Update, 24th June

Having been away for a number of weeks, I have had time to reconsider my thesis and where it is headed. I don’t think that much has changed, although I may be more aware of the limitations of the project and where it fits into a wider range of literature.

My core question, slightly tweaked, is as follows; “How can a post-Lacanian conception of Marxism be utilised to produce a critique of capitalism and move beyond this form of political economy?”

I still intend to investigate this question through two fundamental enquires, which will form the major sections of the thesis;

1. A post-Lacanian theory of capitalism
2. Political economy beyond capitalism

At the conference I attended I was delighted to discover a research community working specifically on the latter question, with a particular interest in psychoanalysis and Marxism. This group, operating broadly as the ‘Association for Economic and Social Analysis’ (AESA) in association with the ‘Rethinking Marxism’ journal, are attempting to rehabilitate both Marxism and communism through psychoanalysis, taking into account the latter’s emphasis on the real, fantasy and enjoyment.

The core line of enquiry for this group of scholars has been rethinking class as a process rather than a transcendental entity. Here class becomes a fundamental impossibility - the impossibility of a fair and equal distribution and appropriation of surplus. This impossibility does not refer purely to capitalism and surplus-value, but rather to the broader category of political economy.

The fundamental condition of possibility for any modality of economy is the production of surplus labour (labour is always surplus; necessary labour cannot be distinguished as production is always a collective process) and the impossibility of a fair distribution and appropriation of this surplus. In this sense, there is no class relationship – a lack which imbues all formations of political economy. This lack produces an excessive response, in the sense that there will always be class relationships which respond to the inherent impossibility of class. Thus, class is not only an impossibility, but the range of ideological responses to this impossibility. These responses seek to pacify the affect of the real in much the same manner as I examined in my Master’s thesis.

Essentially, I am seeking to produce a post-Lacanian theory of the Marxist critique of capitalism and political economy, starting from the point that prevents these objects from being; class. I will then, by extending on the ideological analysis I outlined in my Master’s thesis, seek to understand the manner in which this impossibility plays itself out to form what we know as capitalism. Here I will label class as the concrete universal and seek to examine the various responses to the concrete universal, predominately enjoyment through commodity fetishism/consumerism but also ‘limiting apparatus’ such as democracy (the primary mode of civilisation for capitalist political economy), trade unions and charities.

I believe that my eventual position will be that some form of base-super structure relationship occurs (concurrent with psychoanalytic theory), with liberal-democratic-consumerism being the main form of ideological investment, which disavows the fundamental circuit of capitalism and places a distance between the real of class struggle and the capitalist subject.

The question of anti-capitalist politics than becomes one of how to produce a form of political economy in relation to the impossibility of class. Latest work in the ‘rethinking Marxism’ community relates to a non-fantasmatic conception of economic community where no subject enjoys exclusive rights to surplus. According to this group, in particular Yahya Madra and Ceren Oszelcuk, such a conception of political economy corresponds to the Lacanian notion of the feminine non-All.

Indeed, there appears to be a burgeoning range of literature on ‘community economics’ that takes a similar position to Madra and Oszelcuk. The field of community economics does not rely exclusively on psychoanalysis or Marxism, but is often informed by these disciplines, as well as various elements of postmodern theory.

I think that at this stage much of this work is fairly clunky, but it is reassuring to know that such a field exists. In time I will have to get to know this literature and position myself within the debates. At this stage, however, I need to focus on developing my theory of capitalism.

The most difficult question for me, I believe, is the status of capitalism. That is, what is the status of class in relation to the social? Is this the fundamental impossibility to which all relations return (or, more subtly, the fundamental exclusion which founds the horizon for the political)? Certainly one can cite any number of societal impossibilities, starting with society itself as an impossible object. It is equally valid to state the freedom is impossible, or justice, or democracy. In fact, all objects are impossible objects. This is the fundamental ontological conviction of political psychoanalysis.

Why then should class be privileged? Additionally, is there any underlying logic to capitalism, such that it is not contingent? I believe these two questions are linked, and provide the most pressing issues for me to consider.

For now though, I believe that I must begin by laying out my conception of class, moving through the genealogy of the concept, through contemporary debates before outlining and justifying my theoretical position

Zizek’s Marxism; From Surplus- Value to Surplus-Jouissance

Script of paper presented at Surplus/Excess conference, University of California, Riverside, April 4-5, 2008.

