Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300
From a Žižekian perspective, class should not be thought so much as a positive agency (the bearer of a historic mission) but more as a kind of non-position: the outcast, the drudges, the detainees and all those who do not ‘count’; all those who are resistant to capitalist logics. Class struggle does not function as an infrastructure of the social order (as in the sociological tradition) but precisely the opposite: the inwrought negativity that cannot be resolved by the social order and which forever blocks the latter’s completion as a full identity. Class struggle cannot be represented directly (it is everywhere and nowhere), rather it emerges as an ‘effect which exists only in order to efface the causes of its existence’. 284
Here class struggle may be said to reflect the logic of the Freudian unconscious. That is to say, it functions through primordial repression as something that is inaccessible to, and yet constitutive of, capitalism. In this way, class struggle constantly re-marks its presence through social symptoms — breakdown, failure, conflict, etc. — whose cause is obscured by the very structuring of the capitalist system itself. The question of identifying, and confronting, today’s social symptoms is a critical one for Lacanian theory and for the development of Left politics.
The stereotype of civil society is groups resisting corporations, and that is true as outlined in previous chapters. What is also true, however, is that nonprofit groups have formed productive relationships with corporations to help them develop in more benign ways.
Thus, we have a similar kind of makeover discourse at play. As an agent of the big Other, this ‘unnamed movement’ acts not only as the custodian of humanity but as a conveyor of ancient and practical wisdom/know-how whose expertise needs to be properly sourced and applied in order to achieve a harmonious reconciliation between our socio-economic and ecological systems.
In other words, it is a movement that acts on behalf of the dominant paradigm and seeks critically to reinforce it. This is where the Hegelian form of the liberal-capitalist totality is reached proper: i.e. through an engagement with its own subversion and negativity. A totality is not defined simply in relation to what it excludes as threat-negativity but rather through symbolizing, and making sense of, this very division within itself.
A totality truly succeeds through the constitutive recognition of its failures and through providing a certain grammar for its transformation. Put differently, a totality is at its strongest when it is able to circumscribe the very terms of its own subversion. It becomes an anonymous horizon that defines our responsibilities and the limits of our action. 291-92
Here we might say that democratic discourse presents us with the ultimate makeover fantasy. Where there is marginalization there is the possibility of mobilization (drawing upon the appropriate resources, expertise, etc.). Through standard references to widening antagonisms and increasing numbers of social movements, resistance appears as something that is already contained within democracy and its declared potential for infinite adaptability. The failures of democracy are taken as indicators of its success and the themes of impossibility, undecidability and so on, become part of the mythic appeal of democracy as a kind of systematicity without a system.
It feeds off itself precisely in this chrematistic fashion. If there is no credible alternative (‘all the others are worse’, as Churchill put it) then democracy and humanity are seen to comprise a single destiny as parts of a naturalistic state of affairs. In a more pervasive way than any totalitarianism, closure can be achieved through the very culture of democratic openness. 293