{"id":14596,"date":"2021-02-07T15:52:48","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T20:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=14596"},"modified":"2021-02-07T19:11:43","modified_gmt":"2021-02-08T00:11:43","slug":"zupancic-review-mcgowan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2021\/02\/07\/zupancic-review-mcgowan\/","title":{"rendered":"Zupan\u010di\u010d review of McGowan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\u201cCapitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets\u201d by Todd McGowan Reviewed by Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Continental Thought and Theory. Volume 1 | Issue 3: Feminism 757-761 | ISSN: 2463-333X http:\/\/ctt.canterbury.ac.nz<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Relying on some fundamental theses of psychoanalytic (Freudian and Lacanian) theory, McGowan proposes the following argument: the signifying structure is consubstantial with a loss\/lack which induces and forms the logic of desire: no object can fully satisfy the latter, because they all function as stand-ins for the impossible lost object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s a McGowan quote from his article on Trump and the movie Citizen Kane<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Entry into language \u2013 the subjection to the signifier \u2013 produces a lacking subject, <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Entry into language \u2013 the subjection to the signifier \u2013 produces a lacking subject, a subject with desires that cannot be realized. These desires provide satisfaction through their non-realization rather than their realization, through the repetition of failure that characterizes desire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whenever the subject finds a particular object that promises to fulfill its desire, it quickly moves on to another object. No object proves fully satisfying because no object can be the object \u2013 the object that embodies what the subject feels that it has lost. In the guise of a search for a variety of empirical objects, the subject seeks out a non-existent lost object that would provide it the ultimate satisfaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The failure of desire is the result of the type of object that desire hinges on. It is not a present object but an absent one. Even though one cannot see an absence, one can nonetheless recognize the satisfaction that derives from what isn\u2019t there. This is what psychoanalysis unlocks but what capitalist subjectivity forces us to disavow because it would shatter the illusion that gives the commodity its allure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The defining trauma for subjectivity is its inability to separate lack from excess. Our capacity for excessive enjoyment is inextricably linked to our status as lacking subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
As a result, no amount of excess can ever enable us to escape from lack. The more we have, the more that we feel we\u2019re missing. No excess is ever excessive enough to transcend lack altogether. Excess has its basis in lack, so that the more excessive we become, the more we experience our lack, which is the trajectory that Welles chronicles in Citizen Kane<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s political strategy involves bombarding would-be supporters with images of excess in the other while contrasting these images with the lack in those he addresses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The figures of excess <\/strong>for Trump are Mexican criminals, Chinese political leaders, Muslim refugees, and the purveyors of political correctness at universities. While these figures are enjoying their excesses, ordinary Americans endure lack<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
They suffer from unfair trade agreements, religious persecution, and drug overdose epidemics. In this sense, it is the absence of greatness in America and the greatness of the other \u2013 American lack and foreign excess<\/strong> \u2013 that is ironically essential to Trump\u2019s appeal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the film enables the spectator to become aware of the satisfaction that this lacking position offers in a way that Kane himself never does. Kane keeps searching for excess free from lack while the film enjoins the spectator to embrace the excess that is found through the structure of lack<\/span><\/strong>. It is this fundamental tension between the position of the spectator and that of Kane (and the other characters within the diegesis) that defines the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ability to see an excess in the other that we cannot experience ourselves lends itself to a basic political conservatism. If we wonder why conservatism always seems to have an easier political task than leftist struggle, the answer lies in the form of appearance that lack and excess have. Lack is obscure and difficult to see in the other but easy to experience in oneself. Excess, in contrast, is readily visible in the other but never fully apparent to oneself. As a result of this distribution, we have an inherent suspicion about the other combined with a belief in ourselves as the victim of the structural situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dynamic of recognizing lack in ourselves and excess in the other is the fundamental form of fantasy<\/strong>. Fantasy provides the structure for how subjects organize their enjoyment<\/span><\/strong>. It targets the other\u2019s excess \u2013 the other\u2019s ability to enjoy where the subject itself doesn\u2019t \u2013 and offers the subject a scenario through which it can access the other\u2019s enjoyment that would otherwise remain unattainable for the subject. In this way, fantasy enables the subject to accomplish the impossible, to bridge the gap that separates the subject from how the other enjoys itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paranoia is difficult to undo because whenever one reveals that the other lacks just like the paranoid subject, this subject can imagine a hidden excess lurking within that lack. This is why news reports that depict the horrible plight of refugees in concentration camps or the normality of Mexican immigrants are seldom effective. The excess that the paranoid subject sees has nothing to do with the empirical other. This excess is the subject\u2019s own self-relation. <\/span><\/strong>To abandon one\u2019s belief in it is to abandon one\u2019s own ability to enjoy it. Even as the paranoid subject inveighs against the other\u2019s illegitimate excess, this subject