Annotations on M. Crumps

Questions about (Racist) Jouissance

With discussions about CRT popping off recently, I thought I’d share my annotations on Crumps’s Substack post “They’re coming for your racist jouissance.” The following are questions/annotations on M. Crumps Substack post. The bolded text in brackets is mine. The rest I’d copied and pasted from Crumps. I’d be interested in anybody’s responses to these questions—especially Crumps himself!

How can one explain the persistent attachment that people have to racism, even when they are supposed to “know better”? [So, Crump’s question is: why are people still racist? Why hasn’t racism been overcome?] Why is it such a persistent obstacle to political solidarity? And why is it so hard for people to recognize and admit to, even when the stakes are low? [My question here is: why is this the question for Crumps? In other words, what brings this question to the fore for Crumps? I’m also wondering: (1.1) how do we know people don’t recognize their “racism” and (1.2) don’t admit to it? (2) What are the stakes of this recognition and admission? (3) And for whom are these stakes low?]

There is some type of enjoyment that people derive from racism. I don’t necessarily mean an outright sadistic and obscene enjoyment in the violence of pogroms and lynchings, but something more mundane. There is a type of enjoyment that people get from telling racist jokes, using racial slurs, admitting to prejudices in private company, and so on. And this persists even in people who are supposed to know better, and who are thus consciously breaking some rule of polite society—sometimes called ironic racism [Can jouissance be conscious?]. They are being transgressive. And if racism, ironic or otherwise, is extinguished from society then the institution of comedy (that precious institution) will supposedly collapse. What I’m talking about is an everyday enjoyment, an enjoyment in something understood to be bad [Is everyday enjoyment the same thing as jouissance?]. It’s sort of like Schadenfreude [Schadenfreude = pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune], but not quite.

Racism is a negative enjoyment. And anti-racism, whatever that means, threatens this enjoyment [What is meant by a specifically negative enjoyment? Asked another way, what’s the difference between a “negative enjoyment” and a “positive enjoyment”? Another question I have here is: why is racism a “negative enjoyment” and “anti-racism” a threat to “negative enjoyment”? I ask this because it’s not entirely clear to me what exactly constitutes “anti-racism”? Can there not be enjoyment in “anti-racism”?]. It threatens to take away something dear to people. It threatens to infect their minds, to police their minds and police their close personal relations. It threatens to alienate them from themselves, such that they will become unrecognizable. It threatens to expose their enjoyment. When their enjoyment is exposed, they will cease to be people. They will be cancelled. They come to see their attachment to racism as a mutilated form of solidarity.

Lacan, Miller, and Žižek call this enjoyment jouissance. I will call it jouissance, too. Jouissance is an excess of life. Jouissance is enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle. Jouissance is a backhanded enjoyment. Jouissance begins with a tickle and ends with a blaze of petrol. Jouissance is an enjoyment that may not be consciously experienced as such [Ok, so here it looks like jouissance isn’t something that can be consciously experienced. This brings me back to questions I had in the second paragraph (re: the extent to which jouissance can be, or is, conscious and the difference(s), if any, between jouissance and everyday enjoyment. This also raises the question for me of whether jouissance is a term worth retaining. What unique work is the term jouissance doing here (especially if it’s not significantly different from—everyday—enjoyment)]. Jouissance is prohibited for the person who speaks, the “castrated” member of society. Jouissance is tied to an encounter with an Other. Jouissance is prohibited by the Other—or at least it sort of looks like it [I can’t help but wonder who the intended audience is for this piece given these 3 sentences. Who would possibly understand these sentences besides a reader steeped in Lacanian discourse? And if this is, indeed, intended for a “Lacanian” reader, what is this post supposed to accomplish given the fact that basically everyone reading Lacan buys into Crump’s own framework?].

And so, racism-as-jouissance—different modes of jouissance are incongruous with each other… whites and blacks enjoy things differently… in contact between cultures, the subject projects its enjoyment onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance… this gives rise to jealousy… the subject imagines a utopia, a utopia full of jouissance, from which the subject is excluded… [See my question above about audience, again. Some new questions that come up here include: is this projected utopia uniquely racist? Can an “anti-racist” not project a utopia of “access to a consistent jouissance” onto the racist? Would such a projection by an “anti-racist” mean that the “anti-racist” is no longer such?] the anti-black fantasy of their music, their sagging pants, their drugs, their big booty bitches twerking with their wet ass pussies, their improper and excessive habits of spending money, “making it rain”… this is an attack on me, as a white, it steals my enjoyment… the proximity of the Other exacerbates racism… I cannot sleep with all this loud music… they are having fun that I cannot access… I am not invited to the party… [Why are there some many ellipses in this paragraph? This reads like a text message from someone over 50. Maybe this is petty.]

So goes the basic model. It can apply to any kind of cultural Other. But there are some problems with the Lacanian understanding of racism-as-jouissance. It reduces racism to a depoliticized psychology of affects—it makes peripheral the historical, discursive, and socio-economic causes of racism. This understanding implies that jouissance can mean everything and nothing. It doesn’t differentiate between different modalities of jouissance—there are many ways that a lost object can be cherished.

But this psychological understanding is still useful. We do not need to only speak of racism-as-jouissance when we can speak of a racist jouissance, the psychological aspect that is embedded within the complexity of its many causes [What’s the difference between “racism-as-jouissance” and “racist jouissance”? This doesn’t seem clear to me.]. Racist jouissance is the subjective, personal dimension, the irrationality of the stubborn subject, rather than that of the capitalist system, or the ever-growing pile of shit that is world history.

The answer to jouissance is ultimately “castration,” which means the process by which sacrifice is given a mark. This mark is the mark of a lack, of a negativity. Peaceful coexistence in a multicultural society demands that people give up their racist jouissance so that they can live in proximity to each other. White people are asked to be mindful of what they say and how they act, so that they do not unintentionally commit microaggressions—”the everyday slights, indignities, put downs and insults that people of color, women, LGBT populations or those who are marginalized experiences in their day-to-day interactions with people.” One way to think of racist jouissance is as the opposite of the microaggression; the marginalized person experiences the microaggression as a nagging pain, whereas for the non-marginalized person it is a pleasure, and a perverse or “naughty” one once they are made aware of it [Can there not be pleasure—or enjoyment—in (nagging) pain?]. Castration is renouncing this racist jouissance, making it as marginal as possible, and loosening the grip that the imagined utopia of the Other’s jouissance has over the subject. This act, the ethical act, should be done out of a sense of duty and respect for the lawfulness of a multicultural society [There seems to be a lot packed into these last 2 sentences. I wonder how many “Lacanians” would agree with this definition of “castration” (as “renouncing...racist jouissance”). Aren’t all subjects—as subjects—castrated in the Lacanian framework? What’s the difference between renouncing castration and disavowing castration (this formulation of ethics sounds close to Lacanian perversion)? Also, doing these things out of a sense of “duty and respect for the lawfulness of a multicultural society” doesn’t sound consonant with Lacanian formulations of ethical acts/passage a l’acte I’ve seen elsewhere. This leads me to wonder about the purpose of the Lacanian framing of this piece. What does the Lacanian jargon accomplish in this? What does it make possible that wouldn’t be possible otherwise? The basic point, as far as I can tell, is that people get off to racism, which is why they don’t want to give up their racism. However, (1) this seems like an obvious point that could be made in a more straightforward way (i.e., as I’ve just done) and (2) it remains unclear to me why anti-racism is without jouissance. Taking these two point together suggests to me that the Lacanian framework of this piece is either (1) gatekeeping or (2) directed towards an audience that already agrees with Crumps.]