Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107
An impasse in Žižek’s work on capitalism emerges with his inability to imagine the ethico-political principles of a non-capitalist and non-exploitative relation to class. [Žižek]continually points out the limitation of contemporary critiques of liberal democracy, insofar as they fail to acknowledge the primacy of class struggle in their framework. However, Zizek is in complicity with his own accusations, given that he is neither clear as to what the object of class struggle is, nor indicative of what a new way of organizing our enjoyment to the economy might be.
Rather we entertain the following hypothesis: the difficulty to think economic difference is conditioned, at least in part, by the particular ways in which Žižek and the psychoanalytical literature on capitalism that his work has inspired tend to operationalize Marx’s concepts of circuit of capital and surplus value. This tendency is most easily discernable at those moments when this psychoanalytical critique articulates the concept of enjoyment within an “accumulationist” narrative, which presupposes the contradictory unfolding of the expanded reproduction of capital as a built-in and automatic process.
This narrative ultimately erases any possibility of conceiving of contingency within, or difference from the process of capitalist reproduction.
Further still, this rendering of capitalist reproduction as self-constituted and self-driven also obliterates Žižek’s original attempt to embed the constitutive impossibility of capitalism within the discordant economy of enjoyment, since it disconnects the “structural” from the vital support of the “subjective.”
That is why we find it imperative to begin our analysis by reclaiming “organizations of surplus labor,” rather than the “accumulation of capital,” as the particular entry point of Marxian discourse before we interlace Marxian political economy with Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to conceptualize both the impossibility of, and difference in, class relations.
We then take issue with Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan’s thesis pertaining to the homology between surplus value and surplus jouissance. We reformulate the terms of this homology as that between surplus labor and surplus jouissance. In doing so, we opt for a different relation between psychoanalysis and Marxism in which we rethink economic difference, more precisely difference from capitalism, in light of psychoanalytical discourse without losing sight of one of the unique contributions of Marxian theory: the study of the historically changing relations of surplus labor. To this end, we shift the focus in psychoanalytical theory from consumption/exchange to the moments of production, appropriation, and distribution and conceive the different ways in which communities organize their relation to surplus in terms of sexual difference.
Drawing from Alain Badiou’s axiomatic politics, we formulate a feminine politics of the “non-all” that dynamites not only capitalism, but all other forms of relating to surplus labor, including forms of communism, which are organized around the masculine logic of exception.
As long as the subjects of capitalism continue to believe that an ultimate enjoyment is possible, capitalism will continue to feed off of the very disappointment that the act of consumption produces and shopping will go on ceaselessly.
This is why Stavrakakis (2003) argues that the problem with capitalism is not so much that it produces false needs, desires, and alienated subjectivities but rather that it has become a successful “administration” of enjoyment. This distinction is crucial: while the former position endorses the humanist idea that there are “true” needs, the latter shifts the focus from whether or not our needs are manufactured (they always are—to a certain extent) to the way in which capitalism thrives on the very structure of enjoyment as such (regardless of the content of enjoyment). In other words, the success of capitalism resides not so much in what it dictates that we enjoy, but the way in which it has begun to exploit how we enjoy.
The circuit of capital completes its round again, and again, without any disruption, and begins each time anew, because it has been successfully articulated with the libidinal economy of enjoyment, the structure of how we enjoy. 81-82
Moreover, the logic of desire provides a meaningful frame not only to understand how the administration of enjoyment has become constitutive of capitalism through enabling the sale of commodities (hence, securing the realization of capitalist surplus value), but also to inventively formulate a different relation to enjoyment within the field of consumption. This latter possibility hinges on articulating a relation to enjoyment that does not chase after the promise of fullness. If the notion of ultimate enjoyment is structured by the masculine logic, whereby our libidinal investment in an exceptional state of enjoyment fuels the continual displacement of our desire from one object to another in search of that impossible limit experience, then
a different relation to enjoyment, one that might very well disrupt the circuit of capital, is the decidedly ethical act of saying “no” to the superegoic injunction to “Enjoy!”—an injunction that imprisons the subjects in a regime of difference within a frame delimited by capitalism.
It is by refusing the bribe of impossible enjoyment that the subjects of this libidinal economy of desire are able to break from the endless consumption of commodities, whose flow is shored up by the ready-made signifiers (qua regime of difference/value) that are cleverly propagated by the advertisement discourse. Even though this possibility, which depends on a particular ethical reading of Lacan’s formula of sexuation, is rarely, if ever, explored, it is within the realm of the conceivable for these psychoanalytical critics. 82
However, as far as the moments of the economy other than consumption are considered, contingency remains inconceivable within the psychoanalysis of capital literature, and so does the possibility of politicizing those moments. We conjecture this is because the sophisticated critique of “the administration of enjoyment under late capitalism” attributes a certain necessity to the rest of the circuit of capital to function without any friction. In response to this presupposition, we are compelled to ask: what is the precise mechanism that propels the capitalist corporations to produce the commodities that are to be purchased by the consumers?
In representing the perpetuation of the expansion of value as automatic, we discern a tendency to understand capitalism in terms of the “accumulation drive.” This is an essentializing theoretical maneuver,
which effectively removes contingency from the reproduction of capitalism by positing capitalism qua drive as “the index of a dimension in human existence that persists for ever, beyond our physical death, and of which we can never rid ourselves…” (Žižek 1999, 293). To the extent that the production and reproduction of capital is seen as a “structural” (as opposed to “subjective”) process governed by an “impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction” (Žižek 2006, 61, emphasis added), it becomes difficult to conceptualize contingency in the constitution of the circuit of capital and, from there, to introduce class difference into the other moments of the circuit of capital. 82-83
To the extent that the process of expansion of value is taken to function automatically, the moment of consumption (i.e., realization of surplus value) ends up being the only subjective moment within the circuit of capital where the ethical can have a say and the difference from capitalism can emerge as a possibility. In the rest of the paper, we question and refuse the exceptional status that the psychoanalysis of capital literature tacitly assigns to the moment of consumption, with a view towards proliferating the subjective moments that are potentially open to an “evental site” where difference from capitalism can emerge. 83
It is to this third moment of realization of surplus value (i.e., consumption) that the psychoanalytical intervention tends to limit itself. Such a limitation, in turn, makes it impossible to see the other moments within the circuit, such as production, appropriation, exchange, and distribution, as potential sites of subjectivation. In recovering these moments, it becomes relevant again to reconsider some distinctively Marxian concerns: Who appropriates the surplus value? How are the means of production secured? What are the particular social and technical relations of producing surplus value? What happens to the realized surplus value? What are the concrete struggles over its distribution? As these questions are being posed, the circuit of capital and its continued maintenance will start to appear more and more uncertain and susceptible to disruption by a host of social antagonisms and competitive battles. 84
In this sense, a more nuanced Marxian treatment of the circuit of capital will not only reveal the contingency of the social reproduction of the process of expansion of value, but also expand the scope of applicability of psychoanalysis beyond the hustle and bustle of the shopping mall and into the “hidden abode of production.” 85
To put it differently, rendering the constitution of the expansion of value (the circuit of capital) contingent opens a space within the moment of production for conceptualizing a psychoanalytically informed economic difference that pertains to class. The concept of class here refers to the organization of different affective relations to the surplus labor, in which the relation to surplus value, the capitalist form of surplus labor, becomes one relation among many.