McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.
🙂 This chapter really takes off from Žižek’s claim that I don’t want to hear about your food and costumes, tell me your dirty jokes.
Thesis: Psychoanalytic critique of capitalism differs from Marxist theories because it recognizes that even the rich, well-off upper class do not enjoy, in fact they enjoy less than the workers and lower classes. This is because the former must sacrifice more enjoyment to attain the material worth etc.
But McGowan states that even though they may be on top in the the game of capital, they are still are unable to get satisfaction from their satisfaction. “It is only when one blows up one’s class possibilities that the opportunity for real enjoyment appears. Enjoyment requires sacrifice, but not the sacrifice of one’s time for the sake of accumulation. It demands the sacrifice of accumulation itself.” 86
But this isn’t libertarian, Hayekian right-wing platitudes. These conservatives generally argue for an emergence of an aristocratic elite, that with freedom class division is inevitable. Whereas for psychoanalysis class society is founded on a particular form of non-freedom, arguing that its “implicit ideal guiding psychoanalytic treatment is that of a classless society.” 81 Hmm sounds like Marx; so what gives Todd?
While Marxism shows the economic and social costs of class exploitation … psychoanalysis emphasizes the psychic costs of capitalism for the whole society, including those that most directly benefit … the upper and middle classes. Its concern is … the suffering endured by those who, when one regards their situation from the outside, should be happy. Psychoanalysis arises in response to the psychic costs demanded by capitalist class based society. 82
Psychoanalysis shows how even those who most surely benefit the most from capitalism don’t really enjoy.
If this sounds rather odd for a socially progressive guy like McGowan, he then explains:
Of course, no one wants to lament the misfortune of the poor little rich kid or try to generate sympathy for the suffering of Bill Gates. The point is rather to emphasize the unfreedom and lack of enjoyment that haunt the beneficiaries of capitalism and all class society. Even those who win in the capitalist game lose, and this provides what is perhaps the ultimate indictment of the capitalist system. 82
This is an interesting tact, McGowan implies here that Marxist theory by unearthing the exploitation of workers, and thus basing the overthrow of capitalism on a sense of justice and equality, should also stop to look at the fact that the rich owners are not as well off psychically as many assume.
The reason being is that for McGowan
- Workers suffer less repression
- Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment 84
- Class privilege demands repression in exchange for the social advantages that it offers 83
McGowan cites Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious where Freud explains the trajectory of jokes in terms of social class.
- lower classes (w/o privileged status in class society) the true sexual or smutty nature of joke can be openly revealed
- as go higher in class status in order to remain acceptable the joke undergoes more and more “deformation and repression, so that the original sexual dimension appears only obliquely or indirectly.” 84
McGowan concludes the upper classes have made more of a sacrifice of enjoyment than lower classes, “Class status involves forgoing more enjoyment and living more strictly according to the dictates of the social law that commands its sacrifice.” 84 Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment. 84 What does he mean exactly?
When the upper class experience a smutty joke, they feel outrage or disgust. But this is an unrecognized enjoyment, but an enjoyment nonetheless. “But enjoyment in the form of outrage or disgust is a case of enjoyment that occurs with too much trouble.”
“The upper-class subject who enjoys its superiority takes a circuitous route to find its satisfaction, and this circuitous route is the inevitable product of upper-class status. Though wealth and social recognition make material life easier, they elongate the path of the drive and thereby deprive the subject of the ability to embrace its own mode of enjoying.”
The commodity does provide enjoyment, but only insofar as one doesn’t have it. 85
Capitalism is a system in which we cannot avow our enjoyment. Therefore psychoanalysis calls for more enjoyment, not less. The call for more enjoyment, not less, is a tricky proposition because it threatens to devolve into erecting enjoyment as a social duty, which is the fundamental form of contemporary authority.
We must also clearly distinguish enjoyment, which one endures and suffers, from pleasure and happiness, both of which promise the overcoming of loss. Note 14 p. 303
Recognition
Here McGowan gets into Hegel’s Master/Slave. He distinguishes between acceding to the demand and on the other hand, going beyond demand to desire. Being stuck on authority’s demand and trying to fulfill it, follow it slavishly. But the authority doesn’t know what it wants.
The subject becomes a desiring subject by paying attention not to what the social authority says (the demand) but to what remains unsaid between the lines (the desire). The path of desire offers the subject the possibility of breaking from its dependence on social authority through the realization that its secret, the enigma of the other’s desire, does not exist — that the authority doesn’t know what it wants. 88
Flashy cars, conspicuous consumption … Someone who was authentically enjoying would not need to parade this enjoyment. The authentically enjoying subject does not perform its enjoyment for the Other but remains indifferent to the Other. 90
Sacrifice enjoyment:
But no one can make a direct choice of enjoyment instead of recognition. The initial loss of enjoyment, the initial sacrifice is inevitable. As I have insisted in earlier chapters, this enjoyment only exists insofar as it is lost: there is no way for the subject to avoid altogether the loss of enjoyment for the sake of recognition. But what the subject might avoid is the perpetuation of this abandonment of enjoyment through the embrace of recognition. One can’t initially reject recognition, but one can subsequently revisit the original acceptance of the social demand and refuse it by becoming indifferent to recognition’s appeal. 90
Everything in society works against this indifference. The social order receives energy for its functioning from the enjoyment that subjects sacrifice for the sake of recognition. IT continues to operate thanks to a constant influx of enjoyment from those subjected to it.
When subjects embrace their own enjoyment rather than readily sacrificing for it, they do not contribute to the process of production or reproduction in the social order. Enjoyment has no use value for society, though it organizes and sustains the subject’s existence. (The subject who can no longer enjoy loses the will to live altogether.) 90
“The higher the one rises in class status, the more one invest oneself in an order that demands the sacrifice of enjoyment.” 92 McGowan argues that if we can’t entirely overthrow class distinction “we can take up a different relationship to it.” We can view it as what he calls a “necessary encumbrance.” By this he means that social recognition can be viewed as just another thankless task that society must perform. Not so fast though. There is only one problem, and that is the way capitalism has invested in the pursuit of recognition. This investment we all make in social recognition crosses all class barriers and it is what marks “the decisive break that capitalism introduces into history, and it marks the fundmanetal barrier that it erects on the path to tadopting a different relation to social class and recognition.” 92 In order to argue this point he moves to Hegel’s master/slave relationship.