ideology – Page 2

psychopedagogy

Cho, Daniel. Psychopedagogy. London: Ashgate, 2009.

The force that keeps the unconscious from being heard is the imaginary relation that the analysand constructs between their ego and the analyst’s. To state it differently, the analysand enters into a mirror-relation with the analyst’s ego. The analysand identifies with the analyst by grasping onto the ways they are similar. In a way, the analysand is saying to the analysts, “You are like me!” The analysand will even go so far as to be alienated by the analyst’s ego: “After all,” as the analysand seems to say, “the analyst is the trained professional, the expert.” By regarding the analyst as a mirror-image of one’s self results in attempts to master that image, the analyst. Returning for a moment to Dora – all of her resistance stems from her desire for mastery over Freud, which means the ego is at the bottom of the conflict. Dora is trying to maintain the integrity of her ego by mastering the image qua Freud.

For the unconscious to be heard, the ego must be muted. But one does not mute the ego by debasing, insulting, or shaming it; for indeed the ego will simply redouble itself against such efforts at traumatisation. Rather one disarms the ego by breaking the imaginary identification that alienates the analysand`s subjectivity in the analyst`s, that is, by causing separation. For this reason, Lacan says that the analyst must be ‘not a living mirror, but an empty mirror’ (SII 246). The analyst must be a mirror that reflects an empty image, that is, an image with which the patient cannot identify. The analyst does so by functioning as object a, that obscure object which sullies a perfect picture. And the analyst functions this way by speaking on behalf of the unconscious – the true subject of psychoanalysis. 42

Thus the lesson of the Ratman: we always possess more knowledge than we should like to admit – sometimes more than we ourselves are consciously aware. Learning therefore does not always mean acquiring absolutely new knowledge; it sometimes requires relearning the traumatic knowledge we do “not-want-to-know” but possess all the same. 81

Class consciousness is thus the knowledge of the mode of production contained, or as Lukacs has it, “imputed,” to a particular structural class position within the total system, its thrust is that it places knowledge on the side of the system itself. It no longer much matters what individuals actually think or know about the system. The system functions regardless; and by functioning, the system literally “thinks” the appropriate thoughts for the individuals. For example, the individual worker need not imagine extracting living labor power from the body in order to sell it as a commodity on the market in order for capitalism to function. This knowledge – that is, of classes and their particular functions – is possessed by the system of capital production itself, and as it operates, the system literally thinks about the extraction, sale, and consumption of labor power so that the individual does not have to. In other words, while empirical individuals may not care about the economy or politics, the economy and politics care about empirical individuals. Class consciousness, in other words, on Lukacs’s account, exists on a similar formal level as does the psychoanalytic unconscious. 84

But as suggestive and provocative Lukacs’s unadulterated Marxian variation on consciousness may be, even he does not take into account the various resistances, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, individuals will produce in order not to know the traumatic knowledge yielded by certain standpoints. We must therefore follow through with the

Just as Lukacs correlates class consciousness to the system itself, effectively rubbing out the individual’s relevance, so Lacan and psychoanalysis also correlate the unconscious to a kind of nonindividual subject: “if there is an image which could represent for us the Freudian notion of the unconscious, it is indeed that of the acephalic subject, of a subject who no longer has an ego, who doesn’t belong to the ego” (S II: 167).

Lacan describes his notion of the subject as acephalic (that is, headless) because its thought is no longer tided to the consciousness of the ego but is now taken over by the unconscious itself. Because of its ties to the ego, consciousness is considered by Lacan as an obstacle or resistance to the knowledge of the unconscious. In dividing thought and being between the unconscious and the subject, Lacan introduces a fundamental division into his variation on the subject, that is to say, the Lacanian subject is a split-subject , which he conveys in his nomenclature: $. 87

Lukacs, similarly, introduces a split into the subject of the proletariat with class consciousness, as we saw, on the side of the system itself, separated from the individual’s being. In both Lukacs and Lacan, the acephalic subject becomes the image to which we must hold on.

The overcoming of the ego leaves a clearing in which the subject of the unconscious can emerge. This is why, for Lacan, the subject can only be described negatively. Only when conscious thought or positive identity (i.e., I am a man, I am a teacher, I am able-bodied, etc.) – in short, the ego – is subtracted from individuals, that is, only when they are transformed into the negativity that is the Lacanian subject, can they learn the unconscious. 87

If class consciousness corresponds to the unconscious in that they are both forms of repressed knowledge, then trauma would be the sign of class consciousness’s emergence. Therefore the criticism that Marx issues his political economist contemporaries on the basis of their not having learned the miserable truth of capitalist accumulation is a bit off the mark. For Marx grants them too much benefit of the doubt. More correct would have been to make the psychoanalytic critique, namely, that the bourgeois political economists knew this truth quite well but nonetheless did “not want to know” about it. They felt the trauma of capitalism and attempted to rationalize it away. 88

commodity fetishism

Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.

To this example, Žižek adds the emergence of labor as a commodity which represents “the internal negation of the universal principle of equivalent exchange of commodities,” and, in
his most extended illustration of the social symptom, Žižek follows Lacan’s claim that Marx discovered the symptom when he conceived of the structural shift in fetishism that occurred in
“the passage from feudalism to capitalism” (Žižek 1989: 23, 26).

Whereas in feudalism fetishism takes place in a “relation between men,” in capitalism it occurs in a “relation between things.” In a feudal society, “relations of domination and servitude” are immediately transparent (the king rules over his subjects because they recognize him as king, and vice versa), while in a capitalist society these power relations are repressed by the institution of commodity fetishism (the capitalist, despite his conspicuous consumption, is hidden by the fact that he or she enjoys the same formal rights as the rest of us). Although these fetishistic structures are mutually exclusive, they follow the same logic.

Fetishism: consists of a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured network and one of its elements: what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements. (Žižek 1989: 24)

Rephrased in Hegelian terms, this misrecognition concerns the relation between the Universal and the Particular. The Universal is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between particularities, but in fetishism the Universal appears as an immediate property of a particularity, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other particularities. For example, the abstract, universal exchange-value appears as the immediate property of, say, a $50,000 luxury sedan or a $1 loaf of bread.

the social symptom, “the point of emergence of the truth about social relations,” shifts from being a case of ideological misrecognition or “false consciousness” that we can dissolve through the traditional form of Marxist ideology criticism, to become embodied in the reified (the “objectively subjective”) social reality of the world of commodities (Žižek 1989: 26). “It is this world,” Žižek writes, “which behaves ‘idealistically’” (Žižek 1989: 32).

We no longer have to believe in the magical aura emanating from luxury sedans, the cars themselves believe in their thaumaturgy [a miricle, magic] for us.

The ontological status of the social symptom entails that, as Jameson writes apropos of Althusser, “ideology is institutional first and foremost and only later on to be considered a matter of consciousness” (Jameson 2001: xii). Such an admission does not amount to an irreconcilable divorce of … theory from practice. It simply means that when it comes to ideology, doing “speaks louder” than knowing.

