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DeSanto, Dan

English

2006

MA

The following pages address postmodemity's diffused/dispersed form of authority worked on a subject by an increasingly hegemonic symbolic order. As Foucault explains, a subject represents (himself, ideas, others) with signifiers, and these signifiers necessarily relate meanings predetermined by the acting hegemony. Authority, in the postmodem, has become the agent that decides how things mean. It can be identified as a function which is internalized with the subject's indoctrination into the symbolic order. Yet, it is also true that the difference between sign and signifier has become inextricably blurred. Theorists such as Baudrillard have gone so far as to say that sign and signifier have actually merged (Baudrillard calls this sign/signifier entity the simulacrum). The result is authority's further push from representation into "reality" itself. Authority becomes a function not only of how one represents lived experience but, more importantly, how one creates/defines lived experience. This furthering of Foucault's thesis, taking authority as manifested in the symbolic to an extreme as the symbolic merges with the Real, makes for a system of symbolization that is increasingly totalizing as it assimilates both meaning and experience. The main question asked throughout the following pages is "Can autonomy (the Real) be returned to the subject?" I will examine Poststructuralism's response: the creation of "liminal" spaces of critique and attempts at redefining in a way that benefits the marginalized. Yet, I ultimately find flaw with this liminal methodology and instead propose a methodology of inversion: using the symbolic order's totality against itself. As symbology totalizes, so it leads towards its own collapse. This paper examines the idea of inversion, what Baudrillard calls "a viral inversion" or "pure terrorism," as the means by which to recognize postmodemity's necessary symbolic collapse. The idea of collapse answers both yes and no to the question about the subject's autonomy posed above, yet I argue in the following pages that symbolic chain-failure is not only the most realistic answer but, more importantly, the only one possible.