Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory” Subjectivity, 2008, 24, (256–274)
Category: jouissance
exclude or exploit
Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon part 2
I also want to emphasize that for communists the binary inclusion/exclusion does not indicate the primary axis of justice (although it functions quite nicely for liberal democrats who insist that the true political issue is making sure that no one is excluded from opportunities to participate in the democratic process or from the possibility of striking it rich in the capitalist market). The remedy for those without papers, for example, is to have papers—and thus membership in the state. This isn’t a bad goal, but it is a goal that extends rather than takes or changes state power. The remedy for those without property (slum dwellers, say), is a right to property, a remedy that incorporates the owner into the official market economy, in effect eliminating the threat to the market that uncounted use and exchange pose.
But is capitalism best understood as a system that constitutively excludes persons or one that constitutively exploits them?
Building from Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, Zizek claims that the antagonism between the included and the excluded is the fundamental antagonism rupturing capitalism today (and hence crucial to the idea of communism). Zizek recognizes that the focus on exclusion easily elides with “the liberal-tolerant-multicultural topic of ‘openness’ . . . at the expense of a properly Marxist notion of social antagonism.” Yet he argues that the inclusion of the proletariat is an inclusion of a different sort, an inclusion of the capitalism’s point of symptomal exclusion (“part of no part”) that effectively dismantles it.
A lot rides on the notion of “proletariat” here, especially insofar as contemporary capitalism relies on communication as a productive force, rather than industrial labor. On the one hand, Zizek detaches “proletarian” from the factory, treating “proletarianization” as a process that deprives humans of their “substance” and reduces them to pure subjects. On the other, he identifies exclusion as a particular kind of proletarianization, one by which some are made directly to embody “substanceless subjectivity.” They are the material remainders of the system, its unavoidable and necessary byproducts. Because the entire system relies on their exclusion (or their inclusion as remainders), because they embody the truth that capitalism produces human refuse, surplus populations with no role or function, to include them would destroy the system itself.
Capitalist productivity derives from its expropriation and exploitation of communicative processes. Cesare Casarino’s distinction between the common and the commons is helpful here.
The expropriation of language in the spectacle opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: ‘not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks.’ Failure to communicate provides its own satisfaction, the enjoyment of language itself.
The movement from commons to common repeats, in a way, this shift from active to passive or, the movement from desire to drive.
Blogs, Facebook, YouTube—they each and together take our ensemble of actions and return them to us as an endless communicative common. Rather than “I make,” there is production, a production of thoughts and affects, opinions and contributions that circulate, accumulate, and distract. Words were spoken.
Agamben’s answer to the expropriation of the common is drive. The communist answer is desire, a desire already manifest in our active linking and adding and making, our creating and contributing without pay, just for ourselves and for each other
on communism
Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon
Those who suspect that the inclusion of liberal democrats in a set with capitalists and conservatives is illegitimate probably are democrats. To determine whether they belong in the set of those who fear communism, they should ask themselves whether they think any evocation of communism should come with qualifications, apologies, condemnations of past excesses. If the answer is yes, then we have a clear indication that liberal democrats, and probably radical democrats as well, still consider communism a threat and so belong in a set with capitalists and concerns. They all are anxious about the forces the desire for communism risks unleashin
Bicycles are a “gate-way drug” to communism.
But in parliamentary democracies, for leftists to refer to their goals as a struggle for democracy is strange—it’s not like they are fighting for rights to vote and organize. Democracy is our ambient milieu, the hegemonic form of contemporary politics (which is yet another reason that the right can use communism as a name for what opposes it). For the left to use the language of democracy now is thus even stranger, a way of avoiding the fundamental antagonism between the top one percent and the rest of us by acting as if the only thing really missing was participation.
Rather than recognizing that for the left democracy is the form that the loss of communism takes, the form of communism’s displacement, radical democrats treat democracy as itself replacing communism (and on this point share the neoliberal position regarding the victory of capitalism). Political repercussions of the loss of communism as a name for left aspirations include a corresponding turn away from militant opposition and toward generalized inclusion as well as an abandonment of tight organizational forms like the party, the council, and the cell in favor of broad, thin, and momentary calls to become aware of an issue and change one’s lifestyle.
More fundamentally, the repercussion of the sublimation of communism in democratic preoccupations with process and participation is acquiescence to capitalism as the best system for the production and distribution of resources, labor, and goods.
The mistake leftists make when they turn into liberals and democrats is thinking that we are beyond the communist horizon, that democracy replaced communism rather than serving as the contemporary form of communism’s displacement.