Lacan coined the term sinthome to conceptually account for patients whose symptom persisted beyond interpretation. The sinthome is “literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject” (Žižek 1989: 75). What would it mean to identify with a social kernel of enjoyment that absolutely resists interpretation?

Žižek has used the example of single black mothers to represent the social mean to identify with a social kernel of enjoyment that absolutely resists interpretation? Žižek has used the example of single black mothers to represent the social sinthome, “a knot, a point at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation (the return to family values, the rejection of the welfare state and its ‘uncontrolled’ spending, etc.) meet” (Žižek 2000: 176).

This example strikes me as perspicacious if we consider the jouissance structuring the predominant ideology, but it seems to remain at the level of a social symptom from a progressive perspective. In other words, the example of the single black mother is still interpretable, we can identify with how she interrupts the “service of goods.”

What about a social sinthome that provides the substance that gives consistency to our “collective” subjectivity?

What about commodity fetishism as the definitive social sinthome of capitalist society? As Žižek reminds us, for Marx:

“there is one exceptional “pathological,” innerworldly particular content in which the very universal form of reflexivity is grounded, to which it is attached by a kind of umbilical cord, by which the frame of this form itself is enframed; for Marx, of course, the particular content is the social universe of commodity exchange” (Žižek 2000: 278).

The enjoyment derived from commodity fetishism persists beyond interpretation. Unlike the symptom which loses its enjoyment factor when we gain knowledge of it, the sinthome, as the fully acknowledged “frame” of our existence, maintains its libidinal position.

The particular knot of the “social relations between things” confronts us with the impotence of our critico-political activity. We identify with the pathological point of the social universe of commodity exchange simply by selling our labor power, not to mention the innumerable ways we enjoy this social sinthome . In a topsy-turvy world where not just wooden tables but direct experiences stand on their head, are not the commodities themselves—like Žižek’s celebrated example of canned laughter in television shows—enjoying for us? Do they not function as the “quanta of enjoyment” in late capitalist society, to paraphrase Žižek’s recent analogy that sinthomes are the “Freudian equivalent of superstrings” (Žižek 2006a: 78)?

How do we cut the umbilical cord that attaches us to the social universe of commodity exchange despite our conscious resistance?

Žižek’s recent work displays an acute awareness of this predicament. He frames the problem by drawing an analogy to the psychoanalytic process. He writes, “Just as the unconscious and not the patient must be brought to the truth, the real task is to convince not the subject, but the [commodities]: not to change the way we talk about commodities, but to change the way commodities talk among themselves” (Žižek 2006b:352).

As in the example of the chicken and the man who believes himself to be a grain of seed, we must convince not ourselves but the chicken-commodities that we are not grains of seed in order to defetishize the social universe of commodity exchange.

excremental remainder ethical monster

Kotsko, Adam. “Žižek and the Excremental Body of Christ” Presentation at the American Academy of Religion 2009 Conference

The basic structure of Žižek’s interpretation of Christianity is provided by Hegel, who elaborates a theology of the “death of God” (which was later taken up by American theologians such as Thomas Altizer, whom Žižek discovered after developing his own Hegelian reading of Christianity). Hegel contends that the three persons of the Trinity do not represent three coeternal realities, but rather three decisive and irreversible turning points in the life of God:

the Father empties out the entirety of his divinity into the Son, and by dying the Son then empties out that divinity into the Holy Spirit, which is understood as a new form of social bond.

Coming at this basic structure from a Lacanian perspective and specifically from his use of Lacan to found a contemporary form of ideology critique, Žižek argues that Christ represents a unique form of “master signifier.” Normally “master signifiers” are tautologous authorities whose self-assertion allows some form of symbolic order or ideological structure to crystallize — for instance, in modern society money serves as the foundation of our entire system of values, but when you ask what money is worth, you can only answer that it’s worth… money.

Money is valuable because it’s valuable. The model of this kind of “master signifier” is of course God, whose authority ultimately stems from the fact that he is God. Žižek claims, however, that the founding myth of Christianity provides us with a weird kind of self-effacing or self-denying master signifier — a God who not only dies (many gods have died throughout history, only to be replaced), but who himself becomes an atheist.

In Žižek’s reading, Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — presents us with an image of a God who doesn’t believe in himself.

Elevating Christ to the level of a “master signifier” thus means effectively giving up on “master signifiers,” producing a whole new form of social bond — one that is outside of ideology.

As I argue in Žižek and Theology, this elaboration of a “death of God” theology as a path to a non-ideological social bond is the end result of a long and difficult development in Žižek’s political thought, because—to put it bluntly — getting rid of master signifiers is difficult.

It’s easy enough to overthrow any given master signifier, but the human tendency to reestablish them seems irresistible — and before his foray into theology, Žižek seemed to be essentially advocating revolution for its own sake, as a kind of moment of pure authenticity and truth, despite the fact that every revolution will necessarily be a matter of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The reason for this is that “master signifiers” are a way of organizing our enjoyment, keeping the suffocating force of jouissance sufficiently at bay to give us breathing room, while nonetheless giving us access to occasional moments of indulgence.

A key aspect of this is Žižek’s view that every form of law founded in a “master signifier” includes its own “inherent transgression”— that is, it depends on people occasionally feeling like they not only have permission to break the rules but are actively exhorted to do so, so that they have a way to let off steam.

A familiar example of this is the Jim Crow order in the US — in addition to the official laws segregating blacks and whites, the order was characterized by extra-legal attacks such as lynch mobs.

Žižek would argue that these weren’t unfortunate outbursts but were an integral part of the Jim Crow order, allowing whites to “let off steam” by forcibly asserting their dominance while maintaining the public fiction that segregation was a harmonious system with everyone in their natural place.

Inspired by Alain Badiou’s work on St. Paul, Žižek turns to the origins of Christianity as a way of thinking through what it might mean to have a revolution that would be a durable achievement rather than a flash of inspiration between two ideological regimes. His main critique of Badiou is that Badiou one-sidedly emphasizes the resurrection over the cross — in Lutheran terms, Badiou is a theologian of glory rather than a theologian of the cross.

Žižek believes that any new order (represented by the resurrection) must be preceded by a break with the old (represented by the cross) — some act of negation, some negative gesture separating oneself from the reigning master signifier. But again, this is very difficult to achieve.

Not only does the ideological order actively rely on its own violation through the “inherent transgression,” but Žižek had also argued extensively that “cynical distance” from ideology—the sense that “no one really believes this stuff”—is actually a built-in feature of all ideologies. Just “going through the motions” without really believing it isn’t a way of escaping ideology, but rather the most powerful form of submitting to ideology.

If the seemingly most obvious ways to negate ideology are built-in features of ideology already, then where can one turn? In The Puppet and the Dwarf, which represents his most fully realized account of Christian origins, Žižek makes what is, in my view, one of his most interesting moves—he claims that Judaism represents a kind of inherently negative space, a culture that is “unplugged” from the enjoyment provided by the surrounding pagan ideology, so that the logic of the “inherent transgression” and of “cynical distance” alike don’t apply.

