jouissance – Page 12

commodify surplus jouissance

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

… since the dawn of capitalism the worker’s knowledge has been progressively deprived of the surplus that originally qualified it. In the process it has become structurally identical to the knowledge of the master-capitalist inasmuch as it now perceives jouissance as incarnated in the enjoyment of the commodity (59).

A worker is not suddenly any freer (even potentially) from capitalist ideology, and therefore from the mire of value, simply because his contribution to capitalist production has become either immaterial or affective. Rather, his immersion in capitalism is aggravated by the fact that capital has managed to appropriate and commodify his surplus-jouissance, the excess consubstantial with labour itself.

… the intrinsic limit of all theories on the revolutionary/subversive role of the working-class,whether of the Fordistor post-Fordist period, has been their short-sightedness with regard to the psychoanalytic conception of surplus. (70)

In other words, the workers who can make a substantial difference are those belonging to the increasing numbers of “living dead”, whose labour-power has not yet entered the cycle of capitalist valorization. (76)

What matters here is to stress that the commodity bought back by the workers is not “all there is”, i.e. it cannot be regarded as the final outcome of capitalist dynamics. Rather, instead of stopping at circulation these dynamics are not without their own unaccounted for and unaccountable residue, their own external surplus, which is fully detached and meaningless from the perspective of capital itself. This residue is what Lacan identified, recurring to Marx and Engels’ term, as lumpenproletariat, in spite of the fact that neither Marx nor Engels accorded it any positive political potential. If we agree that the key step to undermine the capitalist order is to link back consumption to production with the aim of politicizing the original parallax taking place within the latter, this step should be complemented by the politicization of the external remainder of capitalist dynamics.

… More precisely, what we need to politicize is the connection between surplus qua knowledge-at-work and the lumpenproletariat as the human surplus of the profiteering logic of capital. Ultimately we are dealing with the same surplus observed in different contexts: the knowledge extracted from the worker, i.e. the foundational surplus of any signifying operation whatsoever, returns at the end of the cycle as the structural, indigestible surplus of capitalist dynamics. 77

My central contention is therefore that the only way to bring back the focus on work and exploitation is to theorize a new link between production and the human surplus engendered by the mad escalation of capitalist dynamics. … Rather than just politicizing production within capitalist dynamics, however, we should dare to intervene creatively by linking the political question concerning the “production parallax” to the other political question concerning the excluded masses in urgent need of organization. Capitalism produces surplus-value by concealing the real surplus, but it simultaneously reproduces this real surplus in the form of “human waste”. Today, the fate of millions of slumdwellers, as well as our own, depends on an intervention in the production process which rethinks the strategic role fo tis constitutive surplus, thus simultaneously preparing the ground for an alternative mode of exchange and consumption. (78)

Surplus-value is grounded in surplus-jouissance.

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

The psychoanalytic contribution to revolutionary politics can be gauged in the claim that radical change becomes possible only at that epistemological conjuncture where the symbolic knowledge supporting the subject fails. (54)

As surplus-jouissance is converted into surplus-value, the object-cause of desire (objet a), by definition unnameable, sheds its disturbing weight and is demoted to the level of commodity. Paradoxically, then, what was hidden in the master’s discourse is now further repressed as it undergoes a radical transformation affecting its substance. The constant reintegraton and valorization of excess (knowledge) produces more valorized excess (knowledge), in a seemingly endless spiral. From this we infer that the libidinal aim of consumer society is to prevent anxiety by, as it were, dressing up jouissance in sexy garments and making it available everywhere, to the extent, however, that its endogenous reproduction generates nothing but more anxiety. In today’s consumer society, enjoyment and anxiety coincide. Although we know full well that commodities only bring ephemeral and angst-ridden pleasures, our answer to this predicament is to consume more, if only to avoid falling behind in the treadmill contest with our fellow consumers (55).

Surplus-value is grounded in surplus-jouissance: the elimination of surplus-value effectively determines the disappearance of the productive drive itself. … Žižek mentions the gap between Madeleine (object of desire) and her curl of blonde hair (objet a, the cause of desire) to argue that Marx’s object of desire (unconstrained productivity) also depends on the presence of surplus-value.

