McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
McGowan explores another modality of enjoyment which departs somewhat from the enjoyment of the death drive, this enjoyment is an libidinal, affective enjoyment as opposed to knowledge. McGowan’s uses the work of filmmaker Michael Moore as a case in point.
Combating the expert is much more difficult than combating the master: the knowledge that would subvert mastery becomes part of the power that the expert wields and thus loses its subversive power. 171
The Enjoyment The Expert derives from providing counsel
CSI: Crime Scene Investigations and House M.D. display this dynamic in its most open form: the shows present a problem that appears utterly unsolvable to the viewer, and then they reveal the expert’s genius at finding a solution. Expert knowledge – a knowledge not accessible to the ordinary subject – has all the answers and thus becomes the undisputable locus of authority. The popularity of these shows derives from their ability to allow audiences to share in the expert’s enjoyment, an enjoyment that typically is the site of trauma for the subject. 172
Contact with expert authority has a traumatic effect on the subject because of the proximity of the expert. While the old master remained at a distance, the expert is always in the subject’s face, like Dr. Buddy Rydell in Anger Management, never allowing the subject room to breathe. As Anger Management shows, this proximity has the effect of stimulating the subject. Under the rule of the expert, subjects experience what Eric Santner calls “a sustained traumatization induced by exposure to, as it were, fathers who [know] too much about living human beings.
Exposure to this type of authority, to “this excess of knowledge,” produces “an intensification of the body [that] is first and foremost a sexualization.” Instead of emancipating the subject, knowledge traumatizes and plays the central role in the subjection of the subject to the order of social regulation. 172
Unlike the master, the earlier form of social authority, the expert not only prohibits enjoyment but also appears to embody this enjoyment through the act of laying down regulations. The expert enjoys informing subjects about the dangers they face or the ways they should alter their behavior, and it is this enjoyment that subjects rebel against.
Reign of expert: transformation of knowledge from a vehicle of liberation to an instrument of power (172)
As long as authority remains in the position of the traditional master, knowledge can have a revolutionary function. 173 Political activity consists in acts of informing, raising consciousness and bringing issues to light.
Conservatism permits people a way of organizing their enjoyment in a way that today’s emancipatory politics does not. Emancipatory politics may offer a truer vision of the world, but the Right offers a superior way of enjoying. 173
Whereas emancipatory politics could offer the enjoyment that comes from defiance of authority, conservatism could offer the enjoyment that comes from identification with it. This is the enjoyment that one feels when hearing one’s national anthem or saluting the flag. It resides in the fabric of the national’s military uniform that makes the fingers touching it tingle. This eroticism is not that of emancipatory politics – and it is perhaps not as powerful – but it is nonetheless a form of eroticism. It produces a libidinal charge. The struggle between conservatism and emancipatory politics has historically been a struggle between two competing modes of organizing enjoyment with neither side having a monopoly. 174
Knowledge is important only insofar as it relates to the way that subjects mobilize their enjoyment. If subjects see through ideology manipulation and have the proper knowledge, this does not necessarily inaugurate a political change.
The enjoyment of a Twinkie does not derive from the physiological effect of sugar on the human metabolism but from the knowledge of the damage this substance does to the body. Knowing the harm that accompanies something actually facilitates our enjoyment of it, especially when we are capable of disavowing this knowledge. 175
Enjoyment … depends on some degree of sacrifice that allows the subject to suffer its enjoyment. Sacrifice is essential to our capacity for enjoying ourselves. There is a fundamentally masochistic structure to enjoyment.
Through sacrifice and loss, we reconstitute the privileged object that exists only as an absence. This is why actually obtaining the privileged object necessarily disappoints: when the lost object becomes present, it loses its privileged status and becomes an ordinary empirical object.
