The symptom and Poverty

My despair (or super-ego enjoyment, at least originally) at global poverty has been the driving force ethical force behind my study. Poverty, absolute poverty that is, is a symptom of capitalism. Its main benefit in terms of provoking anti-capitalist change is that it cannot be commodified, particularly if one takes into account environmentalist critique. Although it is in the best interests of capital on one level to have more wealthy consumers, on the other it is necessary that the workers, and the reserve army of unemployed, stay poor; too poor to live. This is not to say that some will not get richer; just that inequality is a natural and necessary part of this system. The commodification of poverty is also an environmental impossibility- the earth is very unlikely to be able to support an affluent global population.

Yes, this is true, but it is not impossible to commodify the image of poverty, and that is what is happening; charity bracelets, the hole RED and Make Poverty History campaigns and fair-trade; these are capitalism’s responses to poverty. Poverty, thanks to the celebrity appeal is beginning to infiltrate the realm of the super-ego. But, as I noted in The Symptom and the Super-ego, the enjoyment of super-ego is not a productive force in producing change.

Capitalism is by far the dominant global system. As such, it is a multi-faceted system operating in infinite modalities. Thus it is difficult to identify a single dominant universal of capital, or a single symptom, or even to categorize what is symptomatic in capitalism and what is simply arbitrary failure. Perhaps the most hegemonic universal image of capitalism is the market. The market- the invisible hand which directs the self-interested activities of individuals to the benefit of the collective- is presented as the ultimate natural, neutral and objective force. Even those who do not submit to the economics of the pure market do not debate the naturality of the market, the simply question the ethics of its effect; ‘Should we tame the market?’

The market as the capitalist universal is not to suggest that it is the abstract universal of capitalism. Likewise, to suggest a single symptom to capitalism is not to make it the only symptom. However, I believe that the most ethically demanding symptom of capitalism is poverty. Poverty is a symptom of the market; it is presented as the failure of the market, but its true function is as a constitutive condition of the markets’ success. But it is also a symptom of the general ethos of capitalism; death and hunger contrast with wealth and opulence.

However, it is wrong to classify poverty as a passive symptom. As a have suggested in The Symptom and the Superego, the symptom is not simply a passive effect, but rather a force of the repressed Real. Thus a symptom has the potential to form its own Universal. This takes our argumentation to in a new direction. Although Zizek suggests that there is nothing particular in the content of the symptom that is of political importance (it is the gap that the symptom opens up-concrete universality- that is of political importance), the symptom becomes more powerful and active once if it is unified. This is not to suggest that the symptom should take the place of the previous universal, that it would be any better, that its fantasy would be benign.

Rather, my argument is that the symptom is much more likely to dislocate the universal if it is active, instead of simply a passive effect. In this way the symptom is much more likely to break up ideology than forces within the ideology itself.