Bryant, Levi R. “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist” International Journal of Žižek Studies (Vol 2, no. 4) 1-48.
Discourse of Bio-Power
S1 –> $
a S2
Since no signifier is ever adequate to the subject, any knowledge that strives to situate and fix the subject is doomed to fail. Every signifier that purports to name or fix the subject slides off of it like water on the back of a duck. 34
As a consequence, the knowledge and institutions produced in the discourse of bio-power always prove inadequate. Just as the hysteric always develops new tricks for challenging the master in the clinic, something about the subject perpetually escapes precisely because the subject is a failure of language. It is for this reason that the lower level of the discourse of bio-power is characterized by impotence. The knowledge and institutions produced in this discourse forever miss the remainder or surplus embodied in objet awhich drives the subject. Put otherwise, the discourse of bio-power fails because the subject is already dead; which is to say that the subject is governed by the death drive, in excess of any homeostatic mechanisms characteristic of life.
As described by Negri and Hardt, immaterial labor has come to replace industrial labor, now dominating the social field.
In the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged “immaterial labor,” that is, labor that create immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response. Conventional terms such as service work, intellectual labor, and cognitive labor all refer to aspects of immaterial labor, but none of them captures its generality.
As an initial approach, one can conceive immaterial labor in two principle forms. The first form refers to labor that is primarily intellectual or linguistic, such as problem solving, symbolic and analytic tasks, and linguistic expressions. This kind of immaterial labor produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, and other such products.
We call the other principle form of immaterial labor “affective labor.” Unlike emotions, which are mental phenomena, affects refer equally to body and mind. In fact, affects, such as joy and sadness, reveal the present state of life in the entire organism, expressing a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking. Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion (Negri and Hardt 2004: 108). 30