Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.
To this example, Žižek adds the emergence of labor as a commodity which represents “the internal negation of the universal principle of equivalent exchange of commodities,” and, in
his most extended illustration of the social symptom, Žižek follows Lacan’s claim that Marx discovered the symptom when he conceived of the structural shift in fetishism that occurred in
“the passage from feudalism to capitalism” (Žižek 1989: 23, 26).
Whereas in feudalism fetishism takes place in a “relation between men,” in capitalism it occurs in a “relation between things.” In a feudal society, “relations of domination and servitude” are immediately transparent (the king rules over his subjects because they recognize him as king, and vice versa), while in a capitalist society these power relations are repressed by the institution of commodity fetishism (the capitalist, despite his conspicuous consumption, is hidden by the fact that he or she enjoys the same formal rights as the rest of us). Although these fetishistic structures are mutually exclusive, they follow the same logic.
Fetishism: consists of a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured network and one of its elements: what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements. (Žižek 1989: 24)
Rephrased in Hegelian terms, this misrecognition concerns the relation between the Universal and the Particular. The Universal is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between particularities, but in fetishism the Universal appears as an immediate property of a particularity, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other particularities. For example, the abstract, universal exchange-value appears as the immediate property of, say, a $50,000 luxury sedan or a $1 loaf of bread.
the social symptom, “the point of emergence of the truth about social relations,” shifts from being a case of ideological misrecognition or “false consciousness” that we can dissolve through the traditional form of Marxist ideology criticism, to become embodied in the reified (the “objectively subjective”) social reality of the world of commodities (Žižek 1989: 26). “It is this world,” Žižek writes, “which behaves ‘idealistically’” (Žižek 1989: 32).
We no longer have to believe in the magical aura emanating from luxury sedans, the cars themselves believe in their thaumaturgy [a miricle, magic] for us.
The ontological status of the social symptom entails that, as Jameson writes apropos of Althusser, “ideology is institutional first and foremost and only later on to be considered a matter of consciousness” (Jameson 2001: xii). Such an admission does not amount to an irreconcilable divorce of … theory from practice. It simply means that when it comes to ideology, doing “speaks louder” than knowing.
Lacan coined the term sinthome to conceptually account for patients whose symptom persisted beyond interpretation. The sinthome is “literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject” (Žižek 1989: 75). What would it mean to identify with a social kernel of enjoyment that absolutely resists interpretation?
Žižek has used the example of single black mothers to represent the social mean to identify with a social kernel of enjoyment that absolutely resists interpretation? Žižek has used the example of single black mothers to represent the social sinthome, “a knot, a point at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation (the return to family values, the rejection of the welfare state and its ‘uncontrolled’ spending, etc.) meet” (Žižek 2000: 176).
This example strikes me as perspicacious if we consider the jouissance structuring the predominant ideology, but it seems to remain at the level of a social symptom from a progressive perspective. In other words, the example of the single black mother is still interpretable, we can identify with how she interrupts the “service of goods.”
What about a social sinthome that provides the substance that gives consistency to our “collective” subjectivity?
What about commodity fetishism as the definitive social sinthome of capitalist society? As Žižek reminds us, for Marx:
“there is one exceptional “pathological,” innerworldly particular content in which the very universal form of reflexivity is grounded, to which it is attached by a kind of umbilical cord, by which the frame of this form itself is enframed; for Marx, of course, the particular content is the social universe of commodity exchange” (Žižek 2000: 278).
The enjoyment derived from commodity fetishism persists beyond interpretation. Unlike the symptom which loses its enjoyment factor when we gain knowledge of it, the sinthome, as the fully acknowledged “frame” of our existence, maintains its libidinal position.
The particular knot of the “social relations between things” confronts us with the impotence of our critico-political activity. We identify with the pathological point of the social universe of commodity exchange simply by selling our labor power, not to mention the innumerable ways we enjoy this social sinthome . In a topsy-turvy world where not just wooden tables but direct experiences stand on their head, are not the commodities themselves—like Žižek’s celebrated example of canned laughter in television shows—enjoying for us? Do they not function as the “quanta of enjoyment” in late capitalist society, to paraphrase Žižek’s recent analogy that sinthomes are the “Freudian equivalent of superstrings” (Žižek 2006a: 78)?
How do we cut the umbilical cord that attaches us to the social universe of commodity exchange despite our conscious resistance?
Žižek’s recent work displays an acute awareness of this predicament. He frames the problem by drawing an analogy to the psychoanalytic process. He writes, “Just as the unconscious and not the patient must be brought to the truth, the real task is to convince not the subject, but the [commodities]: not to change the way we talk about commodities, but to change the way commodities talk among themselves” (Žižek 2006b:352).
As in the example of the chicken and the man who believes himself to be a grain of seed, we must convince not ourselves but the chicken-commodities that we are not grains of seed in order to defetishize the social universe of commodity exchange.