Poverty

What am I looking to achieve in this chapter?

Much like the environmentalism chapter, I seek to run the theoretical perspectives of Laclau and Zizek through an example area of discourse; poverty, or more accurately, global poverty.

The chapter will again review various discourses showing the manner in they are constituted, signify their meanings and deal with their symptoms. In this chapter, probably more than the previous one, I come at it with a stronger starting theoretical position. This position enters more into Marxist discourse (something that I have ignored so far).

Simplified, this theory attempts to show how victims of absolute poverty are the constitutive excess of capital, the hidden truth (symptom) of capital. In order for the capitalist system to sustain itself, costs must remain as low as possible. One of the major costs is labour. In order to keep labour costs as low as possible, the working class have been globalised, such that it is predominately based in the Third World. Because of the excess of supply in these countries, workers accept very low wage packets. This creates a large degree of poverty. However, what creates the most absolute poverty, the constitutive excess I have referred to, is the ‘reserve army of labour’ who are not employed. The presence of these workers willing to take the positions of those in employment keeps the wages down, and the society poor, but more than this it means that this constitutive excess are left in the most destitute of positions.

Yet capitalism, as the system of wealth generation relies on them for its maintenance. Thus we see that absolute poverty is the symptom of capitalism in the truest sense; it is the hidden truth. Without these workers dying of poverty, the whole system would collapse. Yet this is just the opposite of the capitalist universal of ‘wealth for all’ and the invisible hand. It illustrates quite beautifully the theoretical operation I am dealing with.

I believe that this economic theory is openly Marxist-Leninist. I do not, however, have a strong grasp of this theory, so I will have to investigate it further, both as a theory and as a discourse ( and in this I will also have to trace its developments; classical, scientific, neo, post).

Therefore I believe that absolute poverty is the symptom of capitalism. As such, discourses revolve around this fundamental lack. In my last entry I noted the basic categories of discourses in their relation to the symptom;

- Discourses which disavowal the symptom

- Discourses which particularise the symptom

- Excluded discourses

- Discourses revealing the symptom

- Discourses of the symptom

As I have noted previously, I believe that it is discourses of the symptom, where the symptom actively seeks a position of concrete universality, where the greatest possibility of change lies. The position of the active symptom begins to suggest a certain differentiation around the real. The real here is not the hard kernel that can never be symbolised, but rather something (following Fink(1995:28) that cannot be symbolised from a certain point of view. Thus the discourse of the symptom- in the case of poverty victims- becomes real from the perspective of the capitalist universal. Thus its intrusion provokes much anxiety. Identification with this anxiety- concrete universality- produces a traversal of the fantasy and change.

But complete change? Of this I am not sure. Ultimately a radical act has to occur. Otherwise it is far too easy, like in the environmental case, for small alterations to be made that domesticate the symptom.

However, it must be asked whether such a discourse possible ‘in its own terms’, and how this would take form. Additionally, what is its relationship to discourses which identify the symptom? Can these discourses ‘open a space’ for a discourse of the symptom? Or, alternatively, do they simply prepare the symptom to be domesticated or simply get dismissed as irrational?

There are also issues of the manner in which the symptom becomes active. It is not simply of imposing itself upon the system- this can have all manner of reactions that I will explore. I believe that it is more important for them to identify themselves as the symptom. Not outside the universal and excluded from it as a competing discourse, such as Islam. Rather the symptom is internal; to break up the discourse it is not alternative meanings from the outside that are required, but rather the hidden truth emerging internally as a truth- concrete universality; we are the symptom.

I also believe that I should investigate, perhaps in a chapter further to environmentalism and poverty, the contradiction between environmentalism and poverty around growth. Generally poverty discourse calls for more growth, environmentalism the opposite. This is where we get into the territory of wealth as a symptom rather than poverty. Perhaps what is important here is to resist the false choice of more capitalism growth or poverty and redefine the problem outside of these terms.

Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.