56 Tahir Wood
Failure of subjective morality is in this sense a failure of the very mode of representation
on which it depends, meaning that the simple moral dilemma turns eventually into something
more general than that, an ambivalent, and perhaps relativist, attitude towards moral issues
and a cynical attitude towards the law. This opens up the way for a 'bad subject' to take the
historical stage. This bad subject, who is by nature a cunning subject, is one who has
perceived the flaw in the iconic nature of morality and whose vocation is to live within the
gap between the law as posited and his own experience of it as nugatory. He brings into being
an ̳animal kingdom of the spirit‘, based on the indexical principles that he has discovered for
himself.
3.3. The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit: The Bad Subject
The animal kingdom of the spirit is one where the indexical principle is dominant within
the symbolic order.
The key here is the notion of experience, shared experience in groups and individual
experience. A group of individuals may find that their common experience of the world
contradicts the way in which they had originally represented it (or, as it had been represented
to them).^18 For example, due to the changing nature of the world young people may discover
that the way they had initially represented the world through their education at the hands of
elders does not match their own lived experience. They may then feel free to reject the moral
part of that education.
As techniques of representation develop, and due to the reflexive nature of semiosis
already discussed, these contradictions between the nature of the world and the way it had
previously been represented can themselves be represented and communicated; i.e. one
becomes conscious of this discrepancy and begins to communicate it with others.
Such subjects cannot simply follow the universal law, because the law itself is being
refracted by the increasingly complex prism of society. For example, if the law is seen to
serve particular or sectional interests rather than universal ones, then the law can no longer be
simply and iconically represented in subjectivity. The law becomes part of a more complex
internal representation, in which the sense of self may be radically separated from the
purview of the law, a subjective constellation that may itself differ greatly from one
individual to another. There are as many sources of such diversity as one might wish to
discover: increasing division of labour, the generation gap, racial and ethnic dynamics,
colonisation, gender, the changing nature of familial relations, and so forth.
Whereas in a society based entirely on subjective morality, the individual who does not
conform to the law is seen as simply someone who is weak-willed, unwilling to properly
internalise the law or too weak to obey it, a society based on moral ambivalence, by contrast,
will by its very nature produce criminals, rebels, trouble-makers, non-conformists,
freethinkers and theorists – all variants of the ̳bad subject‘, the one whose personal ethics
cannot be assumed to be identical with any officially propagated moral code. The dominating
semiotic principle here is that of the index, which now concerns the relationships that signs
have with other signs. One of my interests is to apply this principle to relationships among
linguistic representations, such as propositions.
(^18) See Rose (1981) on the contradiction between definition and experience.