, which is why it must remain hidden. As Paul Verhaeghe puts it, “Object a lies beyond the signifier, it is the last term of desire which can never be expressed in signifiers.”7 If we gain access to the object, it necessarily ceases to be the object. No empirical object ever embodies the objet petit a. As Lacan points out, it is “this object that is never there, that is always situated elsewhere, that is always something else.”8 If, for instance, we find the long out-of-print book that we have been searching for in a series of used book stores, at the moment we find it the book loses its transcendent value for us and becomes just another book (albeit perhaps more treasured than others). In order for the book to remain our objet petit a, it must remain out of reach—missing. Finding the book would reveal that the book did not contain the secret enjoyment that we posited in it; it would not be the missing piece of the puzzle. It embodies this secret enjoyment only in its hidden form, but in that form, this enjoyment remains beyond our grasp. This is why we are continually trying to gain access to the hidden object in hopes of cornering the enjoyment that always eludes us. Insofar as this object promises the ultimate enjoyment, it is imaginary, but insofar as it constantly eludes us and haunts us with its absence, it is Real. Today, with the impending elimination of distance, we move closer to losing this Real dimension of the objet petit a.
Just as the experience of cyberspace indicates the contemporary predominance of the imaginary, it also illustrates the loss of the Real. Cyberspace eliminates distance not so much through the instant communication that it provides as through its ability to fill in the gaps within any symbolic structure. In her encomium on cyberspace, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray makes this clear, though she sees it as one of the main benefits of the new technology. For Murray, cyberspace fundamentally alters the narrative process in exciting and beneficial ways. While interacting with a cyberspace narrative—or cybernarrative—we break from the confining nature of traditional narrative and become free to move both forward and backward, exploring fully each possible turn. This gives readers of cybernarratives considerable freedom. According to Murray, the medium allows readers “to decide for themselves when the story is over.”9 The freedom that cybernarrative provides also radically transforms the idea of a narrative conclusion. Whereas traditional narrative achieves closure with its endpoint, cybernarrative does not. According to Murray, cyberspace “could offer an encyclopedic fictional world whose possibilities would only be exhausted at the point of the interactor’s saturation with the core conflict.”10 Which is to say, in cyberspace narrative ends when one grows weary of following its possibilities rather than at any definite point. This lack of a decisive endpoint means that the interactor can explore all narrative possibilities without constraint and without end, thereby eliminating all gaps in the narrative. In this way, the flexibility and freedom that cyberspace offers has the effect of closing the space of the Real.
Not only does cyberspace fill in the gaps within the narrative forms produced within this medium, but it also has this effect on other narrative forms when it interacts with them. This becomes apparent in Murray’s vision of cyberspace supplementing narratives from other media, such as television serials. In this scenario, cyberspace would allow viewers to explore aspects of a serial that remained unexplored in the televised narrative. If, to choose Murray’s example, viewers of ER wish to know more than the serial reveals about the relationship between a doctor and a nurse who are romantically involved, they could explore this relationship through cyberspace, visiting the couple at home, following them on dates, etc. Through these new avenues for exploration, cyberspace would permit the serial viewer access to the empty spaces in the serial. Murray sees this as one of the great advances of this technology. As she says, “By filling out the holes in the dramatic narrative, holes that prevent viewers from fully believing in the characters, and by presenting situations that do not resolve themselves within the rhythms of series television, the hyperserial archive could extend the melodramatic broadcast drama into a more complex narrative world.”11 Murray is sanguine about the possibility of “filling out the holes in the dramatic narrative” because she sees that it increases the realism of traditional narrative, allowing it to approach the complexity of life itself. But she fails to notice what one misses without these holes: by filling in narrative gaps (the Real) with imaginary plenitude, one loses the space for the objet petit a.
