Why Žižek for Political Theory?Jodi Dean - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York

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Aπο το International Journal of Zizek Studies
ISSN 1751-8229
Volume One, Number One - Why Žižek? pp 18 - 32
Why Žižek for Political Theory?
Jodi Dean - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York

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The society of enjoyment
Žižek’s emphasis on enjoyment provides a powerful way to understand and critique the contemporary political-economic formation of communicative capitalism. It helps us grasp why global flows of capital and information, the digital era’s seemingly endless capacity for accessing, distributing, and producing ideas and opportunities, have not resulted in anything like a democratic “globalization from below” but instead result in new forms of inequality, exploitation, and enslavement. To make this point, I turn now to Žižek’saccount of the present in terms of the generalized perversity of the society of enjoyment.
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Žižek argues that the crucial feature of late capitalist societies is the way that
transgression has been normalized (Žižek 2003: 56). Rather than conforming to stereotypes of responsible men in the public sphere and caring women in the private, contemporary subjects are encouraged to challenge gender norms and boundaries. Men and women alikeare enjoined to succeed in the work force and in their family lives, to find fulfilling careersand spend quality time with their children. Networked communication technologies (highspeed internet, cell phones) enable parents to work harder even as they attend to familial
relationships. Similarly, emphases on the value of diverse cultural and ethnic traditions have replaced earlier injunctions to assimilate. These emphases find material support in consumer goods ranging from clothing and accessories targeted to specific demographic groups, to film, television, and print media, to, more recently, drugs and health plansdesigned for particular populations. What is now quite clear is a shift in the understanding of social membership away from the worker/citizen and toward the consumer.[4] Thus, what disciplinary society prohibited, contemporary consumerism encourages, indeed, demands.
Contemporary consumer culture relies on excess, on a general principle that more is better.[5] Excess drives the economy: super-sized meals at McDonalds and Burger King,gargantuan SUVs, fashion magazines urging shoppers to pick up “armloads” of the newestitems, extreme sports, extreme makeovers, and, at the same time, bigger closets, theproduction of all sorts of organizing, filing, and containing systems, and a booming business in mini-storage units all of which are supposed to help Americans deal with their excessstuff. These makeovers, these fashions and accessories, provide material support for injunctions to be oneself, to create and express one’s free individuality, to become theunique and valuable person one already is, to break the bounds of conformity. Excess also appears in other aspects of life under communicative capitalism: 24/7 news, 800 channel
television, blockbuster films, television shows advertised as the “most unbelievable moment of the season” and the “unforgettable series finale.” Self-help books tell us not just how to achieve sexual ecstasy, spiritual fulfillment, and a purpose-driven life—they tell us to achieve sexual ecstasy, spiritual fulfillment, and a purpose-driven life. Exaggeration is part of the very air we breathe. We are daily enjoined to enjoy. Ours is a society of the superego.
One might object at this point that Žižek’s emphases on contemporary injunctions to enjoy is misplaced. Does not the rise of religios fundamentalism, for example, suggest just the opposite, that is, a return to old sexual prohibitions? And, what about persistent warnings around health—don’t smoke, just say no to drugs, watch your weight, cut down on fat and carbohydrates—what are these if not new forms of discipline? Žižek’s response is,
first, that one should not confuse regulations with symbolic prohibitions, and, second, that so-called fundamentalism also relies on an injunction to enjoy (Žižek 2003: 56). 27
The regulations we encounter everyday, the guidance we come under as we
navigate late capitalism, are not symbolic norms. They are regulations that lack a claim to normative authority, but are instead installed by committees, by experts and pundits.
Everyone knows they are ultimately contestable, carrying no symbolic weight. Experts argue over all the time over proper diets, the necessary amount of exercise, the benefits of red wine. In Žižek’s terms, these regulations, then, are regulations of the very mode of transgression (Žižek 2003: 56). This makes sense when we recognize the way that these regulations fail to provide any real breathing space, any relief from the injunction to enjoy. Infact, they function much more perversely insofar as they never fail to remind us that we
really aren’t enjoying properly, we really aren’t doing anything right. Thus, they reinforce the malevolent superego, empowering it to torment us all the more.
Žižek argues, moreover, that contemporary fundamentalisms also enjoin jouissance.
