Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
… since the dawn of capitalism the worker’s knowledge has been progressively deprived of the surplus that originally qualified it. In the process it has become structurally identical to the knowledge of the master-capitalist inasmuch as it now perceives jouissance as incarnated in the enjoyment of the commodity (59).
A worker is not suddenly any freer (even potentially) from capitalist ideology, and therefore from the mire of value, simply because his contribution to capitalist production has become either immaterial or affective. Rather, his immersion in capitalism is aggravated by the fact that capital has managed to appropriate and commodify his surplus-jouissance, the excess consubstantial with labour itself.
… the intrinsic limit of all theories on the revolutionary/subversive role of the working-class,whether of the Fordistor post-Fordist period, has been their short-sightedness with regard to the psychoanalytic conception of surplus. (70)
In other words, the workers who can make a substantial difference are those belonging to the increasing numbers of “living dead”, whose labour-power has not yet entered the cycle of capitalist valorization. (76)
What matters here is to stress that the commodity bought back by the workers is not “all there is”, i.e. it cannot be regarded as the final outcome of capitalist dynamics. Rather, instead of stopping at circulation these dynamics are not without their own unaccounted for and unaccountable residue, their own external surplus, which is fully detached and meaningless from the perspective of capital itself. This residue is what Lacan identified, recurring to Marx and Engels’ term, as lumpenproletariat, in spite of the fact that neither Marx nor Engels accorded it any positive political potential. If we agree that the key step to undermine the capitalist order is to link back consumption to production with the aim of politicizing the original parallax taking place within the latter, this step should be complemented by the politicization of the external remainder of capitalist dynamics.
… More precisely, what we need to politicize is the connection between surplus qua knowledge-at-work and the lumpenproletariat as the human surplus of the profiteering logic of capital. Ultimately we are dealing with the same surplus observed in different contexts: the knowledge extracted from the worker, i.e. the foundational surplus of any signifying operation whatsoever, returns at the end of the cycle as the structural, indigestible surplus of capitalist dynamics. 77
My central contention is therefore that the only way to bring back the focus on work and exploitation is to theorize a new link between production and the human surplus engendered by the mad escalation of capitalist dynamics. … Rather than just politicizing production within capitalist dynamics, however, we should dare to intervene creatively by linking the political question concerning the “production parallax” to the other political question concerning the excluded masses in urgent need of organization. Capitalism produces surplus-value by concealing the real surplus, but it simultaneously reproduces this real surplus in the form of “human waste”. Today, the fate of millions of slumdwellers, as well as our own, depends on an intervention in the production process which rethinks the strategic role fo tis constitutive surplus, thus simultaneously preparing the ground for an alternative mode of exchange and consumption. (78)