{"id":5929,"date":"2010-10-24T14:16:16","date_gmt":"2010-10-24T18:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5929"},"modified":"2010-10-24T14:42:39","modified_gmt":"2010-10-24T18:42:39","slug":"utopianism-or-dystopianism-no-thanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/10\/24\/utopianism-or-dystopianism-no-thanks\/","title":{"rendered":"Utopianism or dystopianism? No, thanks!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ceren \u00d6zsel\u04abuk and Yahya M. Madra. \u201cEconomy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism<\/a>.\u201d 78-107<\/p>\n

If we were to distinguish surplus labor from surplus value <\/strong>and reconstruct the proper homology as one between surplus labor and surplus jouissance<\/strong>, then an entirely different picture emerges.<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/strong>, 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.<\/strong> 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<\/strong>, and not an inexorable accumulation drive, is indeed the absent \u201ccause\u201d that sets the circuit of capital in motion<\/strong>. 91<\/p>\n

“There is no class relation”<\/p>\n

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\u2019s radical insight pertaining to the impossibility of the class relation<\/strong> (92).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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<\/p>\n

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. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/strong> 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,
\ninsofar as all social links are smeared with surplus jouissance<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

All social links, therefore, including class formations, are structured around a constitutive lack<\/strong> that simultaneously invites and frustrates the communities.<\/p>\n

We consider this foundational, constitutive lack<\/strong> as the absent cause, the foundational antagonism, the constitutive impossibility, around which sociality is constructed. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As \u017di\u017eek once put it, the antagonism between the \u201cbosses\u201d and \u201cworkers\u201d is \u201calready a \u2018reactive\u2019 or \u2018defence\u2019 formation, an attempt to \u2018cope with\u2019 (to come to terms with, to pacify\u2026) the trauma of class antagonism\u201d 92<\/p>\n

The homology, therefore, is not so much between the surplus labor<\/strong> and surplus jouissance<\/strong> as it is between the way a particular organization of surplus labor<\/strong> is a response formation to a foundational impossibility<\/strong> and the way the desire of the subject is sustained by a fantasy formation<\/strong> that wraps itself around the constitutive lack embodied in the objet petit a<\/strong>. 93<\/p>\n

Diverging from \u017di\u017eek, we do not restrict the conceptual content of surplus labor
\nto 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\u2019s 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
\nMarx 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.<\/p>\n

In this precise sense, we consider surplus labor to be the \u201cconcrete universal<\/strong>\u201d of the Marxian tradition. While surplus labor as a concept emerges out of Marx\u2019s analysis of its various concrete manifestations, it always fails to be given a final shape by any one of these forms. 93
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ceren \u00d6zsel\u04abuk and Yahya M. Madra. \u201cEconomy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.\u201d 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 … Continue reading “Utopianism or dystopianism? No, thanks!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,24,72,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-objet-a","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5929"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5931,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5929\/revisions\/5931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}