The Lacanian world of desire, fantasy, jouissance and the Real can appear quite divorced from the concerns of traditional political philosophy. Recently, however, psychoanalytic thought has become a major strand within political theory, especially in continental and radical Leftist circles. This influence stems largely from Lacanian, as opposed to Freudian, psychoanalysis.

Lacan re-developed Freud’s work by focusing on language as the structuring element of human subjectivity and social life. No longer bound to the clinic, psychoanalysis has been increasingly utilised by political theorists. A central discourse within the development of political psychoanalysis has been a return to the Marxist tradition.

The rearticulation of Marxism with psychoanalysis has been largely driven by the work of Lacanian political philosopher, Slavoj Zizek . Zizek’s political work, particularly his usage of Marxism, has proven highly controversial. This controversy stems from the apparent incommensurability between traditional Marxist categories and Zizek’s emphasis on the relationship between lack and excess through what Lacan labelled ‘the Real’ and its positivised correlate, Jouissance.

Zizek’s rejection of traditional Marxism in the name of psychoanalysis has, however, opened up a new space for rethinking Marxism and renewing a Marxist critique of capitalist political economy. In this mornings presentation, I will investigate one element of Zizek’s redeployment of the Marxist tradition; the homology he cites been Lacanian surplus-jouissance and Marxist surplus-value. Through this homology, Zizek suggests that the dynamics of lack and excess in human subjectivity are mirrored by the logic of capitalism.

Through a brief analysis of two key global economic problems, poverty and environmental degradation, I will argue that this approach to surplus opens up exciting new ground for a critique of capitalism. Conversely, the very conditions that produce the uniqueness of this critique appear to prevent Zizek’s work from developing a productive notion of radical anti-capitalist politics that is able to offer any hope for the future.

Let us start by considering the dialectic of lack and excess that is present in both surplus-jouissance and surplus-value, by first reflecting on the Lacanian category of surplus-jouissance.

Surplus Jouissance

According to Lacan, the human condition is constituted by a complex dialectic between lack and excess. Lack is generated because language creates a barrier between the subject and the world of things; any attempt at symbolisation creates a gap between the language used in that symbolisation and the object to which it refers. Lacan called this gap the Real. The Real, however, operates not only lack, but also as excess because lack is itself repressed, resulting in an unconscious belief in a time before lack. As a consequence of that repression, the subject is caught in a condition of seeking to regain the absent, but impossible fullness, which existed for them before entering language. Lacan called this state Jouissance.

Although in English jouissance is often translated as enjoyment, it is not simply enjoyment or pleasure, but rather it goes beyond this into a kind of troubling, excessive pleasure that includes elements of transgression, sexuality and suffering.

In order to deconstruct the often difficult concept of jouissance, analytically, we can distinguish two orders , although no such distinction exists for the subject of language. The first is the imagined state of jouissance ‘before the letter’, the mystical state of unity supposed to have been experienced by the body. The second occurs as a response to the impossibility of the former and the subsequent disavowel of this impossibility via fantasy.

Thus, the notion of pure jouissance is a fantasmatic creation, generated only by the entry into language. However, the subject stills holds onto the possibility of such a return, although any attempt necessarily fails. Conversely, this very failure creates the only true jouissance for the subject, surplus-jouissance

Thus, Žižek argues that there is no jouissance for the subject before surplus-jouissance. As such, social analysis should always focus on this order, rather than considering it to be secondary effect. Nonetheless, neither should the fantasmatic form of jouissance be dismissed; the operation of jouissance can only be understood as a relationship between modalities – an excessive compensation for an originary lack, one which is simultaneously both imaginary and very Real.

Surplus-jouissance is embodied through objet a. Objet a can be considered to be the residue of symbolisation, the unknowable ‘X’ that forever eludes the symbolic and produces a multitude of symbolic responses through which the subject seeks to give it form. In this sense objet a is the remainder produced with the breakdown of the unity of jouissance, the positive ‘waste’ of symbolisation.

Objet a connects the lack of the Real and the excess of jouissance because it operates as both the object-cause and the object of desire. Objet a is the cause of desire because it is experienced as the lack or gap within the symbolic realm which drives the process of desire, but also acts as the object of desire because particular objects come to embody this gap, such that they become the object of the subject’s desire.