Sustaining the gaps for the objet petit a becomes completely unacceptable under the reign of the imperative to enjoy. In response to this imperative, we are continually drawn to the process of exposing the hidden in order to access its secret enjoyment. Nothing can remain in a transcendent position because this indicates that an opportunity for enjoyment is being wasted. Exposure of the hidden promises enjoyment, which is why so-called reality television has such appeal today. Reality television shows such as Survivor and web sites that offer a continuous view of a person’s daily life appeal to us because they provide a look at what we cannot ordinarily see—the aspects of daily life of other people that usually remain hidden to us. On a “reality” web site, we can see what people look like while sleeping, masturbating, brushing their teeth, and so on. We can see the underside of life that we otherwise cannot access. We are drawn to this exposure of the hidden because we believe that we will discover the objet petit a of the people we watch, the secret of their enjoyment. But reality television and web sites inevitably disappoint us because the exposure of the secret does not expose the enjoyment; on the contrary, it destroys it. In Freud as Philosopher, Richard Boothby points out that every attempt to reveal the objet a—to show it all—necessarily fails to produce the enjoyment that it promises. He claims, “The result of the ‘show it all’ strategy is to create even more intense hunger for the thing that cannot be imaged: the objet a. The more you see, the less you find what you are really looking for. The ‘proof’ of the Lacanian view lies in the compulsiveness with which the consumer of pornography moves from one girlie image to another, to another, and so on.”12
The more we seek the objet petit a through the act of exposure, the further it retreats from us because what we desire is not the object itself but the object in its absence. As Lacan points out:
What is the subject trying to see? What he is trying to see, make no mistake, is the object as absence. What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain. There he will phantasize any magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if on the other side there is only a hairy athlete. What he is looking for is not, as one says, the phallus—but precisely its absence, hence the preeminence of certain forms as objects of his search.13
Rendering the object present eliminates precisely what is appealing about it—its Real dimension, that dimension of the object that doesn’t fit smoothly into our world of sense—and foregrounds its imaginary status. And yet, the imperative to enjoy compels us to uncover this evanescent object, to unlock its secret. Thus, we find ourselves in an impossible position—driven to seek enjoyment in a way that destroys the very possibility of enjoyment. As we eliminate the transcendent space of the objet petit a in the effort to obey the command to enjoy, we lose the space through which we might enjoy. This loss of transcendent space is one of the symptoms of the turn to a society of enjoyment and one of the reasons why we aren’t really enjoying in the society of enjoyment. It manifests itself not only in our everyday experience but within contemporary theoretical and philosophical work as well.
PHILOSOPHIES OF IMMANENCE
Not only does the society of enjoyment involve a loss of transcendent space in our daily experience, it also tends to produce theories and philosophies of immanence, theories that militate against transcendence. By looking at these theories, we can see another indication of the pervasiveness of the logic of the command to enjoy, at least insofar as it manifests itself in the loss of transcendence that appears in both continental and analytic philosophy. Despite a few efforts to bridge the gap that separates them, continental and analytic philosophy today occupy separate worlds. The ocean that separates them seems an apt metaphor for the distance between their concerns. But there is one point on which these two divergent lines of thought come together: not coincidentally, they both eschew the idea of transcendence, the idea that we can “touch the Real.” Within both continental and analytic philosophy, the sense that there is no transcendence predominates as the critical doxa. In both cases, it manifests itself in the rejection of metaphysics, the rejection of a subject that raises itself above its milieu in order to reflect upon it. The main figures of late-twentieth-century continental philosophy (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, etc.), while diverging considerably in their thought, take common aim at transcendence, especially the transcendence of the subject. This is because, for one reason, transcendence implies authority and mastery, raising oneself above what one transcends. Transcendence violates the temporality and finitude of existence, positing a moment that escapes the confines of finitude. To correctly apprehend our finitude, according to this line of thought, it is necessary to produce—or at least aim at—a wholly immanent philosophy.
The refusal of transcendence becomes immediately apparent in Derridean deconstruction. Derrida’s insistence on différance represents his effort to avoid any philosophy of transcendence. Différance is what can never be reduced to meaningfulness in the signifier, what eludes a final closure. Thus, Derrida claims that différance, in contrast to philosophical concepts, escapes the pitfall of transcendence. As he notes:
Différance is not. It is not a present being, however excellent, unique, principal, or transcendent. It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. And it is always in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach différance with wishing to reign, believing that one sees it aggrandize itself with a capital letter.14
Not only is différance itself not transcendent, but it also has the effect of subverting every attempt at transcendence. In fact, Derrida stresses différance precisely because it is the moment that renders transcendence impossible and reveals its imposture. For Derrida, moments of transcendence within the symbolic structure are purely imaginary, never Real, because the Real can never be isolated as such. Deconstruction is first and foremost a practice of uncovering the illusions and pretensions of the “transcendent.” In doing so, deconstruction works theoretically to the same ends as the imperative to enjoy: it deconstructs every beyond—and thus all distance that might prove a barrier to enjoyment. Deconstruction did not, to be sure, emerge as Derrida’s attempt to heed the command to enjoy, but part of its popularity (a popularity that lives on, despite the fact that there are very few who explicitly identify themselves as deconstructionists) derives from its correlation with the underlying logic of the society of commanded enjoyment and the latter’s rejection of transcendence.
