Who Wants To Be Subjective?

Clinging On To That Phantasmal Stuff
Or: Who Wants To Be Subjective?
December 18, 2007
Revised From: December 3, 2006

The key insight of Slavoj Zizek’s article “Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket” could be summarized in a quote that occurs halfway through his article: “It's not so much that we are losing our dignity and freedom with the advance of biogenetics but that we realize we never had them in the first place.” From this, Zizek concludes, “Reducing my being to the genome forces me to traverse the phantasmal stuff of which my ego is made, and only in this way can my subjectivity properly emerge.” When one makes such sweeping claims about what “humanity” is, and how our conceptions of “humanity” are being changed, one wonders how other ideas, such as justice, value, or meaning, also stand up. If we view “humanity” as no more than a genome, are these things to reduced to “subjectivity”? Unfortunately, Zizek does not define what he means by subjectivity in that article, and for now I will refrain from using his other works on a presupposition that he uses the term consistently.

Do these arguments reconceptualize “value” as something that is so fluid it is meaningless? Does how we live our lives change if we accept Zizek’s terms—are we left compelled to do, or not do, anything?

Let’s use Zizek’s terms in looking at an example from Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire. In Sterling’s novel, the world is full of “post-humans.” I used to think that they were post-human simply because they were too old to be regarded as human. In some senses, this is the case. Their bodies have deteriorated so much that they require constant medical attention just to stay alive, and some of these operations change them at nearly every biological level. Yet, in some senses, this isn’t the complete cause. I forgot to include another factor. They are dependent on the medical system to ensure that they continue receiving these life-extending treatments. This means that they are incapable of doing anything that differs from the norm. They are incapable of exploring the world, of acting in new and exciting ways, at the threat of losing their medical coverage that they depend on to live. At the very onset of the novel, after all, a character commits suicide, unwilling to live on those terms.

Yet, on the strictest sense, that is not enough to regard them as post-human, if we use Zizek’s terms. Instead, they should still technically be humans—since they should still have the same genomic structure. In regarding the world as humans, reduced to preserving their particular genomic structure, but not their freedom, or the capacity to behave in new ways, once certainly might say that their “subjectivity” has emerged. Yet what do they gain from this? Are they not, in a sense, still slaves to the medical industry?

Consider a different case, a man who is not strictly speaking post-human. Emil is a an artist, and not much of the novel dwells on him at length. Emil hates who he is, so he takes drugs to erase his memory. His friends regard the post-amnesiac Emil as a completely different individual. Is his “humanity” changed as a result? Not by Zizek’s terms.

What does one gain or lose in affirming or denying one’s “humanity”? Why does one want to view the world in terms of subjectivity? It may very well be the case that Zizek is correct, that our humanity can be reduced to our genome. Yet, who wants to live with that conclusion in mind? What’s so great about subjectivity? If that is the case, then Emil lost nothing, and gained nothing, in taking the drugs that turned him amnesiac.