Knowledge thus helps us to enjoy not in the way that we might think – that is, by showing us what is good for our well-being – but by giving us something to sacrifice: if we know, for instance that cigarettes are unhealthy and could kill us, this elevates the mundane fact of smoking into an act laced with enjoyment. With each puff, we repeat the sacrifice and return to the primordial experience of loss. The death that we bring on is not simply the price that we pay for smoking; it is the means through which we enjoy the act of smoking. In this sense, every cigarette is really killing the smoker. If it didn’t, the act would lose its ability to provide enjoyment (though it may still produce bodily pleasure).
Under the rule of the traditional master, prohibition sustains the possibility for this type of enjoyment: we can enjoy an act because it transgresses a societal prohibition. 176
But prohibition no longer plays this role in contemporary society. No universal prohibition bars certain activities; instead, knowledge about the harm that activities cause begins to play the role that prohibition once played. We don’t avoid smoking simply because it is wrong but because we know the harm that it causes. We don’t refrain from extramarital sex because it is wrong but because we know the societal and physical dangers it entails. Even conservative think and talk this way.
When, for instance, conservatives argue for excluding information about condoms from sex education classrooms, they claim that we know condoms aren’t 100 percent safe in preventing the spread of HIV. In each case, the authority is knowledge, not law. The libidinal charge in politics involved with challenging the master has largely disappeared today, and now that libidinal charge has attached itself to challenging the experts, who represent the new agents of authority. 176
Conservative populism – the most powerful form of right-wing politics today – owes its ascendancy to the development of this form of authority. The appeal of populist leaders consists in the relation that they take up to enjoyment. While the traditional master prohibits enjoyment, the populist leader liberates subjects from the restrictions on their enjoyment posed by experts.
Though conservative populists often call for a return to traditional values (advocating restrictions on abortion, prayer in schools, and the like), they do not deploy these values in the service of prohibition.. instead, their rhetoric places traditional values in the position of liberation and freedom. The populist leader proposes to free subjects from constricting expert authority in order that they might freely embrace the traditional values that this new authority threatens to eviscerate. In this way, traditional values, despite their function as a source of prohibition, become transformed into their opposite – a source of apparent liberation. 177
Creationism is a doctrine linked in its very foundation to authoritative rule and prohibitions on behavior. … But today the champions of creationism characterize themselves as rebellious challengers of authority rather than its acolytes. They fight for the freedom to believe and teach a doctrine that defies the ruling ideas laid down by expert authority – scientists who understand the complexitieis of evolutionary science that no layperson can master. 177
… proponents of teaching creationism characterize themselves as its most vociferous opponents. This sounds like a radical cause to take up, a way of refusing to believe just what we’re told. The way in which proponents of creationism advance their case exemplifies the tactics of the contemporary populist leader. 177
Whereas the distribution of enjoyment once created a level playing field for the forces of emancipation and those of conservatism. Now both modes of enjoying – enjoying transgression and enjoying obedience – become the exclusive province of conservatism, and emancipatory politics is stuck with knowledge, which provides enjoyment only for the experts themselves (and those who identify with them). 178
According to Dolar, “The whole point of Lacan’s construction of university discourse is that this is another lure, that the seemingly autonomous and self-propelling knowledge has a secret clause, and that its truth is detained by the master under the bar.” In university discourse, the master signifier occupies the position of truth, which means that expert authority works ultimately in the service of mastery.
For her part, Zupančič adds, “What Lacan recognizes in the university discourse is a new and reformed discourse of the master.” University discourse emerges in response to the failure of the discourse of the master, but it is not a radical social structure. It represents a retooling of the authority involved in mastery in order to allow that authority to cope with the exigencies of capitalist relations of production. As the truth of university discourse (and expert authority), mastery is hidden and all the more effective because of this obscurity within which it dwells. 182
When Moore succeeds as an activist filmmaker, he mobilizes the enjoyment of the spectator and works to align this enjoyment with increased freedom and equality.
Moore’s own presence in the films functions as an avatar of the enjoyment that derives from challenging the injustice of contemporary capitalism. His disheveled hair, his old baseball cap, his excess weight – all these aspects of his physical appearance attest to his personal commitment to enjoyment rather than propriety. He looks more like a bowling partner than an expert authority, and this look helps to link the cause of emancipation with enjoyment in his films.