Just as, for Scottie, Judy would not “become” Madeleine without her blond curl, so there is no production without the “inherent obstacle” named surplus-value. Why? Because — and this is the key point — surplus-value like the blond curl, stands for, or overlaps with, the foundational surplus (qua lack) that qualifies jouissance.

The problem with Marx’s hypothesis of the elimination of surplus-value, therefore, is that it obfuscates the ontological presupposition of surplus-value itself, namely surplus-jouissance, upon which everything (the construction of any social order) hinges. (57)

The logical outcome of this critique is that any alternative social system which does not contemplate the dialectics of desire and objet a — the structuring of desire into a socially viable whole through its link to an excessive/elusive element embodying the surplus of jouissance — is also doomed (58).

As history has indeed shown us, the elimination of surplus-value, and consequently profit, does not automatically usher in the elimination of misery, since it fails to consider how surplus-value has its roots in surplus-jouissance. A combined reading of Lacan’s critique of surplus-value and Sohn-Rethel’s analysis of intellectual and manual labour suggests that

unless we find a way to re-politicize both the sphere of material production and its foundation in entropic jouissance, it is unlikely that we shall succeed in promoting a sustainable alternative to capitalism. Today, politicizing the Real coterminous with any knowledge-at-work amounts to politicizing the key symptom of our immersion in the symbolic order. 58

surplus-jouissance

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

… the historical success of capitalism as an economic as well as socially synthetic system ultimately depends on what we might call, resorting again to the fortunate image popularized by Žižek, the parallax between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance: a minimal shift of perspective reveals that

what we perceive as value is actually, in its deepest connotation, the inerasable lack at the heart of being from which the little a emerges, this thing, “in us more than ourselves” that bothers us from the moment we enter the social link to the moment we relinquish our ties with it.

Today’s global incorporation and valorization of this constitutively human surplus coresponds to an unprecedented attempt to construct a social order on an act of recycling, for what we are sold as desirable value is the end product of the invisible conversion of surplus-jouissance into enjoyment (42).

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.

technological innovation allows the capitalist to deskill workers and increase the reserve army of the unemployed. Logically, then, the automatization of production, fuelled by various advances in modern science, caused labourers to completely forsake their original control over production — in Lacanian terms, they had to forsake their knowledge qua surplus-jouissance, knowledge as a “spark” that cannot be taught. (50)

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)

desire and drive

Dean, Jodi. “Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics, Economy, Sovereignty, and Capture” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. number 2, 2010. 2-15.

The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained (Žižek 2000: 291). In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process of not reaching it. Failure (the thwarting of the aim, the missing of the goal) provides its own sort of success insofar as one cannot not enjoy. Such failure or thwarting is key to sublimation, itself premised on the providing of the drive with a satisfaction different from its aim (Lacan 1997: 111).

In drive, one doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive.

Explaining the difference between desire and drive via Lacan’s objet a, Žižek adds a second feature to the notion of drive, namely, loss.

He writes: ‘Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,

while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself – in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss” – the gap, cut, distance – itself.’ (Žižek 2008: 328). Drive is a kind of compulsion or force. And it’s a force that is shaped, that takes its form and pulsion, from loss. Drive is loss as a force or the force loss exerts on the field of desire.

A third feature of drive important for the argument here is Lacan’streatment of drive as ‘a will to create from zero, a will to begin again’ (Lacan 1997: 213). Even as the drive is destructive, ‘a challenge to everything that exists,’ it is also an opening to something new. Dolar extends the idea of drive as creative destruction to the political, positioning drive as a force of negativity that makes politics possible (Dolar 2009).

[Drive is] an excess that subverts all attempts to reduce politics to the proper arrangement of subjects and institutions, drive prevents an order from permanently stabilizing or closing in upon itself. It marks the crack in the social that opens the way to politics.

For Dolar, then, psychoanalysis contributes to political theory a view of politics as necessarily a dis-locating, a shifting of relations, rather than only or primarily an ordering and its reproduction.

