Abstract
This article takes issue with economic discourses that present excessive greed as the central cause of economic crises. Through constructing a particular genealogy of greed, we show how governing it for restoring social order has been a dominant fantasy narrative that has motivated the (theoretically humanist) problematic of political economy. We argue that this focus on greed as the catalyst (when harnessed ‘appropriately’) or the enemy of social order keeps the public debate from deliberating on the particular modes of enjoyment (jouissance) which both shore up and destabilize the dynamics of production, appropriation, distribution and consumption under capitalism. After rethinking the Marxian concept of class antagonism through Lacanian categories, we produce an analysis of the latest crisis of US capitalism that steers away not only from the theoretical humanist problematic of political economy, but also from the residual reproductionism that continues to silently inform certain Lacanian analyses.
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Notes
For a discussion of Freud's metapsychological writings, see Alenka Zupancic (2003, p. 31); the phrase ‘enjoyment as a political factor’ is from the title of one of Slavoj Žižek's earlier books (Žižek, 1991). Yannis Stavrakakis's Lacan and the Political (1999) and Mladen Dolar's ‘Freud and the Political’ (2008) provide two very lucid expositions of a psychoanalytical approach to the political.
In an earlier effort to articulate Marxian political economy with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Alain Badiou warned the reader against this tendency: ‘It is not for nothing that Lacan wages war against every relapse of psychoanalysis into the energetic of drives, or what we would call economism’ (2009 [1982], p. 126).
This is not to suggest that efforts in this direction have not yet been taken. In the second part of the essay we engage with a number of these studies.
Although this tendency is a widespread one among Marxian and critical political economists, David Harvey's recent work constitutes a paradigmatic example – and admittedly one that we learned a lot from. In his widely read The New Imperialism (2005a), Harvey offers a very powerful and gripping narrative of the crisis of overaccumulation. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005b), he supplements his analysis with an account of the role of the ruling classes in enacting the recent transformation.
This may be a controversial claim because most New Keynesian economists identify themselves on the center left of the political spectrum. For instance, the academic work and policy practice of Joseph Stiglitz, who is considered a prominent critic of neoliberalism, are squarely within the New Keynesian school. Also, it is important to distinguish New Keynesians from the earlier Neo Keynesian school of the 1950s and 1960s which attempted to incorporate Keynesian insights into traditional Neoclassical system of general equilibrium.
The question of the precise distinction and relation between jouissance and desire is not an obvious one. Todd McGowan provides an insightful distinction: ‘Desire thrives on the experience of absence, on what it lacks, whereas enjoyment lacks nothing. The desiring subject pursues what the enjoying subject already experiences’ (2007, p. 32). This opposition between jouissance and desire which McGowan posits can perhaps be briefly tackled in the following sense: on the one hand, fantasizing about a complete (non-castrated) jouissance of the Other serves as an object cause for the subject's desire. This is the impossible and full jouissance that locks the subject to the futile aim of achieving fullness within the coordinates of fantasy. On the other hand, there is jouissance that refers to the singular enjoyment of singular bodies, an enjoyment that happens to the subject without it actively seeking it, ‘a by-product, so to speak, of the dissatisfaction of desire’ (Dolar, 2001, p. 132). Here, jouissance refers to a surplus enjoyment that exceeds the regulation of desire through fantasy, an ‘additional enjoyment surreptitiously sneaking into the very process of vainly seeking enjoyment’ and associated with the enjoyment of drives (Dolar, 2001, p. 132). For instance, what McGowan regards as the masochistic enjoyment one derives from prolonging the dissatisfaction of desire could be an illustration of this by-product enjoyment (2007, p. 9). In our understanding, it is the attachment to this by-product jouissance that gradually brings closure to the mobility of desire and causes the subject to suffer.
This is the post-Fordist subjectivity that Paul Virno succinctly expresses as the false and yet necessary semblance that corresponds to post-Fordist capitalism (2007). Although Virno reads the entrepreneur as a subjectivity that is fully formed on the basis of material relations of production, we read it as an injunction to which the subjects fail to measure up, and indeed, precisely because of this failure, produces jouissance, a strange enjoyment that is a form of suffering.
The fact that the financial meltdown on Wall Street occurred during the last stretch of the 2008 Presidential Campaign made it an interesting laboratory case. While it was easy for Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, to announce the end of ‘the era of greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street and in Washington’ (‘In Their Own Words: The Debate Dispute’, 25 September 2008), the position of the Republican candidate John McCain, with his lifetime track record as a deregulator, was much more difficult. Since as late as March 2008 he characterized himself as ‘fundamentally a deregulator’ (Calmes, 16 September 2008), his remarks regarding the adverse effects of ‘the excess, the greed and the corruption of Wall Street’ somehow sounded hollow (Cooper, 17 September 2008) – ultimately costing him the election. Nevertheless, the mapping described above manifested itself most starkly in the way government-sponsored mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac figured in the debates. Although the Republicans insisted throughout the crisis that the ultimate cause of the crisis was the misguided ‘mission’ of these institutes to expand affordable housing, the Democrats defended them rather rigorously despite some of their very obvious problems relating to heavy securitization (Nocera, 23 August 2008). Precisely for this reason, in response to Obama who faulted McCain for ‘the economic philosophy he subscribes to’, McCain's immediate retort was to highlight the various associations of the Democratic campaign with the high-ranking officers of these institutions (Calmes, J. 16 September 2008). In terms of the politically more sensitive issue of the bailouts for homebuyers facing foreclosure, the typical Republican argument was that this would be unjust for those responsible homebuyers who continue to make their mortgage payments even as they also go through economic hardship (Brooks, 18 March 2008).
In one of his high-profile speeches early on in his Presidency, Obama criticized ‘an economy where greed and short-term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness, and diligence, and an honest day's work’ (‘Obama Notre Dame Speech: Full Text’, 17 May 2009).
In his 1969 Impromptu at Vincennes, Lacan points out how the Master can appropriate the excessive jouissance that comes with the transgressions of the student militants: ‘The regime puts you on display; it says “Watch them fuck” …’ (Lacan, 1990 [1974], p. 128). Let us quickly note that our aim is not to argue that May 1968 was entirely a transgressive effort. Nonetheless, we would like to argue that Neoliberalism became hegemonic precisely to the extent that it fed off of the transgressive moments of the post-1968 social movements.
Foucault (2008 [1978–79], pp. 226–233) offers a very insightful discussion of the centrality of the theory of human capital for the neoliberal creed.
For another Lacanian analysis that steps outside the field of consumption and redirects the focus on how fantasy formations operate in workplaces, see Glynos (2008).
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the APCS Annual Conference, Ethics in an Age of Diminishing Distance: The Clash of Difference (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 24-26 October 2008). The authors would like to thank Jack Amariglio, Kenan Erçel, Jason Glynos, Yannis Stavrakakis and two anonymous referees for their labor of reading and thoughtful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Özselçuk, C., Madra, Y. Enjoyment as an economic factor: Reading Marx with Lacan. Subjectivity 3, 323–347 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.13