THEORY
With the emergence of structuralism and poststructuralism
the Arts and Letters disciplines have acquired a theoretical dimension
specific to themselves and distinct from that of the natural and social
sciences. A crucial motivation for the challenge to utilitarian models of
problem solving comes from psychoanalysis (Lacan), whose theory of the
Symbolic Order holds that the unconscious is the outside within us
(thus placing desire within public policy formation)
There is perhaps an experience in the field of politics that entails a
kind of identification with the symptom: the well-known pathetic
experience we are all that!, the experience of identification when
we are confronted with a phenomenon that functions as an
intrusion of unbearable truth, as an index of the fact that
the social mechanism doesn't work. . . .It is the same for all
traumatic moments of the intrusion into the social field of some
impossible kernel that resists integration:
We all live in Chernobyl! We are all boat people! By means of
such an identification with the (social) symptom, we traverse and subvert
the fantasy frame that determines the field of social meaning, the
ideological self-understanding of a given society, i.e, the frame within
which, precisely, the symptom appears as some alien, disturbing
intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth
of the existing social order
- Slavoj Zizek, LOOKING AWRY: AN INTRODUCTION TO JACQUES LACAN THROUGH
POPULAR CULTURE (MIT, 1991).
context | Extimacy