Contradicting both Badiou and centuries of Christian interpreters, Žižek thus argues that the point of Pauline Christianity wasn’t to escape from the Jewish law, but to find some way to induct Gentiles into this “unplugged” Jewish stance.

Historically, of course, Christianity wound up betraying its Jewish roots and became an ideological order like any other, so that perhaps Žižek’s attempt to find a durable model that would be something other than the space between two ideologies has failed — yet he believes that the Pauline communities built on engrafting Gentiles into the promises of Judaism provide at least a way of thinking through what a durable non-ideological social bond might look like.

II.

So where does the Body of Christ fit into all this? As I’ve said, he is uninterested in the idea of the Christian community or church as the “Body of Christ,” and this is not only because he has opted to refer to that social bond as the “Holy Spirit”—in addition to his general distaste for anything as “harmonious” or “organic” as a body metaphor would imply, Žižek also has no interest whatsoever in ecclesiology or in the institutional church as such, believing it to be a betrayal of Christianity’s original revolutionary core. Furthermore, Žižek has never, to my knowledge, addressed the sacraments in any serious way, and so the sacramental Body of Christ in the Eucharist is not on his radar.

What remains, though, is the literal, physical body of Jesus, which Žižek basically only discusses in the context of the crucifixion. Like a medieval mystic, Žižek is fixated on Christ’s weakness and suffering, his pathetic and pitiable appearance—the absolute disjuncture between this disgraced and repulsive dying body and the divine nature he embodies. More than that, he claims, in something like an orthodox fashion, that Christ embodies the truth of humanity, the truth that, in Luther’s words, “we are the shit that fell out of God’s anus.” Drawing on this Lutheran inheritance, Žižek defines Christianity as providing a vision of a God who “freely identified himself with his own shit” (Parallax View, 187).

Now this focus on excrement is not entirely new for Žižek, who has always had a fixation of sorts on whatever is disgusting, repulsive, or otherwise off-putting. In fact, one of the key concepts he takes from Lacan, objet petit a, which represents the ever-elusive object and cause of desire, frequently bears the name of the “excremental remainder,” referring to that little “something” that one has to give up in order to join the social order. What Žižek calls Luther’s “excremental anti-humanism,” then, does not simply lead to humanity wallowing in its own self-disgust.

Rather, it leads to humanity wallowing in its own enjoyment, or as Žižek says, to the emergence of enjoyment as a direct political factor. For Žižek all ideological orders represent a way of organizing enjoyment or jouissance, of keeping it at a distance while allowing periodic indulgence, but what Luther’s position opens up is the possibility of a kind of short-circuit, where jouissance is not just a silently presupposed basis of the political order but instead a conscious emphasis and goal.

The end result is what Žižek characterizes as the contemporary “superego injunction to enjoy” — the perverse situation where authorities are directly exhorting people to enjoy. The most obvious manifestation of this tendency was perhaps George W. Bush’s injunction that people go shopping in response to 9/11, but Žižek believes this basic attitude is absolutely pervasive.

Increasingly, Žižek claims, one feels guilty not for having sex, but for not having enough sex — and even the asceticism of dieting and exercise is geared toward the hedonistic ends of attractiveness and longer lifespan.

Increasingly, contemporary Western subjects, or at least contemporary middle and upper class Western subjects, directly identify with their excremental remainder, with objet petit a — with the end result of a kind of autistic compulsion to enjoy, an obligatory enjoyment that one begins to suspect is not finally all that enjoyable.

The answer to this situation, for cultural conservatives and particularly for conservative Catholics such as Žižek’s dialogue partners G. K. Chesterton and John Milbank, is to reimpose some version of traditional values in order to save enjoyment from itself. For Žižek, however, such a solution is both dishonest and self-undermining, or in other words, perverse — hence the subtitle of The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity, which refers to Actual Existing Christianity and not to its original, supposedly revolutionary form.

His solution is not to disavow enjoyment, but rather to focus on the enjoyment of the other, to form a community centered on the care for the concrete suffering and enjoying others one happens to encounter. This, in his view, is Christian love, a love he characterizes as “violent” in that it cuts beneath the ideological identity markers of the other and attends directly to the excremental remainder underneath it all.

Though this notion of an authentically Christian community is based in an adaptation of one of the later Lacan’s more opaque concepts, the “discourse of the analyst,” I believe that the clearest example of what he’s talking about can be found in his final contribution to The Monstrosity of Christ. There he discusses Agota Kristof’s novel The Notebook, which for him is “the best literary expression” of an ethical stance that goes beyond the sentimentality of moralism and instead installs “a cold, cruel distance toward what one is doing.”

The novel follows two twin brothers who are “utterly immoral… yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.” Žižek gives two examples. In one, they meet a starving man who asks for help and get him everything he asks for, while claiming that they helped him solely because he needed help, not out of any desire to be kind. In another, they urinate on a German officer with whom they find themselves sharing a bed, at his request.

Žižek remarks, “If ever there was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbor’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them.”

(Interestingly, this ethical stance of giving people what they ask for in the most literal way corresponds with one of Žižek’s earliest political prescriptions for dealing with the cynical distance that is inherent to ideology—instead of resisting the demands of ideology, one should take them as literally as possible, because that’s the one response ideology isn’t prepared for.) Žižek commends the twins’ amoral ethics as follows:

This is where I stand—how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion. Monstrosity of Christ 303

Such is Žižek’s understanding of Christian ethics, a position I am sure will not be included in any Christian ethics courses any time soon.

III.

I would like to conclude this presentation by connecting Žižek’s work to liberation theology—not through the more obvious path of the reliance of both on the Marxist tradition, but rather precisely through Žižek’s notion of the Body of Christ as a kind of “excremental remainder.” My initial point of contact here might seem superficial initially, but I believe it will prove surprisingly revealing. In his essay “Extra pauperes nulla salus,” or “No salvation outside the poor,” Jon Sobrino begins with a quotation from his fallen comrade Ignacio Ellacuría, who was among the members of Sobrino’s Jesuit community who were massacred by a Salvadoran death squad in 1989 while Sobrino happened to be out of the country:

What on another occasion I called copro-historical analysis, that is, the study of the feces of our civilization, seems to reveal that this civilization is gravely ill and that, in order to avoid a dreadful and fatal outcome, it is necessary to change it from within itself.

Sobrino agrees, claiming that the “excrement” or waste product of capitalist civilization, in the form of massive impoverishment in the Third World, demonstrates that it is profoundly sick. Reciting the massive imbalances in global priorities, for instance the inconceivable sums spent on arms at the same time as people are starving daily, Sobrino concludes that “we are dealing with a metaphysical obscenity” and that “God is furious” (39). That is of course because for Sobrino and for all liberation theologians, God has identified decisively with this excremental remainder of the poor. The parallel here with Žižek’s “God who freely identifies with his own shit” is inexact—most notably because liberation theologians do not believe God is the author of the process that produces the poor as an excremental remainder — but also compelling, insofar as Žižek has written a great deal recently on the obscene inequalities that characterize the contemporary world and has even put forth urban slum dwellers in the Third World as a contemporary parallel to the “unplugged” stance he detects in first-century Judaism.

