Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.
Capital as Real: The Marxian Parallax
The more fundamental and systemic mode of the capitalist drive no longer operates in the symbolic order where individuals are interpellated as subjects of desire.
To be clear about where the mode of drive operates in capitalism, another term needs to be introduced: the Lacanian Real. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the Real is a purely formal concept; it is nothing more or less than the inherent limit of a symbolic order, that which must be repressed so this order can function. Because the Real is “simultaneously the thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access,” it can only be experienced in itssymptomatic effects (Žižek 2007: 243).
Žižek identifies two homologous forms of the Real , which are “detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances”: the traumatic core of sexual antagonism and the social antagonism of “class struggle” (Žižek 1994: 30). Both of these conceptions of the Real may be said to comprise the “minimalist” or “negative” anthropology of Lacanian Marxism. It is the Real of sexual antagonism, for instance, which prevents “it” from being “It”: objet a will always thwart the coincidence of the object of desire with the object-cause of desire. Likewise, the Real of social antagonism will always prevent the formation of a fully (self-)transparent utopian society. Reminiscent of Althusser’s claim that ideology is eternal, psychoanalysis holds that a minimal degree of misrecognition, reification, and fetishistic disavowal—“I know very well what I am doing, but I am doing it anyway”—is endemic to all symbolic orders. Although antagonism is eternal, Žižek adamantly disclaims that the sociotranscendental status of the Real denies the existence of History [i.e., Butler’s criticism of Lacan]. The Real does not replace temporality with synchronicity or cyclicality. Rather, historical change derives from the emergence of new symbolic formations to deal with the traumatic core of sexual and social antagonism.
Because we still live within a world-economy structured by the “class struggle” inherent within capitalism, Žižek calls it the Real of our epoch. He writes:
The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a civilization, for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others… The problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations—a real in Lacanian terms. (Žižek 2005a: 241) … As Žižek states, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is not just of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of sociotranscendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (Žižek 2006b: 56).
Thus, Žižek transcodes the Marxist concepts of “commodity fetishism” and “class struggle” into the Lacanian notion of the Real. Where the older Marxist terms have long since been confused with empirical entities like the “working class” and actual commercial goods, the Lacanian Real has the benefit of emphasizing the purely formal, and therefore universal, status of capitalism and its overdetermination of the totality of social relations.
If we no longer accept a linear model of economic determinism where the economy directly causes sociopolitical events, how are we to understand the ways in which capitalism as Real overdetermines the totality of social relations?
Žižek adopts Althusser’s causal model of overdetermination: if “‘the logic of capital’ is a singular matrix which designates [capitalism’s] Real,” then it operates precisely as the absent cause of the totality-effects that occur within the sociopolitical realm (Žižek 2007: 211).
In the Lacanian Marxist base/superstructure model, as in its Althusserian predecessor, economic events of the Real do not cause Symbolic phenomena directly. Contrary to Althusser’s subject-less base/superstructure model, however, Žižek’s model maintains the subjectivity of the social antagonism of “class struggle” at the heart of the economy by introducing the concept of “parallax.”
The “Marxian parallax” refers to the irreducible gap between Real absent cause and Symbolic totality-effect.
He writes: …the ultimate parallax of the political economy [is] the gap between the reality of everyday material social life (people interacting among themselves and with nature, suffering, consuming, and so on) and the Real of the speculative dance of Capital, its self-propelling movement which seems to be disconnected from ordinary reality….Marx’s point here is not primarily to reduce the second dimension to the first (to demonstrate how the supernatural mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “real life”); his point is, rather that we cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of Capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life development and catastrophes. (Žižek 2006b: 383)
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Žižek also describes the Marxian parallax of the political economy as follows:
If, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language” enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although—or, rather, because—these two levels are inextricably intertwined.
The “political” class struggle takes place in the midst of the economy…while, at the same time, the domain of the economy serves as the key that enables us to decode political struggles. No wonder the structure of this impossible relationship is that of the Moebius strip: first, we have to progress form the political spectacle to its economic infrastructure; then in the second step, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of the political struggle at the very heart of the economy. (Žižek 2006b: 320)