That is, an object comes to represent for the subject that which is supposed to be missing from their existance and hence suggests the possibility of a return to original unity. The impossibility of this return has two affects. It means that desire can never be satisfied; on obtaining the object, the subject discovers that their desire has not been fufilled and moves onto another object; this is the process of hysterical consumption in the capitalist subject.

Secondly, the subject seeks out antagonisms upon which to externalise the impossibility of total jouissance. This explains the transgressive nature of jouissance; the subject acts against themself in order to explain away the impossibility of a return to unity.

Žižek describes Coca-cola as the perfect embodiment of objet a and as such the ultimate capitalist merchandise. In coke, we have a drink removed of all the objectively necessary properties of a satisfying drink; it provides no nutritional benefit, it does not quench thirst, nor provide the ‘satisfied calm’ of an alcoholic beverage. Instead, all that is left is the mysterious ‘X’, the surplus over enjoyment that is characteristic of the commodity. Coca-Cola seem to have a good understanding of jouissance, as seen in previous slogans;

‘Coke is IT’
And the imperative ‘Coca-Cola: Enjoy’

Žižek has described diet-coke as the final step in this process – the commodification of nothing itself – since the caffeine that gives coke its distinctive taste has been removed. But he did not forsee the recent launch of Coke ‘Zero’, literally nothing in a can. Coke’s marketers further revealed their understanding of Lacanian theory with the accompanying marketing campaign . This campaign portrays Coke Zero as an element of perfection as its malignant elements have been removed; their advertising slogan asks “Why can't all the good things in life come without downsides”. This could well be the misleading motto of objet a.

We can see then how the dynamic of lack and excess in subjectivity aids our understanding of capitalism. The subject’s desire can never be satisfied; instead they go on wanting more and more in a never ending process of consumption unconsciously believed to be the path to wholeness. However, although we can see that the manipulation of surplus-jouissance by capitalist advertising is certainly a source of surplus and profit, Zizek cites a stronger, structural, link between surplus­-jouissance and the operation of capitalism, in the Marxist notion of surplus-value, to which we now turn.


Surplus- Value

Žižek takes the fundamental logic of surplus-value to mirror that of surplus jouissance; a homologous process by which the existence of lack produces a constitutive and compensatory surplus. Zizek argues that this logic extends to the operation of capitalism as a totality.

He contends that surplus value occurs under capitalism because the natural state of labour as a commodity is the production of surplus above the necessary cost of labour. The appropriation of this surplus by the owner is expanded through the circulation of commodities which turns money into capital which subsquently ‘realises’ surplus-value, turning it into profit.

Importantly, however, corresponding to the logic of surplus­- jouissance, in capitalism the production of surplus is only possible because of the existance of lack. Lack is revealled by the presence of symptoms which simultaneously contradict and allow the ‘official’ operation of capitalism.

In his first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek famously argued that Marx ‘invented’ the Lacanian symptom by detecting a constitutive exception within capitalism, a necessary excess or imbalance which, rather than signalling the imperfect realisation of these principles, reveals the truth of their constitution.

As an illustration, the notion of freedom operates as a universal principle at the core of liberal-democratic-capitalist ideology. However, within that ideology one specific freedom, the freedom to sell one’s labour on the market, subverts the notion of freedom itself, yet is necessary for the continued existance of freedom; without the wage labour system, contemporary capitalist freedoms would be impossible.

The same symptomatic structure exists in relation to the production of surplus value. Once labour becomes a commodity – that is, for sale on the market, it is negated through its own fair exchange. The worker is exploited not because they are underpaid (they are infact, fully compensated for their labour power), but because of the very position in which the worker exists; having to sell their labour as a commodity.

The symptomatic element of the form of surplus-value, then, is the existence of exploitation, even when, officially there is none; when the worker is fully paid. This constitutive exception within surplus-value produces a fundamental fissure, a Real affect that Zizek labels class. Class acts as the Real element which resists symbolisation within capitalism, the lack which drives and allows for the production of surplus-value.

For Zizek, in stark contrast to Marx, class is not a positively existing element; rather it is a hitch within capitalism that cannot be integrated into the system, yet allows for its excessive operation.

Thus, as well as a lack within the system, class is also an excess in the sense that it is the surplus of workers – Marx’s reserve army of labour – which produces the vulnerability that allows the labour market to operate, and as such functions as the contradiction which drives surplus-value and capitalism.