In addition, Žižek’s account of “Christian love” as naively meeting people’s needs simply because they ask resonates profoundly with the implied premise of Sobrino’s harsh and furious text: people need to eat!

Regardless of whether they’re deserving, whether giving them food would produce bad economic incentives, etc., etc., people need to eat. The same could obviously be said for all basic needs—for example, regardless of whether it undermines someone’s ability to put big numbers in quarterly reports, people who have AIDS need medicine!

A little more literalism and naïveté would certainly help in our present situation. In addition, simply listening to what people are asking for would be a huge improvement over the patronizing tutelage of NGOs and foreign aid, which Sobrino characterizes as actively contributing to the dehumanization of the already dehumanized people they serve, insofar as it deprives them of agency.

The principle here is basically Jesus’s: sell all you have and give to the poor. The focus here isn’t on liquidating your holdings so that you can enjoy the moral righteousness of poverty, but of putting your goods at the disposal of the poor—or, as Jesus says in another setting, of using your dishonest wealth to make friends.

The really difficult question between Žižek and liberation theology, however, is what the end state looks like. For Sobrino as for most liberation theologians, the basic stance seems to be humanist in the broad sense—a society that respects human dignity, that looks to the intrinsic worth of every individual. Yet Žižek remains resolutely anti-humanist and suspicious of the language of human rights. And while Sobrino can look forward to a correction of civilization’s digestive system such that it will stop producing the poor as excrement, Žižek revels in the disgusting and repellant aspect of the “excremental remainder.”

When the case is stated in this way, it seems difficult to favor Žižek over Sobrino, yet I wonder if Žižek is getting at an important truth here—namely that the end state is something that we, blinkered as we are by the ideology of our present sick civilization, simply cannot recognize as beautiful or desirable, that the change we need is so profound that it will change our very concept of what it means to be human.

In any case, both Žižek and Sobrino agree that what it means to be human now entails the production of a massive and appalling waste product—and that what it means to be faithful to the message of Christ is to freely identify with that waste product.

on neoliberalism a foucaultian analysis

Read, Jason. “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity.” Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009

People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn’t have it at all. People think it’s OK to cut spending, because ESL is about people who refuse to assimilate and health care pays for illegals.

From Tea party in the Sonora: For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona By Ken Silverstein Harper’s Magazine July 2010

As Thomas Lemke [“Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxism, 14, 3 (2002)], argues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while fostering those same relations. The contemporary trend away from long term labor contracts, towards temporary and part-time labor, is not only an effective economic strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive commitments of health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well.

It encourages workers to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “companies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened, can be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role in this to the extent that it turns the workers’ desire for independence…into a ‘busi-ness spirit’ that meets capital’s growing need for satellites.”12

While Foucault’s analysis captures the particular “fear of the state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection.

At the same time, Foucault offers the possibility of a different understanding of the history of neoliberalism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economicus, or homo entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very different results.

Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic theory examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally different: for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation

while for the neo-liberals, as we have seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between labor and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.”

Neoliberalism scrambles and exchanges the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.” 31

Labor is no longer limited to the specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works towards desired ends. The terms “labor” and “human capital” intersect, overcoming in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From this intersection the discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action — crime, marriage, higher education and so on — can be charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an investment.

Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of ex-ploitation.

Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of “capitalism without capitalism,” a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing distribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the antagonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society.

The opposition between capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of production, a new organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. 32

Thus, neoliberalism entails a very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued, because everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking, its implicit anthropology.

Thus, the question remains, why now, or at least why over the last thirty years has capitalism taken this neo-liberal turn?

In the Grundrisse, Marx does not use the term “human capital,” but fixed capital, a term generally used to refer to machinery, factories, and other investments in the means of production to refer to the subjectivity, the subjective powers of the worker. In general Marx understood the progression of capital to be a process by which the skills, knowledge, and know-how of workers were gradually incorporated into machinery, into fixed capital, reducing the laborer to an unskilled and ultimate-ly replaceable cog in a machine. This is “proletarianization” the process by which capitalism produces its gravediggers in a class of impoverished workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. In the Grundrisse, however, Marx addresses a fundamentally different possibility, capital’s exploitation of not just the physical powers of the body, but the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embodied in each individual. This is what Marx refers to as the “general intellect”—the diffused social knowledge of society. This knowledge, the capacity to use various languages, protocols, and symbolic systems, is largely produced outside of work. As Marx writes: “The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the pro-ductive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.”17

Marx’s deviation from the standard terminology of his own corpus, terminology that designates the worker as labor power (or living labor), the machine or factory as fixed capital, and money as circulating capital, is ultimately revealing. It reveals something of a future that Marx could barely envision, a future that has become our present: the real subsumption of society by capital. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the incorporation of all subjective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into productive powers for capital. Capital no longer simply exploits labor, understood as the physical capacity to transform objects, but puts to work the capacities to create and communicate that traverse social relations.

It is possible to say that with real subsumption capital has no outside, there is no relationship that cannot be transformed into a commodity, but at the same time capital is nothing but outside, production takes place outside of the factory and the firm, in various social relationships. Because of this fundamental displacement subjectivity becomes paramount, subjectivity itself becomes productive and it is this same subjectivity that must be controlled. 33

Neoliberalism is a discourse and practice that is aimed to curtail the powers of labor that are distributed across all of society—at the exact moment in which all of social existence be-comes labor, or potential labor, neoliberalism constructs the image of a society of capitalists, of entrepreneurs.

As production moves from the closed space of the factory to become distributed across all of social space, encompassing all spheres of cultural and social existence, neoliberalism presents an image of society as a market, effacing production altogether.

This underscores the difference between neoliberalism as a form of power and the disciplinary power at work in the closed spaces of the factory. If disciplinary power worked by confining and fixing bodies to the production apparatuses, neoliberal power works by dispersing bodies and individuals through privatization and isolation.

Deregulation, the central term and political strategy of neo-liberalism, is not the absence of governing, or regulating, but a form of governing through isolation and dispersion. As more and more wealth is produced by the collective social powers of society, neoliberalism presents us with an image of society made up of self-interested individuals.

In Negri’s analysis, the relation between neoliberalism and real subsumption takes on the characteristics of a Manichean opposition. We are all workers or we are all capitalists: either view society as

an extension of labor across all social spheres, from the factory to the school to the home, and across all aspects of human existence, from the work of the hands to the mind, or

view society as a logic of competition and investment that encompasses all human relationships.

While Negri’s presentation has an advantage over Foucault’s lectures in that it grasps the historical formation of neoliberalism against the backdrop of a specific transformation of capital, in some sense following Foucault’s tendency to present disciplinary power and biopower against the back-drop of specific changes in the economic organization of society, it does so by almost casting neoliberalism as an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term.

It would appear that for Negri real subsumption is the truth of society, and neoliberalism is only a misrepresentation of that truth. … Foucault’s idea of governmentality, argues against such a division that posits actual material reality on one side and its ideological misrepresentation on the other. A governmentality is a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing, that is actualized in habits, perceptions, and subjectivity. Governmentality situates actions and conceptions on the same plane of immanence. 34

Which is to say, that any criticism of neoliberalism as governmentality must not focus on its errors, on its myopic conception of social existence, but on its particular production of truth.