Though the link between deconstruction and immanence is dramatic, it is with Foucault that the rejection of transcendence reaches its apotheosis. For Foucault, power functions immanently, and thus the only proper critique of power is an immanent critique—what he calls a genealogy. To invoke transcendence in response to power, as part of a fight against power, represents a failure to grasp how power works: by invoking transcendence, one falls for the fundamental illusion of power—that transcendence is possible. Power dupes us into investing ourselves in ways of transcending it, and in doing so, we become the perfect subjects of power. To put it in Lacanian terms, power holds out the idea of the Real in order to blind us to the functioning of the symbolic. The Real is never anything but an imaginary illusion, created in order to seduce us, and it remains, as such, fundamentally impossible. Though Lacan accepts, in a sense, this Foucaultian idea that the Real is impossible, he also insists that the impossible can happen, that it only seems impossible from the standpoint of the symbolic order and its constraints on our thought. Through the act of going beyond this order, the subject can encounter the impossible Real. As he says directly in Seminar XVII (and elsewhere), “the Real is the impossible. Not because it is a simple obstacle that we bump our heads against, but because it is the logical obstacle that, in the symbolic, is expressed as impossible. It is from there that the real arises.”15 This psychoanalytic belief in the possibility of the impossible touches on, for Foucault, the fundamental error of psychoanalysis, which responds to the Law (and the repression it demands) by aiding the subject in uncovering repressed desire, in struggling to transcend the Law and its effects. Through this process, Foucault sees psychoanalysis as unwittingly assisting power through the production of (a necessarily illusory) transcendence. However, in giving up the idea of transcendence, Foucault also gives up the hope of ever uncovering the roots of power. This is why Joan Copjec sees Foucault’s refusal of transcendence as the fundamental stumbling block within his thought.
Foucault aims at conceiving how power arises, but his studies consistently stop short of arriving at this. Copjec claims, “despite the fact that [Foucault] realizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power’s institution, he cannot avail himself of the means of doing so and thus, by default, ends up limiting that regime to the relations that obtain within it.”16 This limitation stems from his refusal of any notion of transcendence, “his disallowance of any reference to a principle or a subject that ‘transcends’ the regime of power he analyzes.”17 Without the moment of transcendence, one cannot grasp the regime of power in its incipience, and hence Foucault necessarily posits the regime of power as always already existing, which makes any attempt to counter it fundamentally impossible. The result of this rejection of transcendence is Foucault’s historicism—a mode of analysis that eschews the search for truth in favor of uncovering the presuppositions of regimes of truth, in favor of “pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.”18 This type of uncovering of historical presuppositions is one of Foucault’s chief legacies today, and it indicates the extent to which any idea of transcendence has become an anathema.
In the wake of Foucault, contemporary cultural criticism has largely taken up this contextualizing mode. Today, the predominant response to any articulation of truth claims is a demand for the historicization of these claims: one must reveal the cultural context out of which they emerge. This has become the fundamental operation of contemporary cultural studies. In The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Žižek describes this intellectual situation: “the basic feature of cultural studies is that they are no longer able or ready to confront religious, scientific or philosophical works in terms of their own inherent Truth, but reduce them to a product of historical circumstances, to an object of anthropologico-psychoanalytic interpretation.”19 This reduction of every truth claim to the circumstances of its enunciation represents the ultimate rejection of transcendence: nothing escapes the immanence of history itself. According to this prevailing historicism, no truth claim ever touches the Real; instead, the very pretension to truth is itself imaginary. The popularity of this kind of historicism today indicates the extent to which transcendence has become theoretically untenable. It also highlights the link between contemporary theory and the command to enjoy: the operations of both work to reduce what appears as transcendence to conditions of immanence.
Perhaps even more revealing, however, is the fact that main currents in analytic philosophy share the opposition to transcendence popular within cultural studies. Analytic philosophy tends to see cultural studies and continental philosophy as embarked on a project closer to “poetry” than philosophy. 20 And yet, contemporary analytic philosophy also rejects the idea of transcendence, embracing instead a philosophy of immanence (albeit a different kind of immanence than that of continental philosophy and cultural studies). Here, the rejection of transcendence is not tied primarily to ethical or political considerations but is, as A. J. Ayer puts it, “a matter of logic.”21 Ayer cannot imagine a “valid process of reasoning” that could lead a philosopher “to the conception of a transcendent reality.”22 On the basis of logic, one cannot transcend the phenomenal world, the world of language. One cannot arrive logically at the Real. In fact, the very attempt to do so results in absurdity: “the labours of those who have striven to describe [transcendence] have all been devoted to the production of nonsense.”23 For Ayer, as for most analytic philosophers, the transcendent is akin to the nonsensical precisely because it would transcend the world of sense. As beings of language, our thought remains confined within the language that structures it. This is why W. V. Quine points out that the task of philosophy is not speculating but “focusing on words, or how they are learned and used, and how they are related to things.”24 Since no moments of transcendence exist within the structure of language (or logic), philosophy must be practical and devote itself to concerns immanent to language.