Indeed, the whole capitalist edifice is driven to avoid its own inner contradictions. As with the surplus-jouissance of that defines subjectivity, capitalism cannot be stable; rather it has to operate in a state of constant revolution of its own conditions in order to function. Capitalism is in essence a system in crisis, but a constitutive crisis which produces the upwards spiral of productivity which is the basis of the capitalist production of surplus

Thus, the notion of class as surplus adds another dimension to Zizek’s identification of surplus-jouissance and surplus-value as the structuring logic of capitalism. Indeed, class could be consider to be the founding moment of both, particularly if we consider commodity fetishism to be the fundamental structure of the surplus­-jouissance in the capitalist subject.

However, unlike either surplus-value or surplus- jouissance, where the surplus is positivised and counted for within the existing order, these reserve workers are offically surplus to capitalist requirements. These workers, or rather non-workers, are surplus as waste; they are not strictly required for the operation of capitalism, although, paradoxically it is this waste that allows capitalist surplus to be produced.

I witnessed an example of this waste on the beaches of Santa Monica. Here homeless people lay, completely covered by all manner of types of decaying material. The affect was that the human did not appear at all; all that was left was the appearance of rubbish, a surplus that capitalism considers pure waste.

Noticeably, the otherwise beautiful beach was covered by an excess of rubbish bins but very little rubbish. I could not help thinking the very sad thought that it would simply be easier for the people of Santa Monica if the homeless made these bins their new residence. This is the status of the reserve surplus of global workers; a disavowed waste, radically excluded from capitalist ideology.

Thus we can see how surplus operates in relationship to poverty within capitalism. Poverty is necessary; without the reserve army of surplus labour that is poverty, the capitalist wage system would be unable to function. For this reason, however, poverty as an excess is also necessarily excluded; the same capitalist dynamic of lack and excess which creates poverty allows the subject to repress it’s existance. This repression can be seen in our contemporary capitalist responses to poverty. These take the form of either band-aid super-ego solutions, such as charity and fair trade or a ‘purification’ of the capitalism process through institutions like the World Bank.

Alternatively, poverty-as-surplus is simply ignored, disavowed, much like the waste on Santa Monica beach.

What these responses have in common is that they are unable to acknowledge the fundamental status of poverty as a required reserve-surplus. A constitutive exception, which Zizek labels the concrete universal that allows for the continued functioning of capitalism.

Similarily we can use Zizek’s usage of surplus-value and surplus-jouissance to understand the failure of the environment movement, and lets be sure, as long as this movement is a capitalist movement, it will be a failure. We have previously considered the manner in which hysterical capitalist subjectivity is structured to maintain the constant desire for commodities; the green movement has been unable to break through this excessive demand for jouissance. Instead, environmentalism is articulated strictly within capitalist ideology, such that green initatives only occur if they conform to the logic of capitalism; hence the value of the green dollar and the power of the empty signifier ‘sustainable development’. This response fails to acknowledge capitalism’s fundamental requirement to revolutionise itself (just as it has in the face of the Green threat) to produce further surplus. Here we can easily understand Zizek and Fredric Jameson’s glib assertion that it is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of capitalism.

The more radical green response is the demand for lower levels of consumption. Although this response correctly, if naively, challenges the fundamental modality of capitalist subjectivity, it again shows a total lack of awareness of the dynamics of capitalism.

Such an argument allows us to identify what Zizek labels a parallax gap between the green movement and developmentalism. The two discourses cannot be held together; an increase in economic development would only produce more environmental degradation. By contrast, a truly green economy would susbstantially increase global poverty.

Indeed, latest research by the New Zealand government suggests that if the world’s population were to consume at the same level as New Zealanders, a mid-range OECD country apparently in desperate need for economic growth, we would need another five planets to support the levels of research consumption.

If the problem then is capitalism, what are the alternatives? The traditional Leftist response is located Marx’s notion of communism. Marxist commnism has, however, been thoroughly rejected by Zizek and other psychoanalytic critics, firstly because of the actualities of totalitarian repression, but also because of Marx’s reliance on the form of surplus-value.