The very attempt to inhibit sovereign power, to reduce sovereignty’s domain by treating the market as an autonomous site of truth with laws immune to sovereign direction, enables the intensification and spread of biopolitics. Biopolitics is thus a by-product of the limitation of sovereignty, a set of mobilized effects of its interiorized critique, limitation, and redirection. Biopolitics takes its form as the loss of sovereign political power, more specifically, in the circumscription of the authority of the people as a collective who thereby come to be passively rendered as the population, a target of multiple, shifting interventions. Drive enables us to understand how it is that the people are captured in the population, a capture that neoliberalism amplifies and extends.

A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a common but not a whole and not a unity, makes use of the distinction between desire and drive. The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, as an active common.

The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.

freud lacan

Zupancic, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Ed. Constantin V.Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 457-468. Print

The central themes of structural linguistics are the arbitrariness of the sign and the emphasis on differentiality (signifiers only ‘make sense,’ or produce meaning, as parts of a differential network of places, binary oppositions and so on; the signifying chain is strictly separated from the signified), as well as on the fact that there are no positive entities in language. Lacan concluded that there was an important characteristic of every spoken language that was left out from this account, or was only considered on its margins, … It is not only according to the laws of differentiality that signifiers produce sense, but also according to the two already mentioned mechanisms: sonorous similarities or homonyms and associations that exist in the speaker’s memory. Here we are dealing with something like positive entities, with words functioning strangely similarly to objects. 459

In more general terms we could say that signifiers are not simply used to refer to reality, they are part of the same reality they refer to; hence ‘there is no such thing as a metalanguage’

Lacan transposed the bar separating the signifier from the signified (S/s) into the bar inherent to the register of the signifier itself. Signifiers are never pure signifiers. They are riddled, from within, by unexpected surpluses that tend to ruin the logic of their pure differentiality. On the one side … they are separated from the signified in the sense that there is no inherent connection leading from the signifier to its meaning. Yet, if this were all, the signifying field would be a consistent system and, as the structuralist motto goes, a structure without subject. Lacan subscribes to this view to the extent to which it convincingly does away with the notion of ‘psychological subject,’ of intentional subjectivity using the language for its purposes, mastering the field of speech or being its Cause and Source.

Yet he goes a step further. If we focus on the signifying chain, precisely in its independence and autonomy, we are bound to notice that it constantly produces, from itself, quite unexpected effects of meaning, a meaning which is strictly speaking, a surplus meaning that stains signifers from within. This surplus meaning is also a carrier of certain quotas of affect or enjoyment, ‘jouissance’ … It is precisely through this surplus meaning as enjoyment that signifiers are intrinsically bound to reality to which they refer. Incidentally, this is also the kernel of Lacan’s insistence on the truth being not-all: the effect of the signifier cannot be fully reduced back to the signifier as its cause. 460

The subject of the unconscious is not some deeply hidden subject that makes its presence known through, say, dreams or the slips of the tongue; it only exists with, and within, these very slips of the tongue. 460

What, precisely, it the unconscious? There is no such thing as a direct perception of the unconscious thoughts. dreams (and other formations of unconscious) are not the place where one can get an unobstructed view in the unconscious, beyond the censorship and repression that otherwise ‘hide’ them from consciousness. On the contrary, these formations are nothing but the censorship and distortions at work. … the unconscious is this very distortion, and not some untarnished content lying beyond these distortions, and contained in the coherent narrative of the latent thoughts reconstructed in the process of analysis.

Something is added to the latent thoughts and this surplus, constitutive of a dream, is the unconscious desire. In this perspective the unconscious desire is but this excess of form over content. The unconscious desire is not what is articulated in the latent thoughts, for instance — in the case of Freud’s own famous dream of ‘Irma’s injection’ — the wish to be absolved of the responsibility for a patient not getting better. The same applies to some other cases discussed by Freud, wishes related to professional ambitions or aggressive wishes towards our supposedly beloved ones, or ‘inappropriate’ sexual wishes. All these wishes are not all that unconscious; they are closer to the register of thoughts that we (more or less consciously) have, but wouldn’t admit to.

subject*

social change is irremediably fantasmatic (206)

The excess (*) attending the subject, to repeat, is therefore both the medium of its connection to other subjects and the obstacle to that connection. This dual function comprises the “relation of nonrelation” that undergirds the social field, a relation predicated on an obstacle to relationality.