They don’t see, can’t acknowledge, their own complicity in despotic financialism: if political struggle is always an irreducible dimension of capitalism and capitalism always interlinked with conflict, resistance, accommodation, and demands, then refusals to engage in these struggles, rejections of the terms of these struggles, will affect the form that capitalism takes.
The point I want to emphasize is that a primary factor in the changes in capitalism over the past thirty to forty years has been a change in the understanding of work, a change from an emphasis on its class, group, and collective dimension to a view of work as a personal choice, endeavor, and locus of meaning. Individual work displaced work as a common condition, freeing capital from the constraints in encountered when it had to deal with workers as a collective force.
Left appeals to democracy thus look a lot like the Lacanian notion of drive. For Lacan, drive, like desire, describes the way the subject arranges its enjoyment, jouissance.
– In the economy of desire, enjoyment is what the subject can never reach, what the subject wants but never gets—oh, that’s not it.
In the economy of drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal; it’s what the subject gets, even if it doesn’t want it. It’s that little extra charge which keeps the subject keeping on. The subject’s repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach its goal become satisfying on their own.
Democracy for the left is drive: our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. We talk, complain, and protest. We make groups on Facebook. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox. Activity becomes passivity, our stuckness in a circuit, which is then lamented and mourned as the absence of ideas or even the loss of the political itself and then, yet again, routed through a plea for democracy although it doesn’t take a genius to know that the real problem is neoliberal capitalism and its extreme inequality. What leftists call the loss of the political is the fog they muddle around in because they’ve lost sight of the communist horizon.
In the contemporary networks of communicative capitalism, drive is a feedback circuit that captures our best energies. Invigorating communism as a political alternative requires amplifying the collective desire that can cut through these affective networks. Fortunately, that desire is already there.
As Foucault makes clear, the limiting of the people as a common force turns them from active agents of power into a passive population. Here they are active only as individuals, little entrepreneurs or enterprises. What appears as the freedom of the market, then, is a certain foreclosure of the collective power of the people in and as a common. The power that matters, to affect the basic conditions in which they live, is displaced onto an economy that they are told they cannot govern because they cannot know. What do the people get instead? Representative democracy—the form of their passivity.
From politics of the extimate to axiomatic politics
Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107
[Žižek] searches for exceptional social agents that would replace the proletariat in transforming capitalism. Slums, in Žižek’s recent work, seem to be the privileged site for such social agents. Marginalized and dispossessed of “all but their chains,” “excluded from citizenship,” slum dwellers, for Žižek, hold the position of the extimate, the “part of no part,” the torque that could unravel the capitalist system (2007, 56-58). We wonder, however, whether this political vision is not rendering Žižek susceptible to the same critique that he has previously extended to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
We are referring here to Žižek’s critique of Hardt and Negri’s politics of immanence and its reliance on a messianic awakening in which the dormant potential of the multitude realizes itself (2007). Is the politics of the extimate, at least in the manner occasionally articulated by Žižek, not premised on a similar understanding of political agency that is simply asserted, rather than constructed—although this time, the political agent refers to some exceptional social group (i.e., slum dwellers) rather than the multitude? 101
Initially, Žižek’s notion of the extimate appears to differ from the Hardt and Negri’s use of immanence. By rendering capitalism and its potential opposition as perfectly overlapping,
a politics of immanence eliminates the theoretical space needed to actually construct a position of real difference from which economic transformation can proceed.
For Žižek, the concept of the extimate refers precisely to such a political position that incarnates real difference. At a closer look, however, both Hardt and Negri and Žižek are unable to situate difference. If all difference collapses into a (capitalist) sameness in Hardt and Negri, difference is introduced in a manner that remains arbitrary and
unwarranted in Žižek. This common shortcoming does not come as a surprise
to us. Žižek shares with Hardt and Negri a similar ontology of the economy,
permeated by the logic of self-driven and self-regulating capitalist accumulation.
Limiting the constitution of the economy to the masculine logic of the capitalist-all, Žižek is hard pressed to carve up a position within capitalism that is heterogeneous to it.
The latter, then, is arbitrarily assigned to a selected set of marginalized positions, such as slum collectives, with an alleged disposition to revolt. Slums could certainly be a potential site for social transformation, or they might not be. What we wish to question, however, is the political cogency of trying to locate the “real” social agents of change.