Already in 1963, Theodor Adorno saw this shared rejection of transcendence in logical positivism and Martin Heidegger, the main precursors of today’s analytic and continental philosophies. According to Adorno, “In both positivism and Heidegger—at least in his later work—speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.” 25 Both the positivists and Heidegger resist speculation because it suggests transcendence. Metaphysics becomes suspect because it implies an ability to gain a distance from one’s situation or experience. It imagines that distance is possible: for the positivists, this distance has no philosophical justification—it is a flight of fancy—and it only serves to obscure the immediately given empirical facts; for Heidegger, this distance indicates a flight from one’s being-in-the-world and a forgetting of Being. Both privilege proximity. As Adorno puts it, “Being, in whose name Heidegger’s philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him—as a pure, self-presentation to passive consciousness—just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists.”26 The efforts of the logical positivists and Heidegger to escape distance through escaping transcendence not only prefigure those of contemporary analytic and continental philosophy but also prefigure the contemporary society of enjoyment as a whole, which demands the elimination of distance. Just as the web-cam shows all and eliminates the space for the objet petit a, the logical positivists and Heidegger (and their philosophical inheritors) eliminate this space theoretically.
In this sense, both the logical positivists and Heidegger produce symptomatic philosophies, lines of thought that are suggestive of the turn toward a command to enjoy. But if we can see the later Heidegger’s philosophy of Being as a symptom of the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the imperative to enjoy, the same is not true of the early Heidegger of Being and Time. In that work, Heidegger offers the first extended expression of his rejection of metaphysics and its transcendence. Nonetheless, Being and Time stresses the irreducible significance of Dasein’s encounter with death. For the early Heidegger, Dasein’s individual death is precisely what cannot be reduced to any other event; it is fundamentally singular. As such, it introduces precisely the sense of distance that is vanishing in the midst of the demand for enjoyment.
BEYOND THE FINAL FRONTIER
The subject’s relationship to death undergoes a substantive transformation in the turn from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Despite the latter’s reduction of everything to immanence, the one transcendent moment that no amount of communication would seem to be able to eliminate is that of death. Death is a moment that transcends the immanence of life, indicating a radically inaccessible beyond (even if this beyond is nothingness itself). It acts as a barrier that every subject must endure, and it is the necessity of this barrier that, for Heidegger, confirms our being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, Heidegger sees the inevitability of death as the one nonrelational moment within existence. That is to say, unlike every other moment of life, universal communication cannot reduce death to the level of the ordinary; it proves an insurmountable barrier. As Heidegger famously puts it, “The nonrelational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It reveals the fact that any being-together-with what is taken care of and any being-with the others fails when one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being is at stake.”27 Death provides the subject with an experience of necessity—a necessary barrier—that constitutes the subject as such and that cannot be communicated or relativized. As such, it represents the moment of transcendence in the midst of immanence, a moment that universal immanence cannot include.28 Subjects experience their own death as a fundamental limit.
However, at a time, as Baudrillard says, “when everything is available”29 and all distance evaporates, even the necessity of death disappears. Death becomes something contingent, not constitutive. One might encounter it—and then again one might not. The controlling idea in a world without distance is not that death doesn’t exist—one is confronted with it all the time in undeniable forms—but that it is avoidable. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes at length this attitude toward death (an attitude he of course labels “inauthentic”). According to Heidegger, “characteristic talk speaks about death as a constantly occurring ‘case.’ It treats it as something always already ‘real,’ and veils its character of possibility and concomitantly the two factors belonging to it, that it is nonrelational and cannot-be-bypassed.”30 We experience death as the result of “errors” in human calculation or behavior, rather than a moment constitutive for human existence proper. When death is just a “case” or the result of certain “behavior patterns,” I can focus entirely on my behavior that might prevent it—diet, exercise, “healthy living” in general—and not on the possibility that “cannot-be-bypassed,” the necessity that cannot be evaded.31 In this way, the idea of an insurmountable barrier disappears.
