andy's definitions

malapropism

This is when someone abuses the wrong worm so you can't understudy what they're crying to play.

Named after someone called Mrs Malaprop in some classical something or other.

by Andy May 7, 2004

pomo

Abbreviation for postmodernism. Usually hostile.

The journal took a pomo turn round about 1990, but it seems to have recovered since.

by Andy May 7, 2004

poststructuralism

A clearer collective term for many of the texts and trends often subsumed under the misleading label postmodernism. Poststructuralism means theories which arise after the structuralist period in continental philosophy, which draw on structuralism but do not accept all of its ideas. Poststructuralists believe in the importance of discourse for understanding social life and question the idea of the self-determining individual, but they do not believe that people's actions can be entirely reduced to an external structure. Often, they study the ways in which structures can be subverted and broken down through their own limits or through ironic reinterpretation or reconfiguration of the structure itself. See power/knowledge, writerly, differance, line of flight.

Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard are the best-known poststructuralists.

by Andy May 7, 2004

master-signifier

In Lacanian theory, a signifier which stops the slippage of the signified under the signifier and fixes meaning, thereby forming a stable symbolic order. It is a particular signifier with no signified of its own, which stands in for the "fullness" of the meaning of the symbolic system itself. However, since contingency and lack are taken to be primary in Lacanian theory, it is necessarily arbitrary and is unable to guarantee its own primacy except through arbitrary and ungrounded violence. It is always haunted by the return of the Real.

In my view, this concept is useful but its basis is mistaken. What is repressed is active desire, held down for fear of punishment, and not some kind of ontological void. Lacan is wrong to pose his problems on such a metaphysical level.

by Andy May 7, 2004

stress and duress

Newspeak for torture, used by the CIA and its allies. "Stress and duress" tactics are used in interrogations, and refer to a variety of tortures and forms of mistreatment which the CIA thinks are OK. These include:
sleep deprivation
overload of light
complete darkness
stripping and sexually humiliating prisoners
threatening to torture and rape prisoners
threatening prisoners' families
making prisoners stand, sit etc. in uncomfortable positions to induce pain
denial of satisfaction of basic rights and needs such as food, bedding, clothing and exercise
deliberate cultural insensitivity and intolerance
verbal abuse
use of painful "restraint" techniques
beatings

These techniques are widespread also in US prisons, although nominally illegal. They are more widely used in deregulated offshore gulags such as Guantanamo Bay, abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.

Don't be fooled - these tactics ARE TORTURE, and are defined as such both by the UN and by experts in trauma. Their role is to break down the sense of personality of the prisoner and to deliberately induce psychological trauma and crisis.

They are directly referred to in CIA handbooks - so the photos from abu Ghraib show a systematic pattern of torture, NOT rogue acts by a few stupid/evil/misguided soldiers.

by Andy May 7, 2004

aphanisis

Subjective destitution; an experience of oneself as excremental (a piece of shit) and worthless, and of being eclipsed by the objet petit a. An experience of the breakdown of one's sense of one's own value when overshadowed by the external locus of one's desires.

It is a concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis which is also sometimes used in cultural studies. It is a crucial component of Zizek's concept of the Act.

Victims of terrorist kidnappings may undergo aphanisis and end up identifying with their captors (the so-called "Helsinki Syndrome").

by Andy May 7, 2004

return of the Real

Term used by psychoanalysts, especially Lacanians, for the eruption into social life of impulses or phenomena which have been repressed from the symbolic order in the process of the formation of a master-signifier. The excluded element is not destroyed but returns in a form which is incomprehensible and terrifying. A "return of the Real" is a sudden eruption and interruption which spectacularly reveals the contingency of social relations and shatters fixed certainties.

For instance, Slavoj Zizek analysed September 11th as a "return of the Real": the repressed fundamentalist impulse which was the hidden outcome of the US's own activities produced an explosive and terrifying result which rocked people's identities and the existing political framework.

A reworking of the return of the repressed.

Doesn't make as much sense outside Lacanian ontology, because the violence and negativity of the "return of the Real" are crucial to its use as a concept. One can reconfigure it to some extent if one suggests that the social order makes its own Real, so that the phrase "return" is simply figurative.

by Andy May 7, 2004