For Foucault, we have to take seriously the manner in which the fundamental understanding of individuals as governed by interest and competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and debunked, but is an intimate part of how our lives and subjectivity are structured.

Despite Negri’s tendency to lapse back into an opposition between labor and ideology, his object raises important questions echoed by other critics of neoliberalism.

What is lost in neoliberalism is the critical distance opened up between different spheres and representations of subjectivity, not only the difference between work and the market, as in Marxism, but also the difference between the citizen and the economic subject, as in classical liberalism.

All of these differences are effaced as one relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces and relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption.

To put the problem in Foucault’s terms, what has disappeared in neoliberalism is the tactical polyvalence of discourse; everything is framed in terms of interests, freedoms and risks.

As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of governmentality in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions appear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for individuals to opt out rather than address political problems. Privatization is not just neoliberalism’s strategy for dealing with the public sector, what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, but a consistent element of its particular form of governmentality, its ethos, everything becomes privatized, institutions, structures, issues, and problems that used to constitute the public.

It is privatization all the way down. For Brown, neoliberalism entails a massive de-democratization, as terms such as the public good, rights and debate, no longer have any meaning. “The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her or himself among various social, po-litical, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options.”

Thus, while it is possible to argue that neoliberalism is a more flexible, an open form of power as opposed to the closed spaces of disciplines, a form of power that operates on freedoms, on a constitutive multiplicity, it is in some sense all the more closed in that as a form of governmentality, as a political rationality, it is without an outside. It does not encounter any tension with a competing logic of worker or citizen, with a different articulation of subjectivity. States, corporations, individuals are all governed by the same logic, that of interest and competition.

Foucault’s development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as governmentality has as its major advantage a clarification of the terrain on which neo-liberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose neoliberalism as ideology, revealing the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its various failings as policy.

Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously its effectiveness, the manner in which it has transformed work subjectivity and social relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility.

The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment, but limit the sense of what is possible.

Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals.

It is perhaps no accident that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and as part of a belated response to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the slogan of the famous Seattle protests against the IMF and World Bank was, “another world is possible,” and it is very often the sense of a possibility of not only another world, but of another way of organizing politics that is remembered, the image of turtles and teamsters marching hand and hand, when those protests are referred to.

It is also this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility.

***************************

Foucault develops in “Truth and Juridical Forms,” that Marx posited labor as the “concrete essence of man.”

“So I don’t think we can simply accept the traditional Marxist analysis, which assumes that, labor being man’s concrete essence, the capitalist system is what transforms labor into profit, into hyperprofit or surplus value. The fact is capitalism penetrates much more deeply into our existence. That system, as it was established in the nineteenth century, was obliged to elaborate a set of political techniques, techniques of power, by which man was tied to something like labor—a set of techniques by which people’s bodies and time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effectively used and thereby transformed into hyper profit”

(Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, trans. Robert Hurley et al. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 86).

This idea, of “capillary power relations” that turn man into a subject of labor, is an idea which Foucault sometimes develops as a critique and at other times attributes to Marx, see for example “Les Mailles du pouvoir”, in Dits et Écrits Tome IV: 1980-198, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994) and less explicitly Discipline and Punish.

chicken joke and surplus-jouissance

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Here is the famous CHICKEN JOKE on Nov 5, 2010

A man who believes he is a piece of grain is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a piece of grain but a man; however, when he is cured and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling and insisting that there is a chicken outside the door and that he is afraid that it will eat him. “But wait a minute,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a piece of grain but a man”. “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know that?” (34)

The insight of the patient is correct: no matter how wise and knowledgeable we become, the chicken-commodity will still get us. … we cannot avoid fetishizing the commodity, regardless of how much knowledge we have acquired.

Knowledge itself is not enough. Consequently, ‘the real task is to convince not the subject, but the chicken-commodities: not to change the way we talk about commodities, but to change the way commodities talk among themseves. (Žižek “The Parallax View” 352).

The key ideological battle is fought not on what we consciously believe in (or do not believe in), but on the plane of disavowed beliefs. What has to change is the substance of our “belief by proxy”: the way in which we unconsciously displace belief onto the other qua commodity, thereby ignoring that this other has always-already colonized our unconscious, and thus it has become the cause of what we are.

The task ahead, then, is to invent a new relation to the disavowed substance of our belief, which, of course, must follow our subtraction from or disengagement with commodity fetishism. For the paradoxical statment that commodities “do the believing for us” means that they have hooked us at the level of surplus-jouissance,

hence my argument that there is a crucial gap between our conscious enjoyment of the commodity (which falls under the jurisdiction of the pleasure principle) and the way the commodity enjoys us (commodity fetishism proper).

Only the latter can be said to represent our lack towards enjoyment, namely surplus jouissance, and therefore the only point from which we can subtract and begin anew. It is the traumatic encounter with our passive objectification vis-à-vis the circulation of commodities that, alone, can provide for us an image of salvation.

We are fetishists in practice not in theory: our reliance on common sense masks the fact that we are constantly duped by the commodities. Marx was therefore fully entitled to speak of “commodity metaphysics“. Our condition is one where instead of idealizing through knowledge, we idealize through fetishism — literally, without knowing what we are doing. More than ever before, belief today is externalized, embodied in our blind practices of consumption.

surplus jouissance is always at least minimally traumatic, and only as such liberating. The question is how to locate this jouissance and, most importantly, bring it about. (37)

Žižek neighbor belief

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Second as Farce. New York: Verso. 2009. Print.

… what is toxic is ultimately the Neighbor as such, the abyss of its desire and its obscene enjoyment.

The ultimate aim of all rules governing interpersonal relations, then, is to quarantine or neutralize this toxic dimension, to reduce the Neighbor to a fellow man.

It is thus not enough to search for contingent toxic components in (another) subject, for the subject as such is toxic in its very form, in its abyss of Otherness-what makes it toxic is the objet petit a on which the subject’s consistency hinges.

When we think we really know a close friend or relative, it often happens that, all of a sudden, this person does something-utters an unexpectedly vulgar or cruel remark, makes an obscene gesture, casts a cold indifferent glance where compassion was expected-which makes us aware that we do not really know them; we become conscious of a total stranger in front of us. (46)

At this point, the fellow man changes into a Neighbor.

Is not this same attitude at work in the way our governments are dealing with the “immigrant threat”? After righteously rejecting populist racism as “unreasonable” and unacceptable given our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures . . . even the Social Democrats, tell us: “We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of violent anti- immigration protests is to organize reasonable anti-immigrant protection:’ This vision of the detoxification of the Neighbor presents a clear passage from direct barbarism to Berlusconian barbarism with a human face. (48)

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon film hit, provides the basic coordinates of the functioning of contemporary ideology. The fat panda bear dreams of becoming a sacred Kung Fu warrior, and when, through blind chance (beneath which, of course, lurks the hand of Destiny), he is chosen to be the hero to save his city, he succeeds . . . However, throughout the film, this pseudo-oriental spiritualism is constantly being undermined by a vulgar-cynical sense of humor. (50)

Niels Bohr anecdote

The surprise is how this continuous self-mockery in no way impedes on the efficiency of the oriental spiritualism—the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. Similarly with one of my favorite anecdotes regarding Niels Bohr: surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: “I don’t believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn’t believe in it:

This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them, because we assume that they work even if we do not believe in them.

