Basic Instinct: A Response to Ramadanovic

 
In his timely critique of revisionist kinship studies, Petar Ramadanovic identifies “taboo” as the sticking point where the potentially liberatory value of such discourses disappears. Ramadanovic sets out to rethink taboo, hypothesizing that the “function of the taboo” is to operate as “a fundamental rule that makes sexuality” and “can, of course, be filled with whatever incidental content is politically possible at a given time and place.” “Taboo,” he continues, “is the condition of culture.” As a “function,” taboo separates the “orders of nature and culture and make[s] each possible.” As that “which makes laws possible,” taboo’s “function is unconscious.” Arguing that contemporary theorists discount the role of the unconscious and rely upon cultural, content-oriented models in their rereadings of kinship, Ramadanovic forwards an understanding of taboo as a part of a “reciprocal” relation with culture wherein the concept of “nature” “is created by culture’s separation from it.” Nature, according to Ramadanovic, underwrites our instinctive organization of sexual relations with the others around us. As he expresses it: “we can correct the basic assumption of cultural construction theories to say that culture is not a cultural but, rather, a natural construction humans make instinctively. Our most natural behavior is to organize sexual relations with others around us and to do so by imposing certain rules.” At the foundation of culture, then, according to Ramadanovic, is not nature, but instinct—the instinct to construct the sexual rules that subtend the culture/nature split.
 
In locating the impetus to construct sexual prohibitions as instinctive, Ramadanovic seems to be relinquishing any further notion of causation to the large, unwieldy, and ever-changing category of “instinct.” In so far as a notion of origin or first cause may not tell us anything anyway, Ramadanovic may be wise to jettison origins as a way out of the problem of how to alter cultural prohibitions in order to permit more diverse human sexual relations. But instead of rejecting causation completely, Ramadanovic produces an originary moebius consisting of the dynamic interplay of culture and nature, ending up at what humans “make instinctively.” Instinct, as usual, operates as a species of deity, absorbing uncertainty and providing a delusively specific “cause” when causal chains disappear. Instinct conveniently offers an expandable category associated with the “animal” as well as some “real” biological impetus into which human will, motivation, or any complex causality might disappear whenever our own inventiveness is exhausted—or whenever there is a programmatic need to locate behaviors, beliefs, formations, or organizations as somehow “natural,” and therefore proper, ineffable, and “real.”
 
Even if humans have instincts, positioning instinct as the culture-inciting impetus of human social organization itself participates in the same culture/nature structure Ramadanovic so rightly critiques. If we read “nature” through terms that are always already cultural, and if taboo produces a nature/culture divide, then “instinct” itself is produced on the side of nature as a part of that process. Instinct is as much a contrivance of the nature/culture split as anything else. How, then, can instinct become a species of first cause, an unconscious untouched by the processes of taboo (or the source of taboo), so that it can urge towards the construction of order itself? Is Ramadanovic saying that humans have an instinct for culture? If this is the case, what happens to taboo? Is taboo an effect of this instinct? Humans may well be animals, but humans invented the category of instinct to account for behaviors and processes humans did not understand. Instinct is, if anything, a cultural idea.
 
Ramadanovic’s essay raises an interesting possibility in its implicit comparison between unconscious culture-defining processes such as taboo, and the processes at work in the structuring of the subject. Culture is to nature as the conscious is to the unconscious in the subject; both are formed around a prohibition. If, as Ramadanovic suggests, theories of kinship and culture are also theories of the subject, then by this algebra the subjective unconscious becomes the impetus for the emergence of the function of taboo and perhaps the site from which we might understand instinct as operating. To push this point, Ramadanovic deploys Diana Fuss’s reading of Lacan’s theory of the subject as a “subject-position.” Having reduced Lacan’s complex theories of the subject to the notion of a “position,” Ramadanovic transforms positionality into a set of fields: sexuality, the unconscious (which he glosses as the field of relations to other subjects), and the ego (which he defines as Cartesian). The subject, then, is formed as such by the interplay of instinctive sexual material, the unconscious as constituted by subjective relations, and a cogito ego. This version of the subject nicely parallels the fields that play in Ramadanovic’s version of kinship, comprised by sexual instincts, culture as social organization, and the intellectual will by which the first two fields are occluded.
 