Today, often when someone dies, we tend to look for the analogue to the fatal illness in their 'font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:blue'>32 By linking death to a specific behavior, we deontologize it; we make it seem as if death is only one possibility for life, a possibility that we ourselves—or someone, someday—might manage to escape. The same thinking applies to aging as well: all the formulas for the conquest of aging (skin creme, the baldness pill, plastic surgery, low fat diets) implicitly view aging itself as just one option among many. When we view death as a “case” or an “option,” we reject its necessity as a limit. Death no longer indicates a moment of transcendence that we must encounter. According to Baudrillard, “We are dealing with an attempt to construct an entirely positive world, a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion, of every sort of evil and negativity, exempt from death itself.”33
In the society of enjoyment, death becomes an increasingly horrific—and at the same time, an increasingly hidden—event. Not only does death imply the cessation of one’s being, but it also indicates a failure of enjoyment. Death is above all a limit to one’s enjoyment: to accept one’s mortality means simultaneously to accept a limit on enjoyment. This is why it is not at all coincidental that with the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy we would see an increase in efforts to eliminate the necessity of death. Today, human cell researchers are working toward the day when death will exist only as an “accident,” through the modification of the way in which cells regulate their division and creating cells that can divide limitlessly. As Gregg Easterbrook points out, the introduction of such cells into the human body would not create eternal life, but it would make death something no longer necessary: “Therapeutic use of ‘immortal’ cells would not confer unending life (even people who don’t age could die in accidents, by violence and so on) but might dramatically extend the life-span.”34 The point isn’t that death would be entirely eliminated, but that we might eliminate its necessary status as a barrier to or a limit on enjoyment.
This potential elimination of death as a necessary limit to enjoyment follows directly from the logic of the society of enjoyment. As long as death remains necessary, it stands, as Heidegger recognizes, as a fundamental barrier to the proliferation of enjoyment. If subjects know that they must die, they also know that they lack—and lack becomes intolerable in face of a command to enjoy oneself. But without the idea of a necessary death, every experience of lack loses the quality of necessity. Subjects view lack not as something to be endured for the sake of a future enjoyment, but as an intolerable burden. In the society of enjoyment, subjects refuse to tolerate lack precisely because lack, like death, has now lost its veneer of necessity.
TRAGEDY, TWENTIETH-CENTURY STYLE
The command to enjoy is at the same time a command to overcome all distance. Hence, in order to forestall the experience of lack, an ethos of constant motion develops. Subjects speed themselves up and thus work to overcome all distance between themselves and what they want. The faster one moves, the more one eliminates the very possibility of dissatisfaction. Rather than enduring a gap between desire and its object—rather than experiencing desire as such—the contemporary subject feels this gap as unbearable, as a failure to enjoy (and as a violation of the command to enjoy). Thus, distance threatens to disappear in the society of enjoyment. As Paul Virilio puts it, “To eradicate the gap, to put an end to the scandal of the interval of space and time that used to separate man so unacceptably from his objective: all this is well on the way to being achieved.”35 This “interval of space and time” is disappearing today because its very existence indicates that we have failed to enjoy, that we have accommodated ourselves to lack. Nonstop motion becomes our way of trying to assure ourselves that we are not lacking—that is, nonenjoying—subjects.
This turn to nonstop motion to avoid the experience of lack or distance makes itself felt in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. Kushner wrote Angels in response to the AIDS epidemic, an epidemic that would seem to offer conclusive proof of the persistence of distance between contemporary subjects and their objects of desire. That is to say, AIDS seems to indicate that absence and lack remain operative even in the society of enjoyment. AIDS, as an epidemic that reels beyond human control, should reveal that there is a limit to our enjoyment and that the experience of complete enjoyment remains elusive. In short, it should reveal the Real deadlock that continues to haunt all efforts to symbolize it. The importance of Kushner’s play, however, lies in its ability to show that this is not the case, through its depiction of how the society of enjoyment responds—or doesn’t respond—to AIDS.
Angels in America tells the story of the impact of the AIDS epidemic on a variety of characters, some afflicted with AIDS and others reacting to their affliction. The play centers around a New York City gay couple, Louis Iron-son and Prior Walter, and Part I (Millenium Approaches) begins with the discovery that Prior has AIDS. Unable to cope with his lover’s illness, Louis leaves Prior, and, desperate to forget about his former lover, he starts a relationship with Joe Pitt, a Mormon law clerk who works for Roy Cohn. Roy, like Prior, discovers that he has AIDS early in the play. Through Louis, Joe discovers his homosexuality, which prompts his wife, Harper, to leave him. Prior, meanwhile, as he becomes sicker, receives a visitation from an angel, who announces that Prior is a prophet, which is the event that ends Part I of the play. In Part II (Perestroika), Belize, a friend of Prior (and a former drag queen), becomes Roy’s nurse during his hospital stay. Because of Belize, Roy’s fate intersects with Prior’s. Belize convinces Roy to demand AZT from his doctor, which allows Belize to take some of Roy’s supply of the drug for Prior. Prior, summoned to heaven by the angels, refuses the prophetic mission that the angels have for him—which is advocating an end to motion and progress. The angels hope to put an end to human progress, because this constant forward motion has even infected God—prompting him to leave heaven—and the angels believe that if the humans stop moving, God will return to them. The play ends, after the death of Roy, with an embrace of progress by Prior (and many of the other characters in the play), a thorough rejection of the angels’ plea.