After all, Marxian history is replete with stories of resentment when class-in-itself fails to transpire into class-for-itself (that is, when certain dominated and marginalized groups, anticipated to resist and mobilize due their marginalized position, fail to do so).
Axiomatic politics enables us to extricate ourselves from limiting the potential of transformation to a privileged set of social groups, economic sectors or geographical scales. It displaces the agent of class transformation from a social group to an abstract principle that could insert itself into every occasion in which decisions over the use of surplus are being instituted, rendering each concrete class organization an inconsistent and failed attempt.
Yet, it is also important not to confuse the communist gesture of refusal of an exception with the hysterical questioning of the Master. If the communist axiom fails to constitute an all, this is not because it has doubts about the authenticity, the legitimacy, the validity of that which occupies the position of the exception. By leaving the exception in place, such an understanding would remain blind to the radical commitment of the axiom. Rather, it is because the axiom, to repeat Joan Copjec’s perceptive claim, is only “half-said” (2002, 171, 175). That is, the potential of the axiom is only actualized as it encounters and engages with the function of exception in various concrete contexts, as its universalizing aspiration propels it to move beyond the cooperative workplaceto the local economy, beyond the local economy to the nation-state, and beyond the nation-state to a community of states, and so on. 101-102
Masculine economies of surplus labor
Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107
In this vein, it is only appropriate to consider the different organizations of surplus as various institutional attempts to furnish us with a knowledge of how to come to terms with the impossibility of the class relation. Under feudalism, for instance, the feudal manor constitutes a set, an all gathered together under the feudal lord qua the exception to the set. While all feudal agencies (from the knights that protected the manor from the attacks of the other lords and the vassals that managed the lord’s demesne to the church that provided the rules of conduct under the feudal order), receive a cut from the surplus for the services and functions that they render, it is only the lord who occupies an exceptional status that designates him as the sole recipient of the (products of the) surplus labor performed by the serfs. This highly stylized description of the feudal system can be formalized through
the masculine logic of exception, where the exception to the set (the feudal lord) that appropriates the surplus labor, delineates the boundaries of the affective and political economy of the feudal order. 93
Provided that theexceptional status of the lord is upheld, the social agencies that fall under the feudal form can engage in endless struggles with each other. Moreover, the
endless variations that the feudal form has passed throughout the long transition from feudalism to capitalism (Dobb 1946; Hilton 1976; Ashton and Philpin 1985) as well as its continuing (albeit highly fragile and unstable) presence in the contemporary household (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994; Gibson-Graham 2006; Safri 2006) attest to the fact that it is both fairly resilient yet at the same time highly unstable.
[W]e discern the masculine logic of exception that Marx identified in the feudal system (the universal set of the feudal manor constituted around the lord as its constitutive exception) in the other “canonical” modes of production, including slavery and capitalism. For instance, under the modern capitalist enterprise (i.e., the joint-stock company whose existence can be traced back all the way to the inception of Dutch East India Company in 1602), all the factors of production, “all individuals really active in production from the manager down to the lowest day labourer” as Marx puts it (1991, 568, emphasis added), must give something to get something (a portion of the living labor): the workers have to perform labor, the managers have to manage, the accountants have to keep the accounts, the financiers have to loan capital and so on. In this sense, under the joint stock company, “the capitalist” qua entrepreneur dissolves into its functional components and, thereby, evaporates.
Nevertheless, this universal set of all subsumed under the capitalist enterprise is still constituted by an exceptional entity, or better yet a function, that enjoys “other people’s surplus” without giving anything in return: the Board of Directors.
As long as the reproduction of the exceptional status of the Board of Directors as the sole appropriator of surplus, as the entity that gets “something for nothing,” is not jeopardized, the affective and political economy of capitalism can accommodate an infinite range of distributions of surplus, a wide array of consumption practices, and a variety of modes of exchange. According to our reading, therefore, (portions of) surplus value becomes the object cause of desire (as the currency that enables these subjects to participate in the commodity economy) for the subjects of this capitalist-all only within the delimited frame constituted by the exception to the exchange-function universalized by the market system: from the worker who demands a union premium (efficiency wage) to the executive manager who tries to secure funds for new investment in R&D, they all struggle with each other to justify (to the symbolic Big Other) why they should get a larger cut from the surplus appropriated by the Board of Directors.
