Phd, 2007; The Beginning

This post marks the beginning of my writings for the year. It may be 4 months late, but we all know that numbers lie. Having finished my Master's thesis almost 5 months ago, it has taken me a long time together in regards to what I would like to spend the next 3 years doing. A considerable degree of the delay was caused because I already had my ideas together, having just raced to a finishing line. It has been, fortunately, necessary to both deconstruct and reconstruct myself (at least as Chris the academic. Cook, Macca, Honey and Chris the son all remain intact. God forbid they ever meet). Having gone through this process (to some degree- the light at the end of the tunnel may infact be me getting used to the light which remains in the tunnel) I find myself roughly where I started. Perhaps with some parts reconfigured, full of ambition(?) for the journey ahead.

So what is it that I want to achieve in this thesis, I ask my loyal reader (who also happens to be the loyal writer) My concern lays (or is it lies, I continue to be unsure of the difference) with capitalism and Lacanian social theory/philosophy. Capitalism because of the massive injustices I perceive (although labelling something 'injust' contradicts any notion of an anti-normative approach). Lacan (read Zizek given that I still haven't actually read any Lacan) because of it's ability to illuminate the operation of ideology within the logic of liberal capitalism. In particular through notions of ideological fantasy, symptom and concrete universality. What I need to work out is the manner in which I wish to combine Lacanian theory for an analysis of capital.

Four questions (amongst others) strike me;
- How does the logic of capital operate?
- What opportunities for change does this logic present?
- What method best exploits these opportunities?
- Why do any of it at all? Why would we want to change capitalism?

The first question should provide an answer (or a more developed question) for the last, although the issue of normativity is the gap which (silently) drives this research.

My intitative response to these questions is two fold. Firstly the logic of capitalism is such that symptoms are both produced and integrated in a complex relation of excess and lack. This relation is operationalised in both objet a and the symptom and maintained by ideological fantasy.

The identification of this logic leads to a somewhat secondary idea that capitalist logic can only be interrupted by the performance of an 'ethical' critique that destablises its ideological support. Perhaps the main hole here is whether the ethical can, or should, move into the realm of the normative/moral. That is, What is the status of the ethical within psychoanalytic politics;
-amoral (not related to morality)
-anti-moral (against the idea of morality)
-unmoral (recognising the status of the moral, but not entering into the discourse).
-moral (the ethical as a form of morality).

I am particularly interested in how these ideas would be applied in terms of the economic. What would it mean to have an 'ethical' normative stance on political economy for the bodies involved in reproducing capital? Especially given the consequences of economic 'failure' for those bodies involved.

But why the ethical and not the normative? Or at least, why the distinction between the two? The key issue here is; Why produce an 'ethical' critique of capitalism instead of a alternative normative economic conception?

I have two (related) answers for this question. The first is that normative alternatives are too easily integrated into the logic of capitalist ideology. The second is that if they are not integrated, capitalist ideology produces the alternative as a threat to the system. As is developed by Lacan, and within other modes of social theory, the stability of a system relies on its ability to reproduce threats to the system. An example of a threat to the system is Islam. In contrast, Green ideology has largely been integrated into the system. Overall, alternatives cannot avoid the capitalist hegemony. In this sense, although outside alternatives exist, there is no alternative to capitalism. All that enters its ever expanding realm act to ultimately maintain it stability. So, to come up with one answer to my question, an alternative moral approach can only end up reproducing that which it seeks to reproduce (in this particular, universal circumstance).

So there is no outside? No. There are alternative nodes from which battles can be pitched, but ultimately these alternative act only as a constitutive outside for capital, a threat which maintains its stability. This has been the (failed) appeal of the anti-capitalist campaigners at the beginning of the millenium. Hence, we can see that the outside to capital is not truly outside, because it is only outside in so much as it is reproduced by capital.

With the movement from normative to ethical, however, that possibility of change occurs, but only from an outside which exists inside capitalist ideology. The possibility of an ethical critique lies in an internal incommensurability; the symptom. Whilst these threats produce anxiety, they are generally well integrated back into the system. The role of the ethical is to destablise the process of displacing, or perhaps replacing, anxiety through a breakdown in ideological logic.

I hope to develop these issues further in the next couple of days (weeks). In particular both the difference between normativity and ethics, and exisiting positions on the status of capitalism and political responses to that status e.g. Is there an outside to capitalism