For Kushner, our failure to address the AIDS crisis results from an inability to confront the Real and from the use of motion and speed in order to deny distance. To acknowledge what AIDS represents would mean acknowledging the inevitable failure of motion and acknowledging that something (i.e., the power of AIDS) remains a transcendent beyond. There can be no American tragedy—no proper response to the AIDS crisis—because tragedy is impossible in a society of constant motion, which American society has become.36 The genesis of this motion, as Harper recognizes near the end of Part II, is an experience of dissatisfaction. She says, “Devastation. That’s what makes people migrate, build things. Heartbroken people do it, people who have lost love.”37 As Angels shows, movement has become the fundamental ethos of contemporary American society; we must keep moving in the face of any dissatisfaction in order that we might escape it. Motion allows us to conceive of devastation—and the dissatisfaction it produces—as something we might leave behind, provided we move fast enough.
The enjoyment that so many Americans derive from driving their cars on the open road—“leaving their cares behind”—exemplifies this idea. While moving rapidly, one can readily imagine that one can overcome all distance and eliminate the gap that distance creates. This conception of the fast-moving car as a way of escaping dissatisfaction gets played out in almost every “road movie” that Hollywood produces. In Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), for instance, Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) take to the road after Louise shoots a man who attempted to rape Thelma. Even though the police finally catch up to them, the movement of the car provides a sense of respite for both Thelma and Louise, a sense of respite that lasts for as long as they remain moving. This movement prompts Thelma to tell Louise that, for the first time in her life, she feels “awake.” To be “awake” is to be enjoying oneself, and the movement in the car makes it possible for Thelma to enjoy in a way she never has before. The ending of the film illustrates this even further: cornered by the police, Thelma and Louise decide to drive their car into the Grand Canyon—to die in motion—rather than to allow the police to put a stop to their movement by arresting them. In their attempt to escape dissatisfaction through motion, Thelma and Louise exemplify contemporary subjectivity. This impulse to move, to eliminate distance, makes it impossible to recognize the crisis of the AIDS epidemic, which represents a Real that movement cannot outrun.
The failure to experience the Real of the AIDS crisis, the failure to experience the AIDS crisis as the trauma of human existence itself, reaches its apotheosis in the most memorable figure in Kushner’s play—the character of Roy Cohn. We first see Roy, in the second scene of Millennium Approaches, sitting at his desk and yet, at the same time, in an exaggerated state of motion. As Kushner’s stage directions indicate, “Roy conducts business with great energy, impatience and sensual abandon: gesticulating, shouting, cajoling, crooning, playing the phone, receiver and hold button with virtuosity and love.”38 Completely committed to nonstop movement and activity, he tells Joe, “I wish I was an octopus, a fucking octopus. Eight loving arms and all those suckers” (1:11). More arms means more possibility for activity and motion. All of this frenetic activity—and all of Roy’s connections to the activity of the powerful in the country—is driven by Roy’s avoidance of dissatisfaction. Insofar as he keeps moving, Roy can convince himself that dissatisfaction plagues other people, not him. He knows that there is dissatisfaction in existence—as he tells Joe, “Life is full of horror” (1:58)—but he believes that he (and a certain few) can outrun it. This becomes even more apparent in Roy’s response to the news that he has AIDS.