The drive-effect
Early on in the paper, we welcomed the recent psychoanalytical literature on “the administration of enjoyment under late capitalism” and its analysis of the logic of desire in consumption. And then, in concretizing our “There is no class relation” thesis, we argued that surplus labor/value is the object cause of desire for the subjects of capitalist-all (or any other exploitative form structured around a constitutive exception). In both cases, we were able to identify concrete desiring subjects. Nevertheless, if we are speaking of the case of a joint stock company and if there is no actual capitalist but only a series of functionaries subsumed under the capitalist-all, then how are we going to impute a desire or a drive to the capitalist corporation?
In his The Parallax View, Žižek recognizes this problem and distinguishes the drive of capitalism from desire within capitalism. In contrast to desire, which is located on the side of the interpellated subjects of consumption who jump from one commodity to another in search of satisfaction, drive “…inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systematic, level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction (emphasis added). 95
We enter the mode of drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” […] (2006, 61)
As noted earlier, Žižek borrows this economic determinist narrative from a particular tradition within Marxism that has long defined “expansion through contradiction” as the “law of motion” of capital, and saw in it the telos of capitalism’s end (Norton 2001).
Žižek’s innovation is to turn this narrative upside down and associate drive with capitalism’s resilience rather than its destruction. Even though a pantheon of Marxist political economists, including Paul Sweezy, David Gordon, and David Harvey, posit that “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” is “the rule that governs the behaviour of all capitalists” (Harvey 1982, 29), the argument that the endless circular movement of the circuit of capital is propelled by an accumulation drive is not necessarily one that Marx himself would subscribe to.
Indeed, if we were to expand our concept of capitalism to include Marx’s explorations in Volumes 2 and 3, and his analysis of the numerous claims on surplus value, then it becomes very difficult to reduce the movement of capital into a self-regulating “expanded self-reproduction.”15 We have already noted that, within the masculine universe of the capitalist corporation, in the shape of endless struggles over the surplus, we find “an infinite movement of the desire within a finite, delimited frame” (Zupančič 2000, 289). An endless number of social agencies located within and outside of the actual corporation (but, to the extent they do not question the status of the constitutive exception, within the “capitalist-all”) strive to receive a cut of the surplus and to this end, they need to struggle with one another and, on occasion, justify their “necessity” for the continued existence of the capitalist form of extraction and distribution of surplus value.
This capitalist-all (with its constitutive exception embodied in the Board of Directors) frames the field within which a whole range of “competitive battles” takes place (Ruccio and Amariglio 2003, 239-244). The agencies of these competitive battles could be different recipients of surplus distributions within a corporation, different corporations (within and across industries), different forms of capital (industrial, financial, and merchant), and even nation-states and trans- and inter-national institutions (Resnick 2006). In this sense, the capitalist-all is a topological whole and its consistency is sustained by the taboo status of the exception: as long as (the institutional form that embodies) the exception is sustained and remains unquestioned, the particular location of a particular claimant/recipient of surplus value is only incidental.
We have already argued that, what sets in motion the circuit of capital is a host of social technologies of reproduction. Therefore, from our perspective, the question is not so much what propels the circuit of capital and the process of the self-expansion of value, but rather what throws it out of balance.
In fact, the aggregate outcome of the internal dynamic fueled by the logic of desire at the level of the subjects of capitalist-all is the mad dance of capitalism caught in a circular movement, sometimes resulting in expanded reproduction, sometimes in simple reproduction, and sometimes in non-reproduction. What are economic recessions and depressions, if not the unexpected aggregate outcomes of the uncoordinated activities as well as the competitive battles among the subjects of the capitalist-all? 97
Therefore, the cause of this directionless circular movement is not a drive to accumulate or “an impersonal compulsion to engage in […] expanded selfreproduction” (Žižek 2006, 61). Rather,
the blind movement of the circuit of capital is the overdetermined outcome of, on the one hand, the social technologies of reproduction that uphold/maintain the exception, and on the other hand, the competitive battles and intractable contradictions that crisscross the capitalist-all.
And if there is a drive, it is either at the level of the particular subjects of the capitalist-all, or, if it is at the aggregate level, then it is only as a drive-effect—not really as a drive, but rather a semblance of drive, giving an impression of inevitability and necessity in what seems like a “repetition compulsion.” 97
The question of difference
On the one hand, we have touched upon and highlighted economic difference as it is inflected within capitalism, in the figure of the different claims on the distributions of surplus value. On the other hand, we have demonstrated the different forms of configuring the relation to surplus labor within the delimited economies of capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Nonetheless, in order to explicate what we mean by the ethico-political in the realm of the economy, we need to produce a particular notion of difference that embodies not only a break from the libidinal economy of capitalism but from all delimited structures of class. To be able to think this difference, we turn to psychoanalysis.
the possibility of formulating a meaningful economic difference that would unsettle the capitalist field of differences. We proffer that, when grafted onto the Marxian field of economic difference,
sexual difference (qua Lacan’s formalization of Kant’s dynamical and mathematical antinomies) helps to articulate difference as such. It allows distinguishing between the kind of difference within the delimited frame of the masculine logic of exception—including the differences among the various class structures that fall under the masculine logic of exception—and the difference between this masculine logic and the feminine logic of non-all.