This is why Berlusconi is our own big Kung Fu Panda. Perhaps the old Marx brothers quip, “This man looks like a corrupt idiot and acts like one, but this should not deceive you-he is a corrupt idiot,” here stumbles upon its limit: while Berlusconi is what he appears to be, this appearance nonetheless remains deceptive. (51)

sharpe regimes of enjoyment

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

Žižek as Theorist of Ideology: Two Transpositions

Žižek argues primary site of subjective inscription for an ideology is not the consciousness of ideological subjects, but the Freudian unconscious.
Ideology today doesn’t claim to structure the horizons of meaning of its subjects, … than how its ‘terms and conditions’ enable and structure … ‘regimes of enjoyment.’ (31)

There is no identity that is not a relational identity. Every identity is formed in differentiation from an other, or grounded through reference to an other that guarantees its own consistency, at least as a regulative ideal to be strived towards. (32)

… there is no identity that is not grounded in a reference to some guaranteeing Other (42).

🙂 We need to question the “strength of argumentation as a factor motivating individual and collective action. … — between subjects’ conscious self-evaluations, and the beliefs that inform what they actually do (40).

The key thing about Lacan, for Žižek, is that this scepticism about the modern Cartesian subject, evidenced as early as the first essay in the Ecrits, did not commit him to a total dismissal of the relevance of the category of the subject. To call into question the sovereignty of individuals’ conscious self-perceptions, according to Lacan, does not mean that one can immediately pass into a reflection that centres itself on ‘the body’, the ‘text’ or some trans-subjective ‘will’ or ‘power’. … What is passed over … is that possibility which Freud opened up: namely, that the ‘mind’ is not reducible to consciousness, and that — as such — the consciousness-body opposition might not exhaust the field proper to subjectivity (40).

Lacan’s unconscious subject REMAINS a subject. … At any given moment, that is to say, I might be playing out my neuroses, largely unaware of the true nature of my desire, etc. Yet this does not mean that at some future time, I might not be brought to a heightened self-awareness. This is precisely the possibility that psychoanalysis qua ‘talking cure’ affords, and without which it would be simple perversity (40-41).

Žižek sees in psychoanalytic theory per se a means of uncovering how the most powerful structures of subjective motivation capable of being harnessed for social reproduction are importantly beneath subjects’ conscious control. An account of the unconscious, Žižek believes, will thus significantly sophisticate existing political theories (44).

Žižek’s position is that, from around the time of the mirror stage (six to eighteen months), human needs are irrevocably caught up in the dialectics of the subject’s exchanges with others, and its demand to be loved by them. The child thus, as it were, needs to be taught how to desire, he stresses. Its first question is not ‘what do I want’, but ‘what do the others want from me?’ or: ‘what am I for them?” (45).

daly on Žižek

Daly, Glyn. “The Materialism of Spirit – Žižek and the Logics of the Political” International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol1.4

Class has little/no analytical content and will not play the role that classical Marxism intended for it. Laclau and Mouffe consequently reject the Marxist view of class because it presents a closed and necessitarian picture of identity that does not reflect the true nature of contingent undecidable identities and their basic materialism.

But it is precisely this distinction that is under question. To affirm the authenticityof contingent-plural identities against the falsity of class necessity is perhaps already to adopt a certain infra-political gaze and to stand inside the reflexive economy of modern spirit (Žižek in Butler et al, 2000: 319-320; Žižek, 2004: 99-102; Žižek, 2006: 55-56).

Viewed from the negative, class does not appear as a positive position (endowed with a historic destiny etc.) but rather as a non-position: the impoverished, the destitute, the ‘wretched of the earth’ and all those who do not ‘count’ — a vanishing-point of value in order for the system of socio-economic valuation to function. Along the lines of Badiou, class stands for the void that is constitutive of multiplicity. It is the alchemical caput mortuum (death’s head) of Lacan: i.e. something which is itself empty of value but which, like a catalyst, is essential for the substance of value to be produced.

So while postmarxism is right to critique the positivistic status of class, what it overlooks is a view of class as an inherent and fundamental symptom of a systemic process in which capitalism tries to realize itself as a necessity – a kind of underlying dark matter that supports and stabilizes the positive forms of the capitalist universe. And it is precisely in its condition of symptom, of necessary anomaly, that the contingent nature of capitalist necessity is shown.

This also indicates a central problem with the idea of radical democracy: that is, it does not provide any real or systematic account of today’s symptoms or of those who are in a position to hold up the mirror to, to show the truth of, today’s cosmopolitan capitalism. In arguing for equivalences to be established between all disaffected groups within the terms of the democratic imaginary, the propensity exists for radical democracy to become removed from the more basic and constitutive forms of exclusion and to become increasingly entangled in endless cycles of infra-political networking. Political subjectivity would consequently become hyper-active – endlessly fascinated by its own positions, continually refining itself and so forth – but incapable of acting as such. So the danger exists that radical democracy could devolve into a rather empty proceduralism: regulating the provisional character of all political engagement, repeatedly marking the empty place of the universal, always reinforcing its own prohibition concerning the privileging of one democratic struggle over another and so on. It is on this basis that Norval (2004) draws direct, and rather uncomfortable, parallels between radical democracy and a Habermasian deliberative democracy (7-8).

Žižek in Albania

Early 1980s early Yugoslav commie regime undergo a crisis of legitimation. Milosevic, providing legitimacy for the local Serb republic, devil’s pact with nationalist intelligentsia. The Poetic Military Complex. Warriors together with Poets, look out.

Pere Josef, the Catholic France made a pact with Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire to prevent unification of Germany. This led to Hitler around hundred years later

Pere Josef was a brutal torturer. But something real crazy, wrote the most beautiful mystical reflections. How is it possible that the same person who was a monster was in his inner life a breathtakingly refined mysticist. For some the solution for this is Eastern Spirituality. But this doesn’t work for Žižek. The true heroic greatness is to sacrifice his soul, his ethics for his country. Any fool can give his life. But it’s the real here that will do evil for his country, rape woman, kill children. The ethical temptation is presented as a weakness. If you can’t kill, you are weak the true here does it. Himmler’s solution: Bhagavad Gita, the Indian epic. Bhagavad appeals to God, how can I do it, women and children will suffer, people will suffer, answer of Christna is: substantial reality doesn’t exist, what we perceive of reality is false appearance. If you arrive at spiritual enlightenment, then you see that that’s the only reality. You can kill as much as you want, kill do it, it doesn’t count, nothing is really killed, it’s all only appearance. So Himmler always carried Bhagavad Gita in his pocket. Buddhists are the same. Suzuki, how to kill without feeling guilty. False illusion of substantial reality, the Buddhist enlightenment, you are no longer part of reality, your mind is a medium of only observation, you only see a dance of shadows and appearance. Somehow your body gets stuck on the point of the knife my hand is holding. Rorty says, we don’t have any substantial identity, we are stories we tell ourselves. “We listen to each other’s stories” the way to bring peace is to listen to each other’s stories, your folkloric dances … An enemy is someone whose stories we were not ready to hear. Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story? Abandon this conclusion of trying to understand each other

🙁 Žižek Inner authenticity is a LIE. when someone approaches you trying to understand your dances and songs in order to understand you, this tribe just wanted to be good hosts to their guests, and so as good hosts they invented the dance and masks because this is what they thought the other wanted.

