Abstract
In this chapter I compare the garbage on the internet to the garbage in Lacan’s texts. I take as my cultural object the 2018 film The Cleaners (Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block, dirs.), which depicts social media content moderators working in Manila, Phillippines. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of objects in the Encore seminar, I then discuss actual garbage, digital waste, and the extraneous verbiage generated by different editions of Lacan’s seminars. These different forms of garbage can be thought of in terms of the phallic object (Φ: a garbage dump, the internet—or Lacan’s text); which however does not hold any truth or knowledge, and so is also (Ⱥ), a signifier of lack in the Other; arriving at trash as the objet petit a.
Thanks especially to Marc Acherman (Langara College), whose discussion of Lacan’s three objects, in a PhD qualifying exam almost ten years ago, were very helpful to this chapter. My thanks to Eric Abalajon, who did a sensitivity read of this chapter vis-à-vis its discussion of the Philippines. As always in my writing on Lacan, I have benefited greatly from the collective reading experience of Vancouver’s Lacan Salon, since 2007.
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Notes
- 1.
Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block, The Cleaners (documentary film) (Berlin: Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion et al., 2018). See also “The Trauma Floor: The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America,” which provides the following chilling anecdote: “The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: ‘I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.’” My thanks to Sun Ha Hong for this reference. Casey Newton, “The Trauma Floor: The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America,” Verge, February 25, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona (accessed July 22, 2019).
- 2.
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22.
- 3.
Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 223n.
- 4.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973, trans. Cormac Gallagher, from unedited French manuscripts (Eastbourne, UK: Antony Rowe, 2010), http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-20-Encore.pdf (accessed July 19, 2019).
- 5.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious, 1957–1958, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 450–51. See also Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 104–39.
- 6.
Here, in addition to the Gallagher translation of Encore noted above, I also rely on Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998). For a discussion of the editing histories of the Seminars, please see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: A Biography, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 529–34.
- 7.
See, for more on poubellication, Jean-Claude Milner’s intervention in Alain Badiou, Lacan, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 210–211.
- 8.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 90.
- 9.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 90–91; Lacan, Encore, trans. Gallagher, 172.
- 10.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 90.
- 11.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 95. Please see also, for a discussion of Lacan’s formalization and theories of the state, Anna Kornbluh, “States of Psychoanalysis: Formalization and the Space of the Political.” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (2016), https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/623989 (accessed July 19, 2019); and Suzanne Barnard, “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York, 2002), 171–85.
- 12.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 94.
- 13.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 94.
- 14.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 94–95.
- 15.
In the Greek and Latin, respectively, hupokeimenon and subiectum constitute the etymologies of the theoretical notion of the subject, both in terms of a basis or platform (hupokeimenon) and that which is subjected (subiectum). See Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), entry on “subject.”
- 16.
Chiesa further breaks down the objet petit a into five overlapping functions: as “imaginary representation of lack,” as “detachable part-object,” as “real lack prior to its imaginarization,” as “enigmatic desire of the (m)Other,” and as agalma (Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, 161–63).
- 17.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 96–97. The transferential status of knowledge (akin to Žižek’s four “subjects supposed to” know, believe, enjoy, and desire), however, means that the Other merely has to be presumed to know—as Lacan soon says, discussing “Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan,” that “What is new about their knowledge is that it doesn’t presume the Other knows anything about it” (Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 97). This could be a way of thinking about the S(Ⱥ), or the object as signifier of the lack in the Other.
- 18.
Lacan, Encore, trans. Fink, 97.
- 19.
By one account, social media platforms like Facebook are themselves a kind of gated community: This is Virginia Heffernan’s argument in Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2016). See my discussion in Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 161, 210. Too, the role of such social media wraps in developing countries (smartphones and watches, tablets, and computers are often sold with Facebook pre-installed), means rapid digital access results in what one human rights group, reporting on Myanmar, called “a crisis of digital literacy: A large population of internet users lacks basic understanding of how to use a browser, how to set up an email address and access an email account, and how to navigate and make judgments on online content” and therefore relies on Facebook as its interface. Please see Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), “Human Rights Impact Assessment: Facebook in Myanmar,” October 2018, 12, https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/bsr-facebook-myanmar-hria_final.pdf (accessed May 27, 2020).
- 20.
Barnard, “Tongues of Angels,” 172.
- 21.
Barnard, “Tongues of Angels,” 174. Here Barnard signals a key difference between Lacanian theory and some affect and feminist theory today, which argues for the importance of “embodied” knowledges (see, for example, the “queer phenomenology” of Sara Ahmed).
- 22.
Barnard, “Tongues of Angels,” 175.
- 23.
Barnard, “Tongues of Angels,” 176.
- 24.