Their seeming adherence to law is driven by a superego injunction to transgress
contemporary regulations. I think of this in terms of a culture of cruelty. Opponents of gay marriage, in the name of family values, free their congregations to hate; indeed, theyorganize themselves via a fascination with the sexual enjoyment of same sex couplings,thereby providing enjoyment. Opposition to gay marriage gives opponents permission, infact it encourages them, to find and weed out homosexual attraction. Might a boy be too artistic, too gentle? Might a girl be too aggressive? Christian fundamentalists opposing gay
marriage urge that ambiguous behavior be identified and corrected before it’s too late. If necessary, of course, they can provide retraining, that is, they can install young people in camps and programs that will “turn them straight.”
The preoccupation with excess also characterizes the multiculturalism and political correctness associated with Left and liberal politics. Žižek argues liberal tolerance is in fact a “zero tolerance” of the other in the excess of the other’s enjoyment (Žižek 2002: 174). If the other remains too tied to particular religious practices, say those that involve the subordination of women, the denial of medical treatment to children, the rejection of scientific findings regarding evolution and global warming, well, this other cannot be tolerated. This other is incompatible with liberal pluralism; differently put, liberalism wantsanother deprived of its otherness (Žižek 2003: 96, Žižek 2002: 11). White Leftist multiculturalists, even as they encourage the flourishing of multiple modes of becoming, find themselves in a similar bind (one in which class difference is inscribed): their support of differentiated cultural traditions means that they oppose the racism, sexism, and religiosity that bind together some poor whites. Just as the superego imperative operates in
conservatism to encourage hate, so can it be found in liberalism and Left multiculturalism as
well.
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Correlative to the pervasive intrusion of superego enjoyment is a decline in the
efficiency of symbolic norms, what Žižek refers to as the “collapse of the big Other.”[6] The decline of symbolic efficiency refers to a fundamental uncertainty in our relation to the world,
to the absence of a principle of charity that pertains across and through disagreement. We don’t know on whom or what to rely, whom or what to trust. Arguments and pervasive in onecontext carry little weight in another. In short, although the symbolic order is always and necessarily lacking, ruptured, today this lack is directly assumed. We no longer posit an overarching symbolic. We are so attuned to pretense and manipulation, “spin,” that we reject the very possibility of a truth beneath the lie or of a truth that cuts through the
assortment of lies and injunctions to enjoy constitutive of the present ideological formation. What we presume instead are a variety of partial fillers, partial substitutes. Thus, in place of symbolically anchored identities (structured in terms of conventions of gender, race,work, and national citizenship), we encounter imaginary injunctions to develop our creativepotential and cultivate our individuality, injunctions supported by capital’s provisions of the
ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning (what Žižek refers to as the direct super-egoization of the imaginary ideal). (Žižek 1999: 368) In place ofnorms grounded in claims to universal validity, we have rules and regulations that are clearly the result of compromises among competing parties or the contingent and fallibleconclusions of committees of experts. And, in place of the norms that relieve us of the duty to enjoy, that provide the prohibitions that sustain desire, we find ourselves at the mercy ofthe superego’s injunction. We are expected to have a good time, to have it all, to be happy,
fit and fulfilled.

This compulsion results in overwhelming guilt and anxiety. On one hand, we are guilty both when we fail to live up to the superego’s injunction and when we follow it. On another,we are anxious before the enjoyment of the other. Given our inabilities to enjoy, the enjoyment of the other seems all the more powerful, all the more threatening. The other alltoo easily threatens our imaginary balance. An ever present reminder that someone else has more, is more fulfilled, more successful, more attractive, more spiritual, the other makes our own lack all the more present to us. That the fragility of contemporary subjects means others are experienced as threats helps make sense of the ready availability of the imaginary identity of the victim—one of the few positions from which one can speak. When
others smoke, I am at risk. When others over-eat, make noise, flaunt their sexuality, then my American way of life, my values, are under attack. Indeed, in the terms provided by thewar on terror, to be “civilized” today is to be a victim—a victim of fear of terrorism, a victim that has to be surveilled, searched, guarded, and protected from unpredictable violence. In all these cases, the imaginary identity of the victim authorizes the subject to speak even as it shields it from responsibility toward another (Žižek 2003: 166-168). ......