You should not do to them what they are doing to you. Underground the movie is specifically for the Western Gaze. An image of Balkans, outside history, where they each drink fuck all the time. This is what the West wants to see and he stages it for them, the spectacle, what they want to see.

: ( Žižek its Racist Jokes that play a great progressive role. They were not racist jokes attacking each other but a sharing of obscenities. I’ll tell you a joke about me, you tell me a joke about yours. The correct heroic thing to do is not to say “ohhh that’s racist” but to ironically assume it. A Fairy comes to a Slovene farmer and asks him, I will do anything you want me to do, but I’ll give it to your neighbour twice as much. So the Slovene farmer says, take one of my eyes. So Montenegro, how does a Montenegro masturbate, he digs a whole in ground sticks his penis in and waits for an earthquake etc. So Žižek argues that its the exchange of these racist jokes etc. “I fucked your mother” and the message was let’s be truly friends and Žižek replies, only after I do your sister. So after that they conducted this, they didn’t have to replay it, their friendship developed, in the morning all they would exchange was “mother” and “sister.” A good feminist would say “after I fuck your father” etc. [huh?]

He’s not saying let’s start telling dirty jokes about each other. This ironic populist low humour. In each culture this works in a specific way. It’s a general feature of culture. When you look at a culture, how a community is held together, large and small. You have explicit rules, and then you have ‘meta rules’ higher level rules that tell you how to relate to these rules. We should never underestimate, the subversion, undermining of community … order but underneath, obsenity total. Croatia … we had only a med student. He slept in a room with a wash basin, and a mirror, photos of half-naked girls. Once a weeks doc came from military hospital. One guy stood up and said, “he had pains in his penis” What did you say? the doc asked. Undress. He undressed, his penis is painful. It’s only when I have an erection. Okay, the doctor says jerk off. Do it. He tries to get erection, it doesn’t work. The doc goes to mirror and gets the photo and takes them back. The doc was looking at us and laughing. This is the most oppressive, there was no underming of power. You need this OBSCENE underside.

Cold distanct dignity, undermine it with obscenity. But the problem with today’s liberal ideology: a decaffinated Other, they celebrate the Other but its a decaffeneited Other. Drinking, depair disappears, and Other becomes holistic and spiritual. The problem of “tolerance”, excessive harrasment, ‘toxic’ neighbour: pedophile, abusive father etc. It went from Albanians, Northern Africa, now Romanians. Italy is now a democracy becoming more and more insubstantial After the last elections, the Centre if falling apart and Buslusconi is the boss. But what is it about Berlusconi. Did you notice that B. is systematically undermining the minimal dignity of what it is to be the head of state. His mistresses, his wife. An obscene soap opera. Ronald Reagan was the first that played upon presenting himself as an idiot. He would mock his own stupidity. Richard Nixon was the last AUTHENTIC TRAGIC president. Italy is still a formal democracy but its becoming insubstantial, now you have an obscene head of state who openly mocks his wife’s affairs. This shouldn’t deceive you, its the like the army in the army, ha ha, masturbate, but the POWER remains there. POSTMODERN power, permissivity, the right to choice, but underneath its all the more powerful. Old type patriarch, I don’t care how you feel, behave but you’re going to grandma. Postmodern permissive non-authoritarian Father, You know how much your grandmother loves you but only visit her if you want to. Under the permissiveness of free choice, is the message not only must you go … you must enjoy.

Death of liberal Fukuyama utopia died after 9/11. Western liberal utopia is not the recipe for the rest of world. The true utopia was the 1990s, the happy era of Clinton … this moment is dangerous. It is because SHOCK THERAPY, Capitalism needs a new boost, this financial crisis a SHOCK THERAPY for capitalism. How to use this crisis to break the last of the union trade syndicate. Let’s use this crisis to break the trade unions. There was 1 good argument for Capitalism until now, capitalism did need a dictator to survive, Chile etc. but after 10-20 years it did bring democracy. But now this game is OVER. CHINA, can we imagine to which person from our time will they be raising statues 100 years in the future. The long time president of SINGAPORE. He invented Capitalism with ASIAN values. that is, Authoritarian Capitalism. China today is now an ideal capitalist country. Something is emerging in China, capitalism with Asian values, a capitalism more dynamic and productive than western capitalism but without democracy. ITS OVER the natural alliance with Capitalism and Democracy. BERLUSCONI is a European version of it. Berlusconi plays a clown but he’s got the POWER. What should be politics, the economy, is de-politicized, the economy is starting to function in an authoritarian way. What is happening in today’s capitalism, contrary to NEGRI, it NEEDS more than EVER A STRONG STATE. the STATE is getting stronger and stronger, but it won’t be able to do so in a formally DEMOCRATIC way. When Bush confronted the crisis and addressed the American people. He used almost the same terms as when he reacted to 9/11. Our way of live is in danger. Bush presented the first bail out money 700 billion dollars. First vote it was against, then all politicians came together and said to Congress Fuck Off, this is not time for democracy. They declared an economic state of emergency. Capitalism is less and less able to function in a democratic state. Italy since Sept 2008 is in a state of emergency. This enables government to use army against immigrants, mafia … it will not be classical emergency state, where you wake up and there is curfew, no, its gradual, you’ll still be able to have all your pleasures. The rise of IMMATERIAL LABOUR. when Marx spoke about it GENERAL INTELLECT, the collective practical knowlecge which is more imporatant than labour time. The source of capitalist wealth is no longer primarily worker exploitation, but COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE. Labour measured by time becomes meaningless. What Marx didn’t see is the possibility, that capitalism succeeded in REPRIVATISING the general intellect itself. BILL GATES, how is he rich? He didn’t exploit his workers, he didn’t get extra profit. It isn’t from Rent to profit, but from profit to RENT. It’s not PROFIT, this price is basically totally independent of production costs, he does take into consideration production costs, ITS RENT. Bill Gates privatised part of the COMMON SPACE and we have to pay him rent. the moment you deal with immaterial property, knowledge property. It’s not like making a widget to sell on the market. With immaterial goods, the state has to intervene. Bill Gates, with intellectual property, it’s more complex. Try to privatize some genetic structure. You need an exceptionally strong state to set the parameters. All the problem of copyright. The stronger and stronger state is needed and CANNOT do it in a democratic way.