The masculine logic defines a whole, an all, by positing a constitutive exception. Within the bounds of this set, all kinds of differences are permitted—with the proviso that the constitutive exception remains untouched.
The feminine logic of non-all, on the other hand, refuses to posit an exception at the expense of failing to constitute a coherent whole.
Contra capitalism, or any other exploitative form of appropriation of surplus (e.g., slavery, feudalism), the logic of non-all refuses to assign exclusive appropriative rights to any particular set of social agents.
This also includes those who were exploited under the ancien régime, namely the workers. Communism is generally understood to be the reparation of collective justice or the completeness of social being, which would be achieved once what is stolen from the workers is given back to them. Rejecting the substitution of one exception (i.e., board of directors) by another (i.e., the worker), the logic of non-all disrupts this fantasy. It is important to note that the exception that constitutes the capitalist-all is a function, even though it is embodied in the institution of the Board of Directors in our contemporary social formations. That is, various economic ideologies can sustain the function assumed by the Board of Directors. The ideology of economic growth, for instance, as the unchanging answer of classical political economy, neoclassical economics, and late neoclassical economics to their constitutive and shared problematic of how to reconcile rational choice and social harmony, seems to be a prominent example. In a passage, uncharacteristic in its declaration of the inevitability of capitalism as a “fetish,” Žižek skillfully argues for the need to counter this discourse:
“Whenever a political project takes a radical turn, up pops the inevitable blackmail: ‘Of course these goals are desirable in themselves; if we do all this, however, international capital will boycott us, the growth rate will fall, and so on.’ […] Many fetishes will have to be broken here: who cares if growth stalls, or even becomes negative? Have we not had enough of the high growth rate whose effects on the social organism were felt mostly in the guise of new forms of poverty and dispossession? What about a negative growth that would translate into a qualitatively better, not higher, standard of living for the wider popular strata? That would be a political act today…” (2004, 74) 99
Žižek aptly exposes the efficiency with which the superegoic imperative of growth holds back the contemporary subjects as its captives. The discourse of “negative growth” is a sobering gesture to undo the grip of the growth fantasy. However, our emphasis is on interrupting the logic of exception in all of its manifestations, irrespective of the particular economic discourses that sustain it. After all, this logic can be perpetuated not only in the ideology of growth, but also in the economic fantasies of “local development,” “alleviation of poverty,” “enhancing human capital,” “creation of jobs,” “economic efficiency,” “freedom of choice,” and so on. That is why we approach economic difference instigated and materialized by the “non-all” as a moment, a perspective, a principle, which refuses the exception as such, and not just the particular social group that occupies the position of the exception, or the particular social discourse that articulates this function. We call this difference the communist moment.
Utopianism or dystopianism? No, thanks!
Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107
If we were to distinguish surplus labor from surplus value and reconstruct the proper homology as one between surplus labor and surplus jouissance, then an entirely different picture emerges.
In this alternative construction of the homology, not just capitalism but all forms of production, appropriation, and distribution are disrupted by the paradoxical topology of surplus jouissance.
By universalizing the psychoanalytical insight, in this manner, to all class formations, we intend to steer away from the dual dangers of utopianism as well as dystopianism. On the one hand, we reject utopianism by acknowledging the impossibility of a social link purged from surplus jouissance and the impossibility of the class relation, echoing the Lacanian insight pertaining to the impossibility of the sexual relation. On the other hand, we would be rejecting dystopianism by not restricting the homology to capitalism and retaining the Marxian insight pertaining to the possibility of another way of relating to surplus. Moreover, through our reconstruction of the homology, we will be able to produce a more robust and distinctively Marxian explanation as to why surplus labor/value, and not an inexorable accumulation drive, is indeed the absent “cause” that sets the circuit of capital in motion. 91
“There is no class relation”
We also believe that the numerous refutations and reinstatements of the labor theory of value, by reducing it to a theory of price determination, obscure Marx’s radical insight pertaining to the impossibility of the class relation (92).