Power, for Roy, means being plugged in to a movement that can remove him from any dissatisfaction that he encounters. When he learns that he has AIDS—that is, when he learns that he is going to die very soon and, much more importantly, that his homosexuality may become public—Roy immediately invokes his connections to power in order to deny this.39 In the most famous line of the play, he tells Henry, his doctor, “AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (1:46), thereby fleeing the dissatisfaction that he associates with the disease and with homosexuality. Roy believes that through nonstop motion he can eliminate all sense of lack. Whereas Louis flees lack via his own personal movement, Roy does so through his identification with the movement of history itself. This kind of identification acts as a bulwark against his own mortality (i.e., his own failure to enjoy). He proclaims to Ethel Rosenberg, “I’m immortal. Ethel.[. . .] I have forced my way into history. I ain’t never gonna die” (1:112, Kushner’s emphasis). Entering into the great motion of history itself—what Roy sees himself doing here—represents the ethos of perpetual motion taken to its endpoint. When one enters into the nonstop motion of history, one enters into eternal enjoyment: distance no longer infects one in this domain.40
In a society of enjoyment, subjects work to avoid anything that erects a barrier to enjoyment. This is why, as Roy Cohn recognizes, contemporary America has no use for those who are sick or aged. He tells Ethel Rosenberg:
The worst thing about being sick in America, Ethel, is you are booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for sick. Look at Reagan: He’s so healthy he’s hardly human, he’s a hundred if he’s a day, he takes a slug in his chest and two days later he’s out west riding ponies in his PJ’s. I mean who does that? That’s America. It’s just no country for the infirm. (2:62)
America “is no country for the infirm” because infirmity indicates a failure of enjoyment. To be sick is thus to be guilty. The sick illustrate the persistence of dissatisfaction and distance within the society of enjoyment. In acknowledging the sick, one acknowledges lack as well. Hence, like Roy Cohn, we opt instead for nonstop motion, for trying to eliminate the distance that the sick would introduce into the contemporary world. Through this focus on Roy Cohn (clearly the most compelling character in Angels), Kushner demonstrates the power and appeal of the ethos of motion: it allows us to cover over the experience of dissatisfaction, to imagine ourselves in a state of complete enjoyment.
COSMIC REACTIONARIES
Though the society of enjoyment works to eliminate distance, it also spawns an opposite movement—an attempt to restore distance and transcendence. This accounts for the contemporary rise in fundamentalism, which emerges in response to the absence of distance. Fundamentalism seeks to restore the central role of prohibition in society and thereby restore a sense of distance and of a transcendent beyond. Both religious and nationalist versions of fundamentalism raise their central value (e.g., ethnic identity, religious practices) to a transcendent level: it cannot be captured through universal communication. In order to sustain this kind of elevation, fundamentalism attacks the nonstop motion such as we see in Angels in America. Nonstop motion has the effect of breaking down every barrier, and fundamentalism needs at least one barrier.
In Angels in America, the play’s titular characters represent this fundamentalist position. They call for an end to human motion because this motion has driven God out of his transcendent position. The angel that summons Prior to the “Great Work” comes to him because the human proclivity for motion has wrought havoc throughout creation, even in heaven itself. The angel tells Prior, “In creating You, Our Father-Lover unleashed Sleeping Creation’s Potential for Change. In YOU the Virus of TIME began!” (1:49). With their constant motion forward, humans disrupted the peaceful stasis of heaven. As Prior himself puts it, “As the human race began to progress, travel, intermingle, everything started to come unglued. Manifest first as tremors in Heaven” (2:50). Not only did human motion disrupt heavenly stillness, it also changed God. God became “humanized” and began to imitate the motion of humans. According to the angel, “He began to leave us! Bored with His Angels, Bewitched by Humanity, In Mortifying Imitation of You, his least creation, He would sail off on Voyages, no knowing where” (2:50). And finally, on April 18, 1906, the day of the San Francisco earthquake, God left heaven altogether.41 The departure of God from heaven signifies—at least, in the view of the angel—that human motion has completely eradicated all transcendence.
The angel comes to Prior in order to anoint him the prophet of God’s return, of the end of motion. The angel commands, “YOU HAVE DRIVEN HIM AWAY! YOU MUST STOP MOVING!” (2:52, Kushner’s emphasis). The angel (and the other angels whose interests he represents) hope that by arresting motion, humans will undo the changes which that motion has caused. When Prior tells him of this vision, Belize correctly identifies the angel’s position as that of a “cosmic reactionary.” He accuses Prior of being “afraid of the future, afraid of time. Longing to go backwards so bad you made this angel up, a cosmic reactionary” (2:55). What is attractive about the reactionary mantra is its promise of a world with an end to perpetual motion—and with that, a “return” to a world of stability and distance.
The problem with the fundamentalist attempt to re-create a world of distance is that it itself emerges as a way of enjoying in the guise of its opposite. That is to say, contemporary fundamentalism is not so much an alternative to the command for enjoyment as an attempt to comply with it. The fundamentalist recognizes that the lack of enjoyment that plagues this society of enjoyment; he or she recognizes that the command to enjoy bars enjoyment much more effectively than the prohibition of enjoyment. Hence, one turns to fundamentalism in an effort to rediscover the enjoyment that the society of enjoyment commands and yet militates against. Fundamentalism is thus not the enemy of enjoyment but a desperate attempt to unleash it. This is why the stories about the September 11th suicide bombers’ activities the night before the attacks should not surprise us. If these fundamentalists indulged in the very decadence of the society of enjoyment that they were going to attack the next day (drinking, going to strip clubs, etc.), this testifies to the kinship between fundamentalism and the society of enjoyment. Both are structured around maximizing one’s jouissance. In this sense, the fundamentalist alternative is no alternative at all. It evinces an underlying fealty to the society of enjoyment against which it supposedly constitutes itself.