COMMUNISM NOW! Commies before were not strong enough in realizing what a terrifying experience communism was. The German FIlm Lives of OTHERS. Liberals don’t get the commie tragedy. If you know anything of how socialism functions, if you have a corrupted secret police, where the film goes wrong, in a country East Germany, the writer would have been total observation even without somebody wanting to sleep with his wife. Without religion good people do good things, and bad people do bad things. With religion good people do bad things. The tragedy, is not bad people doing bad things, its good people starting to do good end up doing BAD things. We have a whole series of antagonisms today:

– IMMIGRANTS The walls are going up, West Bank EU, Mexico

– ECOLOGY: you can’t solve with market measure.

– Intellectual property

– Bio genetics; Fukuyama thinks now, biogenetics is strong argument enough all the coordinates are mixed. There is now a wheel chair run totally by thought. He can read if you think strongly about forward, backward, left right. The wheelchair moves according to thought Our being human is I have my FREE THOUGHT. The problem is, what goes out, also goes in. They already isolated the area of brain when you go into panic, then they bombard you and you are already in panic. They have a machine, press a button all people are in panic. Things are happening, the affects most ELEMENTARY what it is to be HUMAN. This is getting underminded the inside/outside. what I think is inside, and reality is outside.

Clinton says this. The result is hunger, many countries Indonesia, Haiti, the best land was privatized companies, who bought up best lands to export. This export industrial agriculatural plants. HUNGER IS NEW PHENOMENON. Haiti is selling mud cakes. Cakes made of mud. They have minerals that fill your stomach. FOOD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO THE MARKET says bill clinton. But Z. says what about education, arms industry, and health can’t simply be left to the market.

🙂 Butler argues about the conflation of desire with the real. What does she mean by this? That parts of the “literal” penis and the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire

Thrown Subjects pt.2 Subject of Enjoyment

Practices of identity reproduction and new acts of identification also presuppose a subject of enjoyment that is structured around certain fantasies. Fantasy is a narrative that covers-over or conceals the subject’s lack by providing an image of fullness, wholeness, or harmony, on the one hand, while conjuring up threats and obstacles to its realization on the other. When successfully installed, a fantasmatic narrative hooks the subject ”via the enjoyment it procures” to a given practice or order, or a promised future practice or order, thus confering identity … the categories of enjoyment and fantasy are relevant for thinking about issues of ideology and ethics. (130)

closure of subjective identification

What might be termed our ethical critique of social practices thus focuses on the closure of subjective identification, which for us is just another name for the ideological. Ideology it will be recalled is related to those practices and forms of identity which conceal or deny the inherent radical contingency of practices … ideology’s very function is to fantasmatically conceal such relations and structures of domination by keeping radical contingency at bay. From this point of view, ethical critique demands detailed analyses of the kinds of fantasies underpinning social and political practices, as well as the exploration of ways such fantasies can be destabilized or modulated. (198)

Jouissance

Jason Glynos, Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter. Political Studies 56 (3), 2008

– jouissance pleasure as pain, jouissance is fantasy of one-ness with mother

– loss of jouissance = loss of one-ness with mother (lost object)

– lost object is primordial = something we never had (impossible) thus its this that structures our desire

– Jouissance linked to an impossibility and fantasied overcoming

– impossibility is translated into a prohibition

– once jouissance is turned into a prohibition, this gives man the illusion that it can be transgressed

– we now have a prohibition of jouissance, a Law qua prohibition

– plus-de-jouir happens through a transgression of the Law qua prohibition

– the subject derives its being and identity via this transgressive enjoyment

– representative of the Law — the Other — is the one who steals enjoyment, as thief of subject’s enjoyment

– the subject’s enjoyment is constitutively ‘stolen’, always already taken, by the Other

– thus the most intimate part of the subject, the subject’s own mode of enjoyment is structured by the Other

How, then, is the subject’s own enjoyment structured? Precisely by acting in such a way as to ‘steal back’ the enjoyment that the Other has supposedly stolen from him or her. His or her enjoyment is supported by the thought that he or she is transgressing the Other’s laws and ideals, enjoying behind the Other’s back’. The neurotic subject sustains itself as a subject of desire through transgressive thoughts and activities (i.e. by doing things it is not supposed to do: by stealing a covetous glance, by secretly wishing the downfall of a successful colleague, etc.)

The very prohibition creates the desire to transgress it, and jouissance is therefore fundamentally transgressive.

What the law prohibits, desire seeks. It seeks only transgression, and that makes desire entirely dependent on the law (that is, the Other) which brings it into being. Thus, desire can never free itself completely from the Other, as the Other is responsible for desire’s very being (cited in Fink, 1997 A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 207)

We enjoy our symptoms

We resist cure, because we unconsciously take jouissance from our symptoms. “subjects enjoy their symptoms as a means of escaping deeper psychical tensions … However painful the symptom may be, its aim is to free the subject form sometimes even more painful conflicts.”

Why do we procrastinate? We set ourselves stringent ideals (perfectionism) and then get a kick out of transgressing them.

Jouissance and the GRIP of ideology, or Jouissance and transgression of an ideal

Ideological critque is meant to weaken the grip of ideology and enhance freedom of subject. What holds the community together is a specific form of transgression of an ideal, of the Law.

– KKK lynchings, Nazi pogroms (these remain hidden from public view), these transgressions provoke a form of collective enjoyment and a kind of solidarity in guilt thus reaffirming the cohesion of the group.

Self-Transgressive Enjoyment

What is responsible for ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing other than the very ‘ordinary’, neurotic contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles. Zizek implies that the modality of our contemporary neurotic subjectivity can and ought to be made unavailable under an alternative regime.

The subject procures a modicum of (unconscious) enjoyment in transgressing his or her own self-affirmed ideal.

– Health ideal I affirm, while secretly smoking in the back room with my friends.

Taylor treats self-understanding as a function of rational understanding … While self-understanding certainly plays an important role here, overcoming unfreedom qua self-transgressive enjoyment is not reducible to the abandonment of a particular mis-understanding and simultaneous adoption of a particular (rational) self-understanding, even though the practice of interpretation may of course function as an essential first step in this process. Rather, overcoming unfreedom from a psychoanalytic point of view resides essentially in the act of abandoning ones self-transgressively enjoyed attachment to a concrete ideal, not simply in abandoning or substituting a particular understanding of the subject’s relation to it. In other words, while a passage through, and reinterpretation of, the subject’s self-interpretation might be necessary, it is not necessarily sufficient to overcome self-transgressive enjoyment qua freedom fetter.

A psychoanalytic perspective thus explains an otherwise counter-intuitive phenomenon in which the ‘pull’ or ‘desirability’ of a concrete ideal resides in the self-transgressive enjoyment it makes possible rather than simply in a mis-understanding (i.e. a false, misguided or irrational understanding).
It is thus able to explain the resilience of an ideal’s attractiveness for a subject in the face of ‘corrective’ measures deployed at the level of rational understanding. It suggests that detachment from self-transgressive enjoyment may diminish a concrete ideal’s desirability, thereby allowing other reasons to defeat (or better support) its apparent worth.