Evil We Desire (Akrasia and the Drive)
New materialism is not my favorite theory
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Now that my wife and I are getting closer to the grand opening of our bookstore, I’m hoping to claw back some time to work on Hello Gorgias!
That said, the focus of the blog has to shift a bit. I’ll still be writing about writing and rhetorical theory, but I plan to include more of what I’ve been doing in the classroom. I’m also going to be writing a lot more about GenAI. I’ve always been interested in digital rhetoric, and I’d like to spend more time exploring it here.
Lastly, I’m going start using Hello Gorgias! to workshop material from the book I’m currently working on, which is called Evil We Desire. It’s a Lacanian interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of akrasia, or moral incontinence.
Akrasia and the Death Drive
For Aristotle, a person is considered morally incontinent when they knowingly choose to do something they consider immoral. From a psychoanalytic perspective, akrasia is fascinating because:
It poses an interesting challenge to the notion of free will.
It helps explain why people sabotage themselves or act against their own self-interest.
It illustrates how subjects pursue satisfaction (jouissance) at the expense of their most cherished ethical commitments.
These tendencies are typically associated with Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death drive — his most important and frequently misunderstood contribution to psychoanalytic theory. In fact, Freud himself did not fully understand the implications of his discovery when he first published Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920.
Contrary to popular belief, the death drive is not a biological impulse to self-annihilation, a nirvana-like release of tension, or the cosmic victory of “Thanatos” (entropy and death) over “Eros” (creativity and life).1 The death drive is better understood as the subject’s tendency to subvert its own aims. It is an ontological (not biological) dimension of human subjectivity that emerges from the subject’s relationship to language — a claim I’ll unpack in a future post.
Some of Evil We Desire will draw from my dissertation, which explored the connection between Aristotle’s description of akrasia and Freud’s theory of the drive to analyze popular conspiracy theories. But to be honest, I’m pretty tired of writing about conspiracy theories. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it was always my least favorite part of my dissertation.
So I’m scrapping all the stuff about conspiracy theories and writing the book as a critique of new materialism, one of the dominant theoretical paradigms in my field right now. I’ve used new materialism a lot in my older work, but I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned with it over the years, for reasons I’ll start getting into down below.
The Problem With New Materialism
If you’re not familiar with new materialism, it’s what you get when you take Marxism and replace the political content and class analysis with actor-network theory and post-human ontologies. It’s not quite affect theory or ecocriticism, but it definitely has a lot of the same vibes.
Most folks affiliated with new materialism are problematizing binary oppositions at the heart of western philosophy (subject/object, human/animal, nature/culture, etc.) with a theory of distributed agency that ultimately does away with the idea of subjectivity altogether.
Since new materialism discards the notion of the subject, it also dispenses with the interior life of the subject. For Lacanians working with concepts like jouissance, the unconscious, and the death drive, that’s a major problem. It makes it hard to account for the contradictions, impulses, and compulsive repetition that frequently characterize human behavior.
Since new materialism does not acknowledge the distinction between the subject’s conscious goals and unconscious desires, it can’t explain why people pursue personal satisfaction at the expense of their own goals and values. Put differently, it has no way to account for all the little ways human beings are constantly undermining and sabotaging themselves.
At the end of the day, new materialism is working so hard to dispense with terms like “human” and “subject” that it’s very bad at addressing the messy, inconsistent, irrational, and unconscious dimensions of human subjectivity.
In future posts, I’ll explain why new materialism is a particularly bad theoretical paradigm for the field of rhetoric and composition. For now, let’s just say it throws out the very thing that makes rhetoric possible in the first place: the human subject.
Good luck with your writing!
Song of the Week:
This last interpretation is heavily influenced by the work of Herbert Marcuse and is definitely the worst of the lot.
Interesting project! I'm not an expert on New Materialism, so offhand, my question would be whether it has room for a less "substantial" version of the subject, that is (following Zizek's interpretation of Kant and Hegel)--What if the subject is not a thing but a difference between judging / intending and acting in any agent that has intentions and is able to make judgments?
Given human agents, I think the following must hold true, even for New Materialists: (1) agents have incomplete knowledge and must make decisions based on speculation, (2) agents cannot fully predict the consequences of their own actions, and (3) agents cannot predict how their actions will be interpreted by other agents.
I suspect that this might be all you need to get a Hegelian account of contradiction going, but I wonder if some kind of Deleuzian bias against "negativity" would rule out even an account of contradiction at this level for New Materialists?
Anyway, supposing contradiction at this level is accepted by New Materialists, then perhaps they already have the resources to account for a vast amount of "self-contradiction" on the part of human agents, especially if one takes into account that the demands on the subject are themselves self-contradictory: that is, social compulsions constantly forces people into double bind situations where they have to engage in contradictory and self-undermining behavior.
For instance, if Marx's account of the worker's structural position is correct, without resorting to any theory of the subject, one can account for the fact that worker's MUST have something like a death drive because when they work they act against their own interests and long term survival, but they MUST work in order to survive. Similarly, capitalists want the global economy to continue functioning so that they can keep making profits, but it is their own activity as they compete with each other that leads to global economic crises, which may even lead to financial ruin for some capitalists.
Ultimately the question here would be whether it what extent contradiction might appear in an immanent critique of New Materialism even if it doesn't assume some kind of ontology of the subject with a death-drive. In terms of theory and arguments, the question for me would then be: Is it really necessary to explicitly argue for the subject or for psychoanalytic concepts like death-drive, in order for a position like New Materialism to account for the "contradictions, impulses, and compulsive repetition that frequently characterize human behavior", or could we arrive there starting from premises a New Materialist would accept?