For Marxian economics, neither the respective quanta of necessary- and surplus-labor nor the potential destinations of the appropriated surplus-labor could be determined a priori. Indeed, there is no stable and universally accepted logic for conducting and institutionalizing the process of the performance, appropriation, and distribution of surplus-labor. To the extent that
there is no true, correct, or just way of dividing the total labor-time performed by direct laborers into its necessary and surplus components and distributing the surplus labor to their destinations, all social organizations of surplus labor will be structured around a foundational, constitutive lack.
This is the sense in which we construct the homology between surplus labor and surplus jouissance. Since there exists no pre-constituted/pre-given guideline or knowledge as to how to organize the surplus labor, there exists a surplus of knowledge. Indeed, historically concrete forms of the social organization of class (that designate who is the lord and who is the serf, who is the master and who is the slave, who is the capitalist and who is the worker) are already so many different, and ultimately failed, attempts to overcome this constitutive impossibility of the class relation and make up for the absence of a ready-made knowledge of what to do with the living labor. Yet each formation, each form of organizing surplus labor is inevitably thrown out of balance,
insofar as all social links are smeared with surplus jouissance. At the end of the day, to the extent that we are speaking of surplus labor, whether it is directly materialized in products/services or in currency with which one can buy products/services, the dialectics of desire as well as the obdurate logic of partial drives will be present.
All social links, therefore, including class formations, are structured around a constitutive lack that simultaneously invites and frustrates the communities.
We consider this foundational, constitutive lack as the absent cause, the foundational antagonism, the constitutive impossibility, around which sociality is constructed.
As Žižek once put it, the antagonism between the “bosses” and “workers” is “already a ‘reactive’ or ‘defence’ formation, an attempt to ‘cope with’ (to come to terms with, to pacify…) the trauma of class antagonism” 92
The homology, therefore, is not so much between the surplus labor and surplus jouissance as it is between the way a particular organization of surplus labor is a response formation to a foundational impossibility and the way the desire of the subject is sustained by a fantasy formation that wraps itself around the constitutive lack embodied in the objet petit a. 93
Diverging from Žižek, we do not restrict the conceptual content of surplus labor
to the paradoxical logic of capitalism, although we concur that there is a capitalist way of organizing the surplus labor, just as there could be a feudal or a communist way of organizing it. This seems more in tune with the original spirit of Marx. While he discussed surplus value as the form of surplus labor under capitalism, Marx neither derived the concept of surplus labor from, nor reduced it to, capitalism. Rather, the concept emerged as a consequence of Marx’s repeated attempts to make sense of the changing forms of economic organizations that existed side by side in the long process of the so-called transition from feudalism to capitalism. To argue otherwise and assert that
Marx constructed surplus labor exclusively through his focus on capitalism would be to neglect how Marx persistently studied, theorized and compared the different economic forms, such as feudalism, primitive communism, simple commodity production, capitalism, and so on, before he arrived at the concept of surplus labor.
In this precise sense, we consider surplus labor to be the “concrete universal” of the Marxian tradition. While surplus labor as a concept emerges out of Marx’s analysis of its various concrete manifestations, it always fails to be given a final shape by any one of these forms. 93
surplus labour surplus value surplus jouissance
Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107
In our attempt to develop a psychoanalytically informed class difference, however, we encounter another resistance, namely, a particular psychoanalytical approach to Marxian discourse, in which the scope of some key Marxian concepts is limited to the form they take within the specific discourse of capitalism. We find the virtual absence of surplus labor in the psychoanalytical literature symptomatic in this respect.
Rather, surplus labor appears in only one conceivable form, the capitalist form of surplus value. Such a reduction of Marxian concepts to their particular form within the discourse of capitalism eliminates the possibility of conceiving different relations to surplus labor (and hence to class) as integral to conceptualizing economic difference from capitalism.
