Ghost in the Wire

Can there be a thinking or a performance of criticism that does not repeat itself? Can we analyze and critically engage the social codes around us without participating in them?

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, a distinction can be drawn between the symptom and the sinthome, the former being evidence of some larger dynamic hinted at in an utterance or text, and the latter being characterized more by a repetition (or even a repetition compulsion), in which the same things are said or written or done over and over again. This repetition occurs because of the enjoyment that flows from it, from the jouissance of the act. At times, it seems as if certain methods and means of criticism can accordingly be dubbed sinthomatic, in that the criticism fails to provide much insight into something new but instead offers up a performative act of reaffirmation about the presuppositions that animate the critique, an affirmation that of course generates its own enjoyments.

In his most recent book of "Cool Memories," Baudrillard declares that:

Critical distance becomes the metastasis pure and simple of the reality it is analysing, which has itself become critical by capillary action and permeable to the worst of things. Positive and negative are in league like charity and cruelty, like violence and compassion. Criticism then provides a balancing function for the system, or serves to regulate the transit, like those capsules you take to offset the side-effects.

We can hear echoes of Sloterdijk's critique of cynical reason: people know the problems, they even like discussing them, they just don't believe that knowing the problems should change their behavior. Criticism, cultural or academic, provides the monstrous balancing act to a system that relies upon such negations in order to perpetuate itself. I'm thinking academically at least of much ideology-critique, with its laments over racism, sexism, classism, and other annotated implements of hegemony, each time roughly similar laments. And justifiably so, for it's not that the conditions have changed; but is it possible that such critiques provide the counterforce that keeps the originary force, the one ideologically problematic, in place?

The alternative, though I am not sure if these are at all opposed, would be a "symptomatic" criticism, which many already practice and to great effect. But it seems as if there remains a threshold beyond which even the pursuit of symptoms becomes a compulsion.