See, for comments on leaders as anal fathers (akin to Žižek’s analysis of the “master with the pants down”), Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Albany: State University of New York, 2004), 53–54. McGowan references Joan Copjec, who is worth quoting here: “America’s solution is, in analytic terms, hysterical: one elects a master who is demonstrably fallible—even, in some cases, incompetent. What may first appear to be a stumbling block turns out on closer inspection to be a solution: Americans love their masters not simply in spite of their frailties but because of them” in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 149. Can this not be said of garbage as well, be it digital (virtual) or actual? Let alone Trump. McGowan elaborates on how we submit not to the phallus but its veil in his recent essay on Lacan’s “Signification of the Phallus”: “a subject acts in thrall to the phallus not when displaying what appears as clearly phallic behavior—like a muscled Arnold Schwarzenegger evincing indestructibility in The Terminator … but instead when a seemingly innocuous figure exercises an authority that doesn’t appear as authority” in Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From Signification of the Phallus to Metaphor of the Subject, ed. Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook, and Calum Neill (London: Routledge, 2018), 14. That is, recycling is actually garbage.
- 25.
Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block, The Cleaners. Eric Abalajon notes, regarding this moment in the documentary: “This is not simple upward social mobility aspirations, but one that is built on a colonial past and a neoliberal present. Education system here is still modeled to cater needs of capitalist metropoles. Primarily, you either go out to become a care worker (nurse, caregiver, nanny, cleaning lady, etc) or you stay and work in satellite offices of foreign capital—of which business processing outsourcing (BPOs) are the latest players. Filipino workers are fluent in English, computer-literate, and wages are cheap. You study hard, but in a sense you still end up doing the empire’s dirty jobs.” Email, 17 July, 2020.
- 26.
Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 175–76.
- 27.
Matthew Flisfeder, personal communication with the author, email, 26 October, 2018. A Simon Fraser University doctoral student, Rawia Inaim, has also made the same remark about the role of the cellphone in a sex scene between Frank Underwood and Zoe Barnes in the first season of House of Cards, retroactively heightened by accusations of sexual predation against Kevin Spacey, who plays Underwood.
- 28.
Fredric Jameson, “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia,” Salmagundi 10–11 (1969–1970): 54–55, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40546514.
- 29.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 23.
- 30.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 122, 127.
- 31.
McGowan, End of Dissatisfaction?, 75–80.
- 32.
I devised an earlier form of this algorithm with garbage and the environment/nature as antinomic. But that does not work: we do not actually have access to those forms; they are only what we get when we combine Φ, and the objet petit a (nature) or when we combine Φ, and S(Ⱥ) (garbage)—that is, nature or garbage are not actual objects in either the OOO sense or the Lacanian meaning: they are the effects of objects. In Waste, Brian Thill argues that “waste is every object, plus time” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015, kindle loc. 120). And while Thill is not a Lacanian, he seems to affirm our thesis when he declares waste denotes the fading of our desire: waste is “the unsatisfactory and temporary name we give to the affective relationships we have with our unwanted objects,” it is “the expression of expended, transumuted, or suspended desire … the ur-object.”
- 33.
According to a recent symposium at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), there should be nine or even twelve recycling bins for plastics alone, as is done in Helsinki and Tokyo, respectively (Bruce Handy, “What’s it Made of? Plastics,” New Yorker, July 8 &15, 2019, 19).
- 34.
That is, this algorithm (my formula; Fig. 5.2), which perhaps is a meta-algorithm (combining the semiotic rectangle and the formula of sexuation), argues that we cannot rely on algorithms, machine learning, to clean up the internet, to detect fake news, to scrub it of violence or hate speech—because that obscenity is constitutive of the internet , just as garbage is constitutive of nature or the environment.
- 35.
In his commentary, Abalajon notes that the moderators’ fallibility ought better to be laid at the door of highly mobile transnational companies (with precarious contracts that render unionization or a better-informed workforce unlikely) and a filmic style that settles for third world exoticism and contradictions (“slums vs high rise, religion vs consumerism”) rather than the more mundane reality that these workers are just doing a job and trying to provide for their families. This would be a social reading not unlike the “exotic” Lacanian trope of les non-dupes errent (those who think they are not duped are in turn mistaken), which turns back on the film’s audience, and this essay’s author.
- 36.
Fredric Jameson has suggested Lacan’s “predilection for -isms and named thought systems stands as a fundamental example of what he termed university discourse,” or the beginnings of “a theory of linguistic reification” in Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), 99; emphasis in the original.
- 37.
The narcissism of thinking “every bit counts” is the dialectical mirror-image of “I’m making it worse.” Morton, for example, insists again and again that “every time I turned my car ignition key I was contributing to global warming” (see Dark Ecology, 8, 19, 35, 36 …). The hubris!
- 38.
Here it is worth noting that before and during the time period of this book and the preceding conference (from 2013–2019), a minor international contre-temps took place between Canada and the Phillippines over a trans-Pacific shipment of garbage (103 containers) that had been sent from Vancouver to Subic Port, then sat in the harbour for years before being returned to Canada. The containers were supposedly recycling but two-thirds of them turned out to contain ordinary household garbage. “Canadian garbage on its way from Philippines to Vancouver.” https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canadian-garbage-from-philippines-departure-1.5156007 (accessed July 29, 2020).
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Burnham, C. (2021). Lacan’s Trash Talk: Three Objects for the Internet. In: Burnham, C., Kingsbury, P. (eds) Lacan and the Environment. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8_5
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