Lacan’s seminars XVI and XVII, delivered in the aftermath of May 1968, include many favorable references to Marx’s discourse and the significance of the concept of surplus value. It is in seminar XVI that Lacan, in order to underscore the intimate relationship between surplus jouissance and surplus value, emphasizes the term “homology,” thereby evoking the idea of a fundamental similarity in the structure and function of these two concepts, a sameness that needs to be strictly distinguished from a cursory resemblance
between two discrete entities 87
Our interpretation of the encounter between Marx and Lacan begins from conceiving the homology as one between two nodal points (surplus labor and surplus jouissance) that set a new “discourse” in motion that revolves around them. Žižek, on the other hand, understands the homology as one between surplus jouissance as the object cause of desire and the surplus value as the “cause” which sets in motion the circuit of capital. His analysis differs from ours primarily in its oversight of the Marxian distinction between surplus labor and the particular form it takes under capitalism, surplus value. This, in turn, as we shall demonstrate, leads to a representation of capitalism as the only game in town. We believe that with the absence of the epistemological dimension of the homology that insists on retaining the independent existence and the distinct objects of each theoretical discourse, the attempts at articulating psychoanalysis with Marxism fail to do justice to either discourse. 87
What then, for Žižek, is the precise nature of the homology between the two concepts and what was it that Marx failed to recognize? What additional insight does the psychoanalytical concept of surplus jouissance bring into the Marxian concept of surplus value?
For Žižek, surplus jouissance is essentially “a residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifying operation” (1989, 180) that gets “embodied” in the Lacanian objet petit a.
The Lacanian objet petit a “is just an objectification of a void, of a discontinuity opened in reality by the emergence of the signifier” (95).
Zupančič adds that surplus jouissance is a pure waste, an excess, a senseless and entropy-inducing refuse of signification that results from “the inadequacy of the signifier to itself, its inability to function ‘purely,’ without producing a useless surplus” (2006, 159).
However, surplus jouissance is not a simple, ordinary waste or excess that could be disposed of without consequence. Quite the contrary, in its status as the limit of signification, surplus jouissance (or objet petit a) is where the cause, the kernel of enjoyment is. The objet petit a is the “‘surplus’ in the object which stays the same in all possible worlds” (Žižek 1989, 95): because it lacks consistency, because it is “just an objectification of [the] void” of signification, it simultaneously frustrates and incites our desire to pin its meaning down to a concrete attribute.
Nevertheless, the subtraction of this excess, this surplus, this “something in it more than itself” will not deliver a balanced desire:
[Surplus jouissance] is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some ‘normal’, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an ‘excess.’ If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it ‘stays the same’, if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus value — the ‘cause’ which sets in motion the capitalist process of production — and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. (Žižek SOO 1989, 52-53)
Žižek … argue[s] that because capitalism is marked by a constitutive imbalance, it is impossible to reform it or eliminate its foundational discord between the forces and relations of production.
Just as one cannot obtain domesticated, balanced desire without surplus jouissance, one cannot maintain a regulated capitalism without an incessant push towards capital accumulation that continually revolutionizes its conditions of production and reproduction. 89
against Žižek’s essentialism
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.
respecting other’s diversity hmm
Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Thus, the need to restore the autonomous and legitimate diversity of “other narratives” often functions in subtle ideological terms, namely as a kind of “fantasy screen”, an unquestioned fascination with the other qua fetish-object which allows the gaze of the critic-observer to preserve the unproblematic identity of his or her own subject position. 148
… our point of view is never ideologically neutral, but instead always constituted through the foreclosure of its excessive “internally external” cause … surplus-jouissance. And it goes without saying that this historically specific surplus, today, is co-extensive with capital.
… realty emerges as an object of cognition only on condition that the material surplus of thought is disavowed and transposed into the sublime object of desire “out there”.
I can think something (for instance, a politics of emancipation) only if the constitutive non-coincidence of my thought with itself is externalized as objet a, the elusive X which sets my desire to know (my thought) in motion.
… only by yielding unreservedly to the object (objet a) can the subject find itself; only by going through to its epistemological limit, can thought realize itself. …
the actualization of any political theory that aims at subverting the status quo depends on an unexpected event which ruptures the seemingly unbreakable continuum of history (or an act which opens up the possibility of radical subjective change) and is perceived as materializing not so much the theory behind it but the very deadlock of (that) theory. From this angle, the task of political thought would seem to be not just to propose a consistent project, but especially to intervene in the symptomal point of our socio-symbolic order in the attempt to seize the Benjaminian “revolutionary chance” coincidental with history’s sudden openness.
What follows logically is that theory can only connect with praxis at the level of the Real, and not at the level of conscious rational signification.