We can see this dimension of fundamentalism in Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty, an argument for restoring traditional sexual prohibitions in contemporary society. In attacking the culture of sexual liberation and its destruction of the intersubjective distance that modesty provides, Shalit implicitly confronts the society of enjoyment and condemns the evanescence of clear limits within this society. A Return to Modesty argues for a return to the vanished society of prohibition and its demand for the elimination—or at least the curtailment—of enjoyment. As Shalit says, “Maybe instead of learning to overcome repression, we should be prolonging it.”42 Despite this call for a return to prohibition, Shalit’s justification for returning to a society of prohibition betrays her underlying allegiance to a society of enjoyment. While on the one hand Shalit insists that we must promote modesty and prohibit enjoyment, on the other hand the basis for her argument for modesty lies in the enjoyment that it promises. According to Shalit, the fundamental problem with the society of enjoyment is its failure to provide enjoyment: “without any restraint and without any rules, we just don’t have as much fun.”43 Hence, the return to prohibition becomes simply a better way of facilitating this enjoyment—a better way of obeying the imperative to enjoy. No authentic advocate of prohibition would put the claim this way. For the genuine partisan of prohibition, the prohibition is not a vehicle for enjoyment; it must be adopted and obeyed purely for its own sake. In abandoning this absolutist ground, today’s proponents of prohibition betray their underlying investment in enjoyment. As Shalit puts it, “the most compelling rationale for a return to modesty is our discovery that our culture of immodesty isn’t, finally, as sexy as we thought it was going to be.”44 Shalit bases her argument for a “return to modesty” on this claim that modesty, not sexual liberation, is the real key to enjoyment. This is the instructive feature of Shalit’s book. It reveals that subjects turn to the fundamentalism that Shalit and others offer not because it restores a limit on enjoyment—not because it seriously promises renewed distance—but because it promises an enjoyment beyond any limit, which is to say, a complete absence of distance.
Angels avoids falling for this fundamentalist trap, but it does depict fundamentalism as the only possible alternative to the society of enjoyment. Though Angels is a play about the angels choosing Prior as their prophet, it is, finally, a rejection of their plea for return and an embrace of progress—an embrace of the motion that erases distance. Even though Prior recognizes the problems attending nonstop motion, he feels, in the end, as if he has no option but to endorse the idea of motion and progress. Not to do so would be to side with the forces of conservatism and reaction, forces that want to turn the world to stone, to ossify our lives. But in doing so, what distinguishes Prior from Roy Cohn? Don’t both of them, in the last instance, come down on the side of nonstop motion? No matter what we may think of Prior, his embrace of motion does place him clearly in Roy’s camp, leaving us with a puzzling situation. The problem is an insoluble one, precisely because it is a product of the very way in which the play establishes the alternatives. The dilemma, as the play sets it up, is either/or: either one chooses motion or one chooses stasis; there is no third way.
The choice between motion (erasing distance) and stasis (reestablishing distance) is an antinomy of the society of enjoyment. Given the two (false) choices in the play, it is not difficult to see why Prior elects for motion, proclaiming to the angel repeatedly, “I want more life” (2:135). The phrase “more life”—which becomes, at the close of the play, something like the mantra of Angels—illustrates in a capsulized form why Angels exemplifies the society of enjoyment. The demand for “more life” is a demand for more enjoyment—an unwitting attempt to comply with the duty to enjoy. If fundamentalism doesn’t provide an authentic alternative, it would seem as if Kushner is right. Under the circumstances, opting for “more life” looks like the best we can do. But this represents one of the great triumphs of the society of enjoyment: it so circumscribes our alternatives that we cannot imagine what a way out would look like.
Angels in America can depict no alternative to conformism or fundamentalism because of the very elimination of distance to which the play is responding. Distance—the existence of a gap within the symbolic order—allows us to grasp the possibility of an alternative. But today all alternatives seem purely imaginary; they never appear to touch the Real. This reduction of the Real to the imaginary and the symbolic makes it increasingly difficult to make sense of our experience. We can discover meaning only through reference to some foundational point at which the sliding of signification stops—a point where the Real seems to make itself felt within the symbolic order. Without a sense of this point of exception within our system of signification, we lose the ability to universalize, which is the key to discovering meaning. Thus, the society of enjoyment is a society in which one must labor to find meaning.