The Excessive Subject

Introduction: The Excess of Everyday Life

… withdrawing my dagger I’m overcome by a sort of vertigo, a feeling of emptiness, of being alone, not here in Rome, today, but forever after, in the centuries to come, the fear that people won’t understand what we did here today, that they won’t be able to do it again, that they will remain distant and indifferent as this beautiful calm morning in March.

Italo Calvino, “A Beautiful March Day”1

The senators who damned Julius Caesar as a tyrant argued that killing him was the only way to liberate Rome. In their logic, we find the most common gesture of every political program and every call for social change: identify a problem, locate its cause, and then eliminate that cause to solve the problem. This logic seems so self-evident as to be virtually tautological. But Calvino exposes its flaw. Killing Caesar not only eliminates the tyrant, it changes the conditions by which that action acquires its meaning. The very world in which it made sense to get rid of Caesar also vanishes with those dagger strokes – not because Caesar held that world together, but because the assassins could not foresee that their act would also transform the way the act itself would later be judged, even by themselves. They could not factor in the historicity of their action; neither they nor anyone else could predict or govern how the future would interpret the assassination. Put another way, we could say that there was simply no way for them to take into account the retroversive effect of future interpretations.

“Retroversion” is one of the most common but least acknowledged forces in human social relations. We encounter it in every use of language. When you read that “Carl smiled as he gently stroked the velvety skin of his lover,” you may find your initial picture of this apparent love scene altered irrevocably by the next phrase: “with the keen edge of a knife.” Using language means making constant adjustments as the field of meaning widens, narrows, and then circles back on itself. The opportunity and the need for such adjustment is ever-present but has unpredictable effects. One person may be jolted out of a chain of associations, forced to re-evaluate the beginning of that chain by a word that has no particular effect on another person. It is easy enough to imagine a reader who would not read the first phrase as a love scene but rather as the opening of a horror story: such a person may not be vulnerable to the kind of blunt retroversion that would otherwise strike at the mention of the knife. At the same time, we could imagine another reader for whom every word in the first clause works backward to warp or inflect the words that precede it, even before the knife makes its appearance. For example, the reader might at first imagine “velvety skin” to be referring to Carl’s own body, and would then re-work the whole scene – from auto-stimulation to interpersonal sexual relations – at the moment of encountering the word “lover.” But once the jolt occurs, the opening of the sentence, the opening that sets us up for the jolt down the line, will be transformed permanently in this retroversive movement. In a kind of Back to the Future scenario, the original causes – words such as “smile” and “stroked” – are altered in their significance by the effects they produce. Time seems to loop back on itself.

Were we to consider the difference between the way a heterosexual and a homosexual reader might imagine this scene, we could explore another set of possible retroversive effects. In other words, the very conditions by which these sentences acquire their meaning shift not only as we add words and phrases but also as the particularities of the people involved are taken into account. When we read or talk with each other, we make just such (often minute or unconscious) adjustments to the fantasmatic dimension of our associative chains and to those we postulate as operating in our interlocutors. One of the great pleasures of learning to read attentively, of course, is to register such micro-adjustments, even to imagine ourselves as having different concerns, interests, and personal histories. But if we are in the business of trying to promote social change, things become more difficult once we acknowledge that retroversion is constantly in play as a function not only of individual signifying acts but also of interactions among individuals.

So, Calvino’s story points to a double problem facing contemporary theories of social change. In the first place, we are used to conceiving of change in a linear way: I strike a stationary billiard ball with a cue and it rolls into the corner pocket. First comes the cause, then the effect. But retroversive causality challenges that linearity, as if the act of striking the ball into the pocket could loop backward in time to change the initial position of the ball on the table. Of course, physical forces at human scale rarely exhibit retroversive causality, although physicists describe the quantum world as a phantasmagoria of such phenomena. On the other hand, social forces seem always to exhibit retroversive causality, precisely because they necessarily involve signification, meaning, or interpretation. As soon as we have a social situation, we are in the world of signifiers: the signifier is always subject to the law of retroversion. Clearly then, once we notice the phenomenon of retroversion and try to take it into account, we face the difficulty of defining the concept of “change.” For if our social interactions necessarily operate with retroversion, then our everyday ideas about generating change come into question. If we identify a problem, as Rome’s senators did, and then act to change it, how should we model the operation of retroversive causality? Indeed, can it be modeled at all?

In the second place, by describing sociality as saturated with the unpredictability of retroversive signification, we call into question some familiar ideas about what we mean by social interaction. As we shall see, the usual sorts of interpersonal activities – joining a club, going to church, bringing a lawsuit, attending university – that we typically conceive in terms of individual units engaging in delimited actions for specifiable ends start to look incredibly complicated. The very idea of the “social” has to be revisited once retroversion enters the picture. How is it possible to address the concept of social change when we seem to be talking about a fluctuating social field formed from the mutually constitutive interactions of retroversive effects?

To a person dedicated to trying to make the world a better place, such reflections might seem beside the point. After all, can’t we identify real problems that exist at a material level rather than at the level of language or interpretations? What difference does retroversion make when we’re trying to abolish hunger? Why consider the social field as a congeries of forces in flux when people around the world are subjected to oppression, violence, and death? Let’s attempt to solve the practical problems, and leave the theoreticians to their ivory tower cogitations. Without a doubt this approach has its appeal. Yet the history of efforts to change the world for the better indicate forcefully how poorly it has worked. Violence, poverty, oppression – this familiar litany of woe begs the question as to why we have failed to cross a single item off the list. For despite our best efforts to identify and address their causes, such serious problems seem to be permanent fixtures of every modern society.

We have laid the blame at many doors, including lack of sympathy and common values, human propensities for greed and power, the rhizomatic properties of global capitalist institutions, the weakness of political systems, the strength of hegemonic ideologies, the micro-fluctuations of power, and the madness of individual rulers. No one would argue that identifying the causes of these problems is easy. Think for a moment of the difficulties facing anyone who wants to address poverty. What causes poverty? It seems unlikely that every poverty-stricken person is poor for the same reason, given the myriad different circumstances of poor people on the planet. Some have their land taken away, some fall ill; some manage their money poorly, some lose their jobs; some are victims of disaster, some are victims of hoaxes. How should we group these people in order to best address poverty? By psychological type? By urban or rural setting? By skill set? By country? By degree of agency? By economic system? For example, if we think that poverty has its roots in a worldwide economic system, then we have to figure out how that system works (and works differentially) on individuals, groups, industries, and governmental processes, and then design a new system that would not only enrich the present poor but also would not impoverish hosts of other people in the process. How do we decide what is the proper scale for our focus? How do we handle the mass of variables at every scale as well as the complexity of their interactions?

Attempts to handle these factors (among many others) have generated a demand for new disciplinary methods to bring analytic clarity to such chaos. Yet, because every analysis takes its orientation from some model of the structure and operations of social interactions, and because every model inevitably reduces social complexity in order to manage it, these analyses necessarily produce a distorted picture of the complexities of the social field. In modern times,...