Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.
Discourse of the University
S2 —> a S1 $
- S2 or knowledge is in the position of the speaking agent. S2 addresses objet petit a the little nugget or remainder of enjoyment.
- S1 (the Master) is in the position of truth, and the subject ($) is in the position of production.
- This is a discourse in which knowledge speaks, the rule of experts.
- What is hidden under the facts however, what the facts want to deny, is the way they are supported by power and authority (S1 below the bar, in the lower left-hand corner; the Master in the position of truth).
- As Žižek argues, the “constitutive lie” of university discourse is its disavowal of its own performative dimension. University discourse proceeds as if it were not supported by power, as if it were neutral, as if it were not, after all, dependent upon and invested in specific political decisions.
- Capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, as a generation of critiques of technocracy and instrumental reason made clear, emphasize expertise. Capitalists ground the expertise in efficiency as understood by economic theory. Capitalism addresses the subject as a kind of object, providing no real ideological or symbolic locus of subjective meaning. We see this in the way capitalism undermines symbolic identities, how it undermines such forms of attachment through the revolutionary force of ever expanding and intensifying markets. Instead of a symbolic identity of the kind provided by a Master, capitalism offers its subjects enjoyment (objet petit a). (83-84)
For Žižek, the most interesting aspect of modern power captured by the formula of the discourse of the university stems from the distinction between the upper and lower levels of the diagram. The upper level S2 —> a expresses the fact of contemporary biopolitics (knoweldge addressing objects, treatinig subjects as objects) while the lower S1 —> $ marks the “crisis of investiture,” or the collapse of the big Other …
In contemporary capitalist society biopolitics appears in two forms: the life that has to be respected and the excess of the living other that one finds harassing, unbearable, and intolerable.
- Thus, in one respect, the other is fragile and vulnerable. It must be fully respected.
- In another, the fragility of the other is so great, the need for respect so strong, that anything can harm it; everything is dangerous
Žižek argues that the discourse of the university enables us to understand how these two attitudes are two sides of the same coin. They are both brought about by a crisis in meaning, by “the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself.” That is to say, the structure of university discourse reminds us that authority is presupposed yet denied by expert rule; the Master does not speak and does not occupy the position of agent; rather, he occupies the position of Truth (85).
Yet whereas capitalism is a self-revolutionizing economic form, one in whose very crises, inequities, and excesses drive its productivity, Stalinism was a self-revolutionizing political form. Stalinism tried to attain (and surpass!) capitalist productivity without the capitalist form, without, in other words, class struggle. Once class struggle officially ended with the 1935 constitution, the revolutionizing impulse of capitalism came under the control of the political domain in the form of terror. As a consequence, the inequities of capitalism shifted into social life as more direct forms of hierarchy and domination. Žižek writes, “In the Soviet Union from the late 1920s onwards, the key social division was defined not by property, but by direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). For this reason, Žižek can say that Stalinism was the “symptom” of capitalism. It was a symptom insofar as it revealed the truth about the social relations of domination that capitalist ideology presents as free and equal. (86)