The Subject is Dead

1. The Achievement Subject

2. Death of God

3. Nietzsche & Bergson

4. Language Games

5. Action & Contradiction

6. The Death or Revival of the Subject

I. The Achievement Subject

Today, the subject is constituted by achievement. But since achievement is short-lived, the process restarts, leading to burnout. These ideas are developed throughout Byung Chul-Han’s early work. For Han the achievement subject is not just encouraged to achieve, achievement is a compulsion. The individual has become an entrepreneur of the self – engaged in optimization, marketing, networking, and sales. While Han attributes the source of the achievement subject to the internalization of power relations vis a vis neoliberalism, I’d like to propose an additional explanation that adds to the explanation of how the modern subject has come to be what it is today.

II. The Death of God

Thinking about the modern achievement subject, one can reasonably ask “hasn’t it always been this way?” As someone who has been thinking about subjectivity lately, I have been reading some fiction in order to think through various concepts. When I compare stories about subjects from the past 500 years to characters in more ancient stories, I find that there are a number of differences that I believe at least allow us to find a pattern that seems to provide at least the means to speculate about how today’s subject differs significantly from those in the past.

The first difference is that the modern subject seems to be godless. In Gilgamesh, king Gilgamesh and the people of his city are organized according to their religion. I remember exclaiming when I read that Gilgamesh had the right to sleep with every bride before their husband did. At first this made no sense to me, but since Gilgamesh was a descendent of the Gods, my takeaway was that by sleeping with the brides, the people of the city would be a superior people with immortal blood.

The second difference would be the diminishing role of the family in today’s world. In Antigone, the main character is ordered to leave her brother’s rotting body in the streets. As a punishment for his crime, the city forbade Antigone from giving him a proper burial that would help him transition to the afterlife. Despite the law, Antigone’s value of family was stronger than the mortal codes.

In Hamlet, I think we do see the birth of the modern subject as others have claimed. Hamlet is torn between God, family, society, and himself.

In modern television and film, characters are rarely in communication with God or bound by their familial duties and roles. In Girls, Hannah Horvath is guided by her pursuit of becoming a famous and well respected author. In Mad Med, Don Draper spends more time at the office than with his family. And in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman isn’t concerned with the pursuit of eternal values but the fleeting experiences of drugs, validation, and consumption.

The difference between the modern achievement subject and the ancient subject is definitely tied to neoliberalism, but the death of god can be understood as a moment where the world became fluid and untethered from a center. In a sense the modern subject seems to live in an ephemeral world, while the ancient subject lived in an eternal one. This temporal shift seems to explain the transition from a subject that takes part in rituals to a subject that participates in consuming. Lastly, unlike Gilgamesh and Antigone who ultimately decide to destroy themselves, the modern achievement subject is fixed on the process of self-creation.

III. Nietzsche & Bergson

In chapter one of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes about the great lie of philosophy. Philosophers have never been concerned with truth, every philosophy simply conceals the will of the author. For Nietzsche, what is fundamental is not truth but each person’s will to power. What is said to be true is simply the justification for those in power.

While Nietzsche held a minority opinion, decades later Henri Bergson wrote in Matter and Memory that perception is not about truth but about action. We perceive what we have the capacity to do. While Bergson’s work isn’t nearly as famous as Nietzsche’s, the two of them offered a critical perspective that argued for the primacy of action and the subservience of beliefs to action. But in today’s world, over a hundred years later, the ideas of these two philosophers remain on the periphery. With the death of god, the achievement subject doesn’t find itself free from tyranny, but bound to the ever changing consensus of the crowd.

IV. Language Games

In American Psycho, there’s a famous scene where Bateman is at dinner with a table of friends and strangers where he says in a concerned and genuine tone how important it is that his peers take the problems of their society seriously in order for further social progress. Leaving the table speechless, Bateman’s friend Price responds by calling Bateman the boy next door. If you aren’t familiar with American Psycho, this scene is particularly funny because Bateman is a serial killer, a racist, and a sexist to name a few. But the scene does a good job at satirizing the social impulse to have the right opinions, to perform them, and update them as time goes on in order to be up to date on the most progressive views.

In today’s economy, the speed at which media is consumed reflects the speed at which ideas circulate, get adopted, and get replaced. A few years ago, any meeting began with a land acknowledgement and people sharing their pronouns – today that seems to have mostly faded. No longer tied to a fixed center through religion, rituals, and family, society today is a series of language games in which information circulates, is consumed, and assimilated into one’s actions. While god died, it was replaced by what Nietzsche referred to as the crowd. While some might see this as progress, this lack of grounding has made achievement a never ending process – as soon as something is achieved something new is ready to be achieved – leaving the subject in an endless cycle of compulsive action to align themselves with the vicissitudes of the crowd.

IV. Action & Contradiction

At the end of season one of Mad Men, Pete Cambell discovers that Don Draper has actually stolen the identity of another man. Using this as leverage against Don, Pete threatens to tell their employer Bert Cooper unless Don promotes Pete. When Don tries to call Pete’s bluff, Pete heads to Bert’s office where he’s followed by Don. Directed to spit it out, Pete tells Bert that Don isn’t who he says he is. If you aren’t familiar with the show, Bert looks to be around 70, Don is in his 30s, and Pete in his 20s. When hearing what Pete had to say Bert said ‘who cares’. Shocked by his response, Pete became flustered and unable to comprehend how Bert couldn’t care that Don was not Don. While Don and Bert had a shared understanding that what mattered is what Don was capable of doing, Pete’s entire worldview functioned according to the idea that what was true mattered.

Today’s subject, like Pete Campbell’s character, seems to be largely concerned with having actions follow what’s true according to social consensus. Unable to live a life where one’s actions can be deemed contradictory, today’s subject is characterized by an inability to act in an ostensibly contradictory way.

VI. The Death of the Subject

For Antigone, the law that forbade her from burying her brother, forced her to take action that would cause her to live with a contradiction. Could she be a good person if she broke the law? For Antigone, breaking the law wasn’t just something that could co-exist with her being a good person, daughter, and sister, it was the very thing that would allow her to be a good person. Unlike today’s subject that is concerned with creating themselves, the story of Antigone shows us how in order to be a subject one must destroy themselves, in the eyes of the crowd, in order to truly become a subject.