… because the Möbius subject encompasses both its symbolic properties (elements of the set) and its formal properties (set-ness, empty set), de-personalization doesn’t rid the subject of its ontic properties but it sets them off, revealing them as contingent (rather than necessary) bearers of meaning. By making visible the relation of nonrelation through symbolic divestiture the subject situates itself as the source of the non-orientability of the social field, without however being able to account for its own effects within that field in any predictive or comprehensive sense.

In this way, the subject takes ethical responsibility for its parallax oscillation, exposing the excess that sticks to itself (as if it were being seen from the perspective of others) and establishing distance from it, which is a prerequisite to tolerating it nondefensively (207).

As far as I can see, the suspension of the defense against excess — or the neutralization of the more destructive defenses — is the only way that the subject’s transformation of its relation to its own jouissance can affect others. This suspension means that the subject accepts the relation of nonrelation, giving up its fruitless but often destructive efforts to locate the excess outside itself or to eradicate it. By refusing to defend itself (or by refusing to deploy destructive defenses such as narcissism, aggression, projection, and scapegoating), the subject decreases its contribution to the affective storm in a social field that circulates excess like a hot potato. The potentiation of affect decreases, however temporarily, when the subject absorbs some of the affective energy without releasing it back in a destructive form (207).

… in general the absorption of affect by one member of the group provides an opening for others to change their own affective posture.

In any case, no matter what the specific defense aroused, the encounter with the neosubject will make apparent the dominant identifications and defenses of others. This display of the dominant tendencies in a particular social universe permits reflection on what works and what doesn’t, helping to aggregate and focus social energies. These may be actions that put the brakes on violence, stymie bullies, alleviate suffering, secure privacy, promote stability and so on. That is, the encounter with the neosubject forces into the open the rationalizations for the status-quo, and in so doing can foster the conditions under which people will have a choice to make at the level of practices — individual, familial, institutional.

The setting-off of the subject’s substantive traits — through, for example, self-deprecating humor — both exposes the contingent meaning of those traits and reflects back to others the way those traits get used as explanations for social discord. In this way, the subject brings something new into the social field — not only a de-emphasis on ontic properties and a revelation of a dimension of universality independent of such properties, but also a new way of being in the social field that nondefensively accepts the relation of nonrelation. What is more, unlike the immanent cause or the exceptional cause, the effects of the deployment of the extimate cause, as it generates new behavior and new relations, can be tracked, studied, and analyzed (208).

relation of nonrelation

Although every subject in the field is a Möbius subject, all subjects are marked by their own history and mobilize different defenses against the experience of excess. The individuals within the social space are diverse, even though they share the common characteristic of excess. put another way, the fact that they are subjects of excess makes it possible for them to be individuated differently and still seek out and maintain connections to one another, even as some of those connections are heavily imbued with aggression and hatred (204).

… by placing the relation of nonrelation front and center, the formal properties of the subject clearly emerge as the route to its universalization and the link to its political potential. In order for social change to come about, something new has to enter the situation, something that is not simply a funciton of that situation’s determinates (204).

Möbius subject and the relation of nonrelation

The Möbius subject has two driving motivations, that is, motivations at the level of the drive:

1. The first is to maintain the extimacy that is the ground of its existence: as we know, the drive circulates around objet a, the missing object, established by way of the encounter with the formal negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père.

2. The second is to defend itself against the anxiety generated by its excessive status. This anxiety, understood in Lacanian terms, is simply affect itself, a function of the Möbius condition of subjectivity.

The motivations may be at odds, but they derive necessarily from the subject’s founding. Taken together, they provide the means by which the social space itself is propagated and sustained.

Because, at the level of the drive, the subject comes into existence only if it seems as though objet a is possible, prohibited rather than impossible, the subject has a stake in the very condition that produces anxiety — its status as a signifier depends upon the impossibility of objet a and its status as a signifier makes its ultimate stability, its final meaning or self-consistency, unreachable. In this dynamic, seen from the level of Symbolic relations, it can seem that the other’s failure to stabilize the subject’s meaning is willfully aggressive (or negligent) rather than a function of impossibility.

