Sketch of a Mechanism of Subjectivation
August 26, 2020
Here’s a brief of sketch of a mechanism of subjectivation (the engineering or production of subjectivity itself). It was brought on by an admittedly odd mix of Brandom’s reading of Hegel on self-consciousness, Žižek’s analysis of what he calls “interpassivity” (Žižek, 1998), and some intersecting thoughts about game theory. This post also relates to a previous reflection on virtue-signalling, which takes up this theme in a specific context.
Supposedly advertising manipulates our desire. While there seems to be a kind of bored general agreement about this, it has the feel of a platitude. No-one seems to actually believe that advertising directly manipulates their desire—after all, the messaging behind adverts is often flatly transparent. Maybe the suspicion is that advertising manipulates everybody else’s desire. Other people might fall for the mock jokiness and on-trend typography, but I buy Oatly because it just tastes the best. It is this kind of attitude that Žižek pounces on, pressing the point that in fact advertising never works by directly manipulating desire, but rather by indirect manipulation, engineering the desires of the individual by engineering their perception of everybody else’s desire.
The liberal mindset of course balks at the implicit suggestion here, countering that if your desire is dependent on your perception of the desire of others, then this speaks to a deficiency on your part: you are simply not in touch with your authentic desires, and you should do some work on yourself. Žižek replies that this is the voice of ideology, a tacital shifting of responsibilty onto the individual which masks the very truth that advertising relies on: that our desires are essentially mediated. There is no authentic unmediated desire that the individual can gain access to by stripping away all their social conditioning to achieve consumerist nirvana.
Žižek’s take on this mediation structure appeals to a decentering of subjectivity found in Lacan’s notion of the “subject supposed to know”. It has occurred to me that a similar point can be made by appeal to the kind of reasoning loops underlying game theoretic dilemmas like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. In addition to throwing light on the engineering of desire, I believe this points to a way about thinking about a more general question of subjectivation, namely the production of self-interested subjectivity itself.
What is self-interested subjectivity? It is, surely, no more than taking oneself in practice to be a self-interested agent, i.e. it is to (in practice) reason from self-interest. Call an agent who acts from self-interest an I-actor. In contrast, call a we-actor anyone who acts from self-disinterest, for example from altruistic, political, or moral motives that may actively conflict with their self-interest. A person may take another to be an I-actor or a we-actor in a given context. A question then arises about how, given a context, should an actor take themselves? This is a question of deciding which form of practical reasoning to employ, whether to base action on whether it maximises benefits to oneself, or to engage in forms of group reasoning that may require putting one’s own preferences on hold.
The Tragedy of the Commons describes a scenario in which the rational decision process of a group of I-actors with access to a shared natural resource leads to a descending spiral of opportunistic plunder, even when it is in their long-term mutual interest to cooperate in preserving it. The tragedy arises as a result of each I-actor’s reasoning about the others’ own decision making process, based on their understanding of one another as I-actors. The pathway to a long-term collective benefit requires everyone refraining from acting on their own (large) short-term benefit. Since they each take each other to be I-actors they cannot rely on each other to do this, so it becomes irrational for them to do so themselves. The trust available to a group of actors understanding each other as capable of exercising we-agency is not present in this scenario, and this is what leads to the failure of cooperation.
That everyone involved be an I-actor is a stipulation of the Tragedy of the Commons as it is normally formulated. This is not the case in normal human affairs, when the kind of actor we take ourselves to be is often a matter of contextually cued social convention. We are I-actors when we play chess (if we’re not then we’re not playing chess); we are we-actors when we are deciding on a restaurant with some friends. Sometimes these are tangled and embedded, such as in professional situations when the we-reasoning contexts of particular projects occur within the wider I-reasoning context of profits or careers.
Consider a Tragedy of the Commons like situation, but with the stipulation that everyone be I-actors removed. What happens then? The first thing each participant needs to do is decide what kind of reasoning context they’re in—whether they should reason as an I-actor or as a we-actor. Now comes the crux: how they should answer this question depends critically on whether they perceive others to be reasoning as I-actors or as we-actors. If everyone else appears to be an I-actor, then it is completely pointless to reason as a we-actor yourself—the collective goal won’t be realised, and you’ll end up losing out. In fact, in order for anyone to take themselves to be a we-actor they will need a fairly robust sense that everyone else is going to do so too, otherwise the risk is too high. (This links with a point made by Brandom that practical identification with a group requires an act of sacrifice—to publicly show that one can act in self-disinterest is to show others that you can be taken as a we-actor, which is a condition of making we-agency possible.) If they take everyone else to be I-actors, then it is rational for them to reason as I-actors themselves—in this case we have collapsed back into the normal Tragedy.
The point here is that one’s taking oneself to be an I- or a we-actor is always rationally mediated by one’s perception of what kind of actor other participants in the context are. If you were a demiurge whose mission was to get everyone to act from cynical self-interest, all you would have to do is get them to perceive everyone else as already acting as such. If they weren’t already doing so, perhaps it would be possible to manipulate the perception itself.
The suggestion is that the individualistic subjectivity of neoliberal capitalism—a subjectivity which shows up in the way people act, in their habits of consumption, production and interpersonal relating—is something which could be actively produced by creating an illusion that everyone else is always-already inhabiting it. The illusion could in fact create the reality, due to the socially mediated character of practical agency. Is this not exactly the condition that is satisfied when public representation at all levels is transposed onto a market structure that systematically amplifies signals with the slickest branding? If only the motives packaged for maximum exchange-value are visible, doesn’t this imply that the self-disinterested motives available before the public gaze will be precisely those with the spectre of self-interest hovering behind them? If so, what unambiguous reason can you ever have to engage in collective action?
References
- Žižek, S. (1998). The Interpassive Subject. Traverses. [PDF]