More extensively: precisely because the only point of contact between theory and praxis is in the Real, signification needs to be at least minimally distorted and betrayed if it is to successfully actualize itself. 148
knowledge jouissance
Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
the task of theory …to construct a project whose transformative potential depends on its capacity to reflect upon its blind spot — on its conviction that to be socially and politically productive it has to include its own foundations in jouissance. … Is not the whole point of Lacan’s teaching that knowledge is rooted in jouissance, and that the moment we cut the umbilical cord between the two — or in Sohn-Rethel’s terms, between intellectual and manual labour — we are done for, condemned to be ruled by an invisible master and to perambulate in a paranoid universe? As with Lacan, Žižek’s epistemology hinges on the connection between thought and the “material weight” of the historical Real.
– this Real is not external to thought but its innermost symptom
– it is only insofar as it “enjoys the symptom” … that thought can lead to praxis — not the other way around (that is, not by keeping the symptom at a distance).
– The only way to understand the unity of theory and practice, … this generative force connecting theory and praxis can only be conceptualized in relation to the ability to disturb a symptom by definition in excess of a given theory and therefore rooted in the Real of jouissance. (146)
je sais bien mais quand même
Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Žižek, like Lacan, is not a moralist — he refuses to connect revolution to a moral urge.
By contrast, it is a matterof being unwittingly caught in the strange, distressing awareness that in our fixation on the task in hand we go “beyond/against ourselves” — that at the crucial moment of our full commitment we have no control over our actions, since we are driven by some unconscious libidinal attachment to an object-cause which, strictly speaking, has no name or form.
For this reason the revolutionary intervention per se inevitably retains a psychotic dimension, one where despair mobilizes utopian energies in responding to what is perceived as an apocalyptic historical scenario. The urge of drive is therefore amoral, for it is “in us more than ourselves”, beyond our conscious decision to be “in overdrive”. … [for Žižek] moral knowledge is not a sufficient condition to enact change, let alone to act.
Octave Mannoni’s fortunate formula Je sais bien, mais quand même … effectively rules our lives: we are fetishists in practice, regularly displacing belief onto our concrete, material practices, for the simple reason that we do not know what we truly believe in, since we are interpellated at the level of unconscious enjoyment. Our true beliefs are unconscious, and as such they tend to materialize in the proverbial fetish. 140-141
… is it not the case that the parallax concerns not only the minimally psychotic form of the revolutionary act or the unpredictable outburst of the event, but also
the vertiginous dimension of thought itself, exemplified by the massive task of thinking a new strategic link between the socio-symbolic order and the Real which might challenge and eventually install itself as an effective alternative to the capitalist valorization of jouissance? 142
What nevertheless cannot be emphasized enough is the overlapping of his formalistic definition of the act qua confrontation with the Real and the creation of a new political vision capable of recalibrating our existence through jouissance. … to find a new formula seeking to supplement signification with enjoyment (142).
libidinal surplus and signifier
Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
consubstantial: Of the same substance, nature, or essence … Christian theol (esp of the three persons of the Trinity) regarded as identical in substance or essence
Entropy: a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed system
It is Lacan’s notion of the signifier that discloses the intrinsic limitation of Marx’s discovery:
the unpaid labour-power responsible for the creation of surplus-value is ultimately nothing but the constitutive, non-symbolizable libidinal surplus that accompanies any intervention of the signifier, that is to say of any knowledge.
Why? Because knowledge by definition strikes on the wall of its lack (of knowledge), its limit, thereby secreting an entropic addendum, i.e. a measure of libidinal energy which is not available to perform work. This is surplus-jouissance, whose presence proves that an unconscious knowledge is, literally, at work.
Everything hinges on the dialectic of knowledge and jouissance, for the surplus of jouissance (qua lack) is correlated to the arrival on the scene of the signifier. Language therefore ‘institutes the order of discourse’ but simultaneously ‘it does bring us something extra’. When Lacan claims that knowledge is a means of jouissance he explains that when at work, knowledge produces entropy, a point of loss, which is the ‘the sole regular point at which we have access to the nature of jouissance. (44).
Insofar as it overlaps with entropy, surplus-jouissance has no use-value: it is waste, a quantity of libido that is both produced by and lost to any working activity, for we cannot gain control over it — it remains other. (45)
We must clarify that, strictly speaking, we do not have jouissance in addition to the signifier, but as the very impasse consubstantial with the signifier: ‘Anything that is language only obtains jouissance by insisting to the point of producing the loss whereby surplus jouissance takes body’. Jouissance per se is a mythical entity, while surplus-jouissance is the libido materializing the loss that emerges from this myth — which means that whenever we speak of jouissance we refer to a surplus that can only be given as entropy, a plus that, as it were, coincides with a minus; and that for this reason it cannot perform any work.