derives an otherwise impossible enjoyment from it. To deny the existence of this enjoyment is to deprive the paranoid subject of its own enjoyment, which is why no quantity of news reports about the actual state of things can ever be convincing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The capitalist economy depends on subjects viewing themselves as lacking while identifying an excess in the other. This is what motivates the competition that drives the capitalist system. The other\u2019s excess is what capitalist subjects aim to appropriate through the process of exchange and through the accumulation of capital. The accumulation of capital is the attempt to appropriate the other\u2019s excess for oneself in order to eliminate one\u2019s lack, to have excess without any trace of lack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Capitalist subjects accumulate with the idea of amassing enough money or enough commodities to allow them to enjoy without restraint. The idea of enjoying without restraint instead of just enjoying is absolutely crucial to the psychic structure of capitalism.<\/strong> If we recognized that enjoyment involved lack and thus depended on some form of restraint, we could no longer be effective capitalist subjects. The image of a non-lacking enjoyment is the only type of enjoyment that capitalism permits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The result of this logic is that capitalist subjects find themselves constantly dissatisfied without any clear explanation for this dissatisfaction, since it stems from the capitalist system itself. Within the logic of capitalism, there is no solution to this problem. But left unsolved, it has the potential to produce a revolutionary spirit that looks beyond the horizon of capitalism to a different socioeconomic system. In order to avoid this eventuality, a paranoid fantasy <\/strong>comes to capitalism\u2019s rescue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But when this basic capitalist fantasy turns to paranoia about the other functioning as an illicit barrier to this excess for the subject, fascism erupts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kane doesn\u2019t see that satisfaction always involves one in what is lacking, that lack is not only unavoidable but salutary for the subject. Kane\u2019s refusal of the necessity of lack condemns him to a life of unending striving that never leads anywhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
By showing the spectator the sled as the object corresponding to the signifier \u201cRosebud,\u201d Welles allows the spectator to see what Thompson and the other characters cannot. Rosebud is not some mysterious object that Kane enjoys excessively, as we imagine it might be throughout the film. It is the loss that defines his subjectivity<\/strong>. Rather than being Kane\u2019s specific form of success, it is his singular failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is possible, instead, to recognize that the image of excess one sees in the other has nothing more to it than one\u2019s own lacking experience<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We escape paranoia only by recognizing that we are already excessive, which is the position that Citizen Kane enables us to accede to.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Back to Zupan\u010di\u010d’s review<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
While other systems have integrated loss\/lack into social life in different ways \u2013 basically by way of its symbolization, which allocated to it a special (often \u201choly\u201d) place within the social structure \u2013 capitalism does something very different. It incorporates the lack within the very notion of commodity: commodity is an object touched by the mysterious power of lack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A person who just sits at home, relishing in the idea of all the possibilities and opportunities capitalism has to offer and doing nothing to realize them is not the kind of person this system needs. <\/li>
What we are expected to do is to realize as many possibilities as possible (to act), but never to question the framework of these possibilities as possibilities.<\/li>
Which is precisely where \u201cactual\u201d freedom has to be situated: not simply in the actual realisation of possibilities, but in \u201cunscrewing\u201d the very framework which is based on the idea of freedom as possibility to be (yet) realized.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Act as if you were already satisfied!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The promise of a better future is the promise of a future (full) satisfaction which drives our desire. Yet what we don\u2019t see is that the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is precisely the real source of satisfaction.<\/span><\/strong> This real source of satisfaction is traumatic in its nature, and capitalism \u2013 with both its economic and ideological structuring \u2013 allows this traumatic source to remain unconscious. It provides a gigantic armature for the metonymy of our desire, and hence protects us against confronting the trauma of loss as constitutive (and not empirical).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dissatisfaction, and the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is the very source of satisfaction that accompanies capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By accepting the psychic or psychoanalytic perspective adopted by McGowan there nevertheless remains one question that concerns what we may call \u201cmaterial conditions of the reproduction of our psyche\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This question is intrinsic to the psychoanalytic theory itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lacan is famous for his statement that \u201cthe unconscious is out there\u201d<\/strong>, which implies that we can perhaps also change it only out there. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Commodity functions as it does because of our attitude to it, but such an attitude is already part of the commodity as its objective functioning, and this functioning continues pretty much independently of what we think and know about the object in the first instance. This problem is, of course, far from easy and McGowan is aware of this. Capitalism and Desire <\/em>confronts us with this problem in a powerful and engaging way. Most of all, it forcefully keeps reminding us that despite how we see the problem of capitalism, we are very much (an active) part of this problem, and also of its perpetuation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"