Although it’s a neat idea to try to locate within the subject the processes that Ramadanovic identifies as operating in the dynamic transformations of nature and culture, it relies again upon an assumption that there is an instinctive urge to regulate sexual activity as an intrinsic part of every human subject. This may well be why he chooses to deploy a twenty-year-old, very partial gloss of Lacan’s theory of the subject instead of going straight to Lacan’s theories of the subject, particularly as the subject appears in Lacan’s famous “Schema L”—”The Schema of the intersubjective dialectic” from his “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” reproduced again in “On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis” in Écrits. Schema L offers a dynamic model of the subject as the inmixing of culture (or Other) and subject, conscious and unconscious “relations and associations,” wherein the “unconscious is the Discourse of the Other” (193). One set of relations consists of the speaking subject (Ramadanovic’s “cogito”), whose structure is produced by its being “stretched over the four corners of the schema: namely, S, his ineffable, stupid existence, o, his objects, o’, his ego, that is, that which is reflected of his form in his objects, and O, the locus from which the question of his existence may be presented to him” (194). What operates in this Schema is the signifier and not necessarily only the question of position: “The L of the questioning of the subject in his existence has a combinatory structure that must not be confused with its spatial aspect. As such, it is the signifier itself that must be articulated in the Other, especially in its position as fourth term of the topology” (195).
 
Lacan’s Schema L offers three terms that suggest the same categories Ramadanovic envisions as constituting the dynamic autopoeisis of culture/nature: “As support for this structure,” Lacan explains, “we find in it the three signifiers in which the Other may be identified in the Oedipus complex. They are sufficient to symbolize the significations of sexed reproduction, under the signifiers of relation, ‘love’ and ‘procreation'” (196). Although Ramadanovic might interpret the “Oedipus complex” as taboo itself, the terms constitute an inmixing of culture and nature around a prohibition. Instead of invoking instinct, however, Lacan notes that this kind of basic reality is unavailable to the subject: “The fourth term [“the questioning of the subject in his existence”] is given by the subject in his reality, foreclosed as such in the system, and entering into the play of the signifiers only in the mode of death, but becoming the true subject to the extent that this play of signifiers will make it signify” (196). Whatever the material “reality” of the subject in his questioning of his existence, that reality is only available as death. It does not operate as any sort of instinctive wellspring for the impetus to culture in the subject itself.
 
I quote at length not because doing so can clarify Lacan’s thinking as reflected in Schema L, but because the Schema and its explanation re-present Ramadanovic’s formulation with two crucial differences. The first is that the subject is structured in relation to the signifier, i.e., to language, to that which is always already cultural, even if that signifier is itself bound up in questions of sexed reproduction. The second is that the system forecloses the “reality” of the subject, a reality one might easily equate with Ramadanovic’s formulation of an underlying instinct to produce regulatory structures for sexuality. This “reality” enters only as “the mode of death.” To say that “reality” is “foreclosed” means that whatever else there is of a subject’s “reality,” it is not there or available to the subject at all, even in the unconscious; it is non-operative. So although Lacan’s Schema L is topological and does seem to involve something that might be construed as “fields,” Ramadanovic’s model of kinship/culture/nature ghosts only three of the four terms: the speaking “cogito” subject (Je), Culture (O), and the unconscious Ego produced as the reflection of the Je’s objects. Although the subject asks about its existence, that question is already posed in relation to cultural effects of the signifier.
 
In the end, Ramadanovic’s essay attempts to relocate the site from whence any culture/nature distinction derives, not only as a critique of those analyses of kinship taboos that want to alter content as a way to alter culture, but also as a reminder that there may be more mechanisms for investigation. Deriving culture from nature on the basis of taboo is analogous to (but not the same as) Lacan’s understanding of how a “cut” induces the unconscious in a subject (e.g. Four Fundamental Concepts 43). The analogy between the culture/nature dynamic and the dynamics of the subject enables Ramadanovic to relocate the source of taboo to an unconscious analogous to the structure of the subject and perhaps emanating from it. The subject, then, is reduced at least in part to a set of biological imperatives, one of which Ramadanovic hypothesizes is an instinctive urge towards sexual organization. If, as Ramadanovic insists, this organization has no specific content, the forms it takes must then depend upon what comes to the “unconscious” from the Other, or from culture itself. Taboo redefined, the problem of content remains the same. And the problem with relocating this into the subject’s unconscious “instinct” is that the subject itself, at least according to the Lacanian model Ramadanovic evokes, has no instinctive mechanism available to engender the organization he envisions. Instinct is merely a way of saying we don’t know.