placebo ergo sum
We are posthuman — our theories tattooed on the flesh of our bodies, stamped and branded, not merely as symbols of aesthetic affiliation, but rather as something dangerously equivalent — symbols of belonging and defiance. And it is this particular paradox — of defiant belonging — can be so dangerous precisely because the two are now equivalent: futile resistance in an age of unverifiable self-fashioning.
Consider the hypothesis: If I didn't already know myself I might well fail to recognize myself in my own reflection.
The self has never had a reliable face, nor any face a reliable self. And it is the technology of reflection through which this fundamental self-deceit is reflected back to us — bodies now tattooed only with the alienting futility of nihilism itself.
[...]
Consequently, if Foucault — as an already self-alienated individual — can come to the conclusion that individuality is already self-alienated, is his declaration self-revealing or prophetic? In other words, is the fate of the posthuman to return, not to the redundancy of humanist fantasies of autonomy, but rather to the re-realization that humanity was only ever a phase in its cultural development? And, in this spirit could we not assert that: to be human is to be alienated; to be posthuman is to be self-alienated?
placebo ergo sum — I am born into posthuman destiny.
It is an already normalized self that now confronts itself as already normalized. Yet no longer is there any hope of recovery, for it is not as simple as to attribute contextual development as the root of self-formation. Lacan posits a "nature" in contrast to Foucault's "nurture," and yet the result is the same. Doubly depersonalized, the myth of autonomy has always already been the spectre of the myth of biology.
"These reflections [on the workings of the mirror-stage] lead me to recognize in the spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality — in so far as any meaning can be given to the word 'nature'."But it is also precisely here, in this attribution of essence — this attribution of a non-human (alienated) nature to all things human — that the truly sinister side of Lacan comes out. For if the spectre of autonomy under the sign of Foucault begins to look somewhat like a social conspiracy, under the sign of Lacan this conspiracy is precisely genetic. Betrayed by our own bodies into not-being, the mirror stage becomes the literal stage upon which the fantasy of existence is acted out.
The mirror-stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation... [and] which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development.Consequently, a question: what would Lacan see when he looks in the mirror? For if the fantasy of autonomy resides with the spectral double — the self-alienated ego — are the words of Lacan not precisely the words rather of his reversed reflection? And if Lacan himself is and must be seen as exactly self-alienated to the same extent as everyone else, which Lacan do we hear when he speaks? The answer is obvious: we hear the posthuman Lacan, the doubled Lacan. This is necessary since, as a biological theory, the "mirror stage" does not allow for a privileged recovery, nor for even the possibility of "inside knowledge" of one's a priori alienation. In fact, Lacan's theory itself is a better answer to "how we became posthuman" than any other: we became human through self-alienation, we became posthuman through (re)recognition of our own humanity as myth. Lacan's voice is not the voice of (human) alienation, but rather that of (posthuman) belonging. more...
Ted Hiebert | The Lacanian Conspiracy
[from CTHEORY via the incomparable Mark Woods]