For Zizek, Marx’s political response to capitalism and surplus-value was ultimately fantasmatic. What Marx missed was the logic of jouissance – that there is no jouissance without the obstacle that propels it. Marx believed that by removing the obstacle – wage labour and private appropriation – the productivity generated by surplus-value would remain and could be utilised for communal good. What Marx missed, however, is that it is this the inner contradiction of capitalism – between class and surplus-value – that drives capitalist productivity. That is, without class there is no surplus-value. Ultimately, perhaps Coca-Cola and Marxism have more in common that one might think, both attempting utopia by endeavoring to retain the object without the obstacle that propels the cause.

So, what does Zizek offer in the way of a program for future radical politics? Essentially and openly, Zizek offers nothing in terms of this form of political intervention. Instead he argues that we live in pessimistic times for radical politics. Asked about the revelance of his work for anti-capitalist struggle, a cause to which Zizek’s work has been increased orientated, Zizek stated in his characterisic manner;

‘I have a hat, but I have no rabbit’

This is not to suggest that Zizek work is not without political value. For Zizek, the proper political response is to reveal the surplus exclusion which structures ideology, a technique he labels ‘practicing the concrete universal.

An example of this approach occurred recently in the States with the ‘We are America’ campaign staged by illegal immigrants. In this campaign, the immigrants attempted to articulate themselves as the concrete universal, the necessary glue of American society. However, whilst this may be a good example of a protest based political intervention, it offers little basis for future movements.

I do not believe, however, that this is any reason to outrightly reject Zizek’s work and resort to the ‘rubber chickens’ that others are claiming as their rabbits. At a time when global capitalism has generated a paradoxical position where a small portion of humanity is living well beyond the capacity of the planet to support their activity, yet the majority of humanity is struggling to support their own material needs, the need to generate a new approach to political economy and the question of shared social life is as pressing as ever. These material concerns, remind us of the need to produce theory which has grounded political application, without losing sight of its theoretical convinctions. Thus, to quote Zizek;

"The theoretical task, with immense practical-political consequences, is: how are we to think the surplus that pertains to human productivity 'as such' outside its appropriation/distortion by the capitalist logic of surplus value as the primary mode of social reproduction?

Recent work within the discipline of psychoanalytic politics has made steps to reconsider the relationship between surplus and exception, most notably in the notions of the ethics of drive, love, comedy and the associated ‘traversing of the fantasy’. Yet, so far no stable position has been developed. Neither has it been considered exactly how this new articulation would apply to the production of shared social life, particularly in regards to the economy. It is this task, I believe, which forms the shared future of psycho-Marxist theory.

Zizek's Marxism; From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Jouissance

The Lacanian world of desire, fantasy, jouissance and the Real can appear quite divorced from the concerns of traditional political philosophy. Recently, however, psychoanalytic thought has become a major strand within political theory, especially in continental and radical Leftist circles. This influence stems largely from Lacanian, as opposed to Freudian, psychoanalysis.

Lacan re-developed Freud’s work by focusing on language as the structuring element of human subjectivity and social life. No longer bound to the clinic, psychoanalysis has been increasingly utilised by political theorists. A central discourse within the development of political psychoanalysis has been a return to the Marxist tradition.

The rearticulation of Marxism with psychoanalysis has been largely driven by the work of Lacanian political philosopher, Slavoj Zizek . Zizek’s political work, particularly his usage of Marxism, has proven highly controversial. This controversy stems from the apparent incommensurability between traditional Marxist categories and Zizek’s emphasis on the relationship between lack and excess through what Lacan labelled ‘the Real’ and its positivised correlate, Jouissance.

Zizek’s rejection of traditional Marxism in the name of psychoanalysis has, however, opened up a new space for rethinking Marxism and renewing a Marxist critique of capitalist political economy. In this mornings presentation, I will investigate one element of Zizek’s redeployment of the Marxist tradition; the homology he cites been Lacanian surplus-jouissance and Marxist surplus-value. Through this homology, Zizek suggests that the dynamics of lack and excess in human subjectivity are mirrored by the logic of capitalism.

Through a brief analysis of two key global economic problems, poverty and environmental degradation, I will argue that this approach to surplus opens up exciting new ground for a critique of capitalism. Conversely, the very conditions that produce the uniqueness of this critique appear to prevent Zizek’s work from developing a productive notion of radical anti-capitalist politics that is able to offer any hope for the future.

Let us start by considering the dialectic of lack and excess that is present in both surplus-jouissance and surplus-value, by first reflecting on the Lacanian category of surplus-jouissance.