As a result, the Möbius subject relates to the other both as the solution and the obstacle to its own inconsistency — a relation of nonrelation. That is, thanks to the excess that sticks to each subject, and thanks to the fantasy that the other is consistent in a way that the subject is not, the social relation necessarily emerges as a relation of nonrelation (202).

In the Levinasian version the subject seeks to overcome the radical alterity that, in this view, properly belongs to the other. In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it. The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire tor the relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness.

At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: the other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish. So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space. It is in this relation of nonrelation that we find the sustaining of the duality of subject and other that Levinas requires for ethics but fails to provide.

The hatred and envy that can arise from the subject’s frustration at the other’s inability to repair the subject’s self-inconsistency could easily galvanize the destruction of the very space of the social … (203). The destruction of that space, however, would spell the demise of the subject qua subject. Subjects mobilize a number of (necessarily inadequate) defenses — including perversion and hysteria — to avoid that result. … We don’t want to feel that “we’re all in this together” if that means everyone is subject to excess. We want to feel that someone can solve this problem or be targeted as its source. But because these wishes do not actually resolve the excess, the best we can do is to try to send it on its rounds, even though it inevitably “returns” to us — since, of course, in reality it never left. We are stuck with and to excess. From this point of view, it appears that the motivation for the social relation is not the preservation of the other’s distinct existence, as Levinas and Critichley would have it, but rather the need to preserve the social field itself — the field without which the subject (all subjects) as such cannot exist — from a threat of dissolution.

That is, the subject fantasizes that the continual dissolution and reassemblage of the social field made possible and necessary by excess is a threat to the field rather than the very condition of its perpetuation (203).

rickert affective modalities

Affective modalities for integrating language and world: fantasy jouissance desire (46)

For Lacan and Žižek, reality is formulated as “the Real,” those things that are foreclosed from the symbolic and that return as errors, gaps, and misrecognitions. In plainest terms this means that language fails to capture the Real; the Real always exceeds what can be conveyed by means of the symbolic.

rickert acts of enjoyment

Rickert, Thomas. Acts of Enjoyment.

However as Torfing explains in New Theories of Discourse, there is a difference between conceiving the social as a totality that always falls short of closure and conceiving it as something already fundamentally split or fissured that we try and fail to conceive as a totality (Torfing 52)(45).

This is the point at which Žižek parts company with Laclau and Mouffe. While he retains notions such as chains of signifiers and a discursive field open to rearticulations, he theorizes the discursive field in terms of a fundamental fissure, not simply as something nontotalizable.

From Žižek’s perspective, the social is better understood in terms of a fundamental antagonism that prevents any closure, rather than as a Derridean field of signifiers whose incompleteness stems from the signifier’s free play in the absence of any organizing, totalizing center. It is thus a question of whether substitution or antagonism is primary in the operations of discourse. (45)

Feldner

Vighi, Fabio and Heiko Feldner. Žižek Beyond Foucault. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

act proper (radical agency)

performative activity within a hegemonic structure

What qualifies a free act, according to Žižek, is an intervention whereby “I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself’ (Žižek, On Belief 2001c, 121).

For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of … a momentary ‘suspension of the big Other’, of the socio-symbolic network that guarantees the subject’s identity: an authentic act occurs only when the subject risks a gesture that is no longer ‘covered up’ by the big Other (Žižek, 1993, Tarrying with the Negative 262-4).

Here is a crucial quote that pretty much sums up their (Butler and Žižek) respective differences, (okay its pretty condensed)

… only the Real allows us to truly resignify the Symbolic. (110)

Žižek maintains that for all Butler’s radicality, she remains caught up in a resistance at the level of the symbolic, that is, at the level of signification. Judy Butler’s work doesn’t touch the Real.

A quote by Žižek from the book:

we cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other’s suffering and pain, has first to be broken in a gesture of taking the risk and reaching directly out to the suffering other — a gesture which, since it shatters the very kernel of our identity, cannot fail to appear extremely violent. (Žižek, Revolotion at the Gates 2002a, 252)