Surplus Jouissance

According to Lacan, the human condition is constituted by a complex dialectic between lack and excess. Lack is generated because language creates a barrier between the subject and the world of things; any attempt at symbolisation creates a gap between the language used in that symbolisation and the object to which it refers. Lacan called this gap the Real. The Real, however, operates not only lack, but also as excess because lack is itself repressed, resulting in an unconscious belief in a time before lack. As a consequence of that repression, the subject is caught in a condition of seeking to regain the absent, but impossible fullness, which existed for them before entering language. Lacan called this state Jouissance.

Although in English jouissance is often translated as enjoyment, it is not simply enjoyment or pleasure, but rather it goes beyond this into a kind of troubling, excessive pleasure that includes elements of transgression, sexuality and suffering.

In order to deconstruct the often difficult concept of jouissance, analytically, we can distinguish two orders , although no such distinction exists for the subject of language. The first is the imagined state of jouissance ‘before the letter’, the mystical state of unity supposed to have been experienced by the body. The second occurs as a response to the impossibility of the former and the subsequent disavowel of this impossibility via fantasy.

Thus, the notion of pure jouissance is a fantasmatic creation, generated only by the entry into language. However, the subject stills holds onto the possibility of such a return, although any attempt necessarily fails. Conversely, this very failure creates the only true jouissance for the subject, surplus-jouissance

Thus, Žižek argues that there is no jouissance for the subject before surplus-jouissance. As such, social analysis should always focus on this order, rather than considering it to be secondary effect. Nonetheless, neither should the fantasmatic form of jouissance be dismissed; the operation of jouissance can only be understood as a relationship between modalities – an excessive compensation for an originary lack, one which is simultaneously both imaginary and very Real.

Surplus-jouissance is embodied through objet a. Objet a can be considered to be the residue of symbolisation, the unknowable ‘X’ that forever eludes the symbolic and produces a multitude of symbolic responses through which the subject seeks to give it form. In this sense objet a is the remainder produced with the breakdown of the unity of jouissance, the positive ‘waste’ of symbolisation.

Objet a connects the lack of the Real and the excess of jouissance because it operates as both the object-cause and the object of desire. Objet a is the cause of desire because it is experienced as the lack or gap within the symbolic realm which drives the process of desire, but also acts as the object of desire because particular objects come to embody this gap, such that they become the object of the subject’s desire.

That is, an object comes to represent for the subject that which is supposed to be missing from their existance and hence suggests the possibility of a return to original unity. The impossibility of this return has two affects. It means that desire can never be satisfied; on obtaining the object, the subject discovers that their desire has not been fufilled and moves onto another object; this is the process of hysterical consumption in the capitalist subject.

Secondly, the subject seeks out antagonisms upon which to externalise the impossibility of total jouissance. This explains the transgressive nature of jouissance; the subject acts against themself in order to explain away the impossibility of a return to unity.

Žižek describes Coca-cola as the perfect embodiment of objet a and as such the ultimate capitalist merchandise. In coke, we have a drink removed of all the objectively necessary properties of a satisfying drink; it provides no nutritional benefit, it does not quench thirst, nor provide the ‘satisfied calm’ of an alcoholic beverage. Instead, all that is left is the mysterious ‘X’, the surplus over enjoyment that is characteristic of the commodity. Coca-Cola seem to have a good understanding of jouissance, as seen in previous slogans;

‘Coke is IT’
And the imperative ‘Coca-Cola: Enjoy’

Žižek has described diet-coke as the final step in this process – the commodification of nothing itself – since the caffeine that gives coke its distinctive taste has been removed. But he did not forsee the recent launch of Coke ‘Zero’, literally nothing in a can. Coke’s marketers further revealed their understanding of Lacanian theory with the accompanying marketing campaign . This campaign portrays Coke Zero as an element of perfection as its malignant elements have been removed; their advertising slogan asks “Why can't all the good things in life come without downsides”. This could well be the misleading motto of objet a.

We can see then how the dynamic of lack and excess in subjectivity aids our understanding of capitalism. The subject’s desire can never be satisfied; instead they go on wanting more and more in a never ending process of consumption unconsciously believed to be the path to wholeness. However, although we can see that the manipulation of surplus-jouissance by capitalist advertising is certainly a source of surplus and profit, Zizek cites a stronger, structural, link between surplus­-jouissance and the operation of capitalism, in the Marxist notion of surplus-value, to which we now turn.


Surplus- Value

Žižek takes the fundamental logic of surplus-value to mirror that of surplus jouissance; a homologous process by which the existence of lack produces a constitutive and compensatory surplus. Zizek argues that this logic extends to the operation of capitalism as a totality.

He contends that surplus value occurs under capitalism because the natural state of labour as a commodity is the production of surplus above the necessary cost of labour. The appropriation of this surplus by the owner is expanded through the circulation of commodities which turns money into capital which subsquently ‘realises’ surplus-value, turning it into profit.

Importantly, however, corresponding to the logic of surplus­- jouissance, in capitalism the production of surplus is only possible because of the existance of lack. Lack is revealled by the presence of symptoms which simultaneously contradict and allow the ‘official’ operation of capitalism.

In his first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek famously argued that Marx ‘invented’ the Lacanian symptom by detecting a constitutive exception within capitalism, a necessary excess or imbalance which, rather than signalling the imperfect realisation of these principles, reveals the truth of their constitution.

As an illustration, the notion of freedom operates as a universal principle at the core of liberal-democratic-capitalist ideology. However, within that ideology one specific freedom, the freedom to sell one’s labour on the market, subverts the notion of freedom itself, yet is necessary for the continued existance of freedom; without the wage labour system, contemporary capitalist freedoms would be impossible.

The same symptomatic structure exists in relation to the production of surplus value. Once labour becomes a commodity – that is, for sale on the market, it is negated through its own fair exchange. The worker is exploited not because they are underpaid (they are infact, fully compensated for their labour power), but because of the very position in which the worker exists; having to sell their labour as a commodity.

The symptomatic element of the form of surplus-value, then, is the existence of exploitation, even when, officially there is none; when the worker is fully paid. This constitutive exception within surplus-value produces a fundamental fissure, a Real affect that Zizek labels class. Class acts as the Real element which resists symbolisation within capitalism, the lack which drives and allows for the production of surplus-value.

For Zizek, in stark contrast to Marx, class is not a positively existing element; rather it is a hitch within capitalism that cannot be integrated into the system, yet allows for its excessive operation.

Thus, as well as a lack within the system, class is also an excess in the sense that it is the surplus of workers – Marx’s reserve army of labour – which produces the vulnerability that allows the labour market to operate, and as such functions as the contradiction which drives surplus-value and capitalism.

Indeed, the whole capitalist edifice is driven to avoid its own inner contradictions. As with the surplus-jouissance of that defines subjectivity, capitalism cannot be stable; rather it has to operate in a state of constant revolution of its own conditions in order to function. Capitalism is in essence a system in crisis, but a constitutive crisis which produces the upwards spiral of productivity which is the basis of the capitalist production of surplus

Thus, the notion of class as surplus adds another dimension to Zizek’s identification of surplus-jouissance and surplus-value as the structuring logic of capitalism. Indeed, class could be consider to be the founding moment of both, particularly if we consider commodity fetishism to be the fundamental structure of the surplus­-jouissance in the capitalist subject.

However, unlike either surplus-value or surplus- jouissance, where the surplus is positivised and counted for within the existing order, these reserve workers are offically surplus to capitalist requirements. These workers, or rather non-workers, are surplus as waste; they are not strictly required for the operation of capitalism, although, paradoxically it is this waste that allows capitalist surplus to be produced.

I witnessed an example of this waste on the beaches of Santa Monica. Here homeless people lay, completely covered by all manner of types of decaying material. The affect was that the human did not appear at all; all that was left was the appearance of rubbish, a surplus that capitalism considers pure waste.

Noticeably, the otherwise beautiful beach was covered by an excess of rubbish bins but very little rubbish. I could not help thinking the very sad thought that it would simply be easier for the people of Santa Monica if the homeless made these bins their new residence. This is the status of the reserve surplus of global workers; a disavowed waste, radically excluded from capitalist ideology.

Thus we can see how surplus operates in relationship to poverty within capitalism. Poverty is necessary; without the reserve army of surplus labour that is poverty, the capitalist wage system would be unable to function. For this reason, however, poverty as an excess is also necessarily excluded; the same capitalist dynamic of lack and excess which creates poverty allows the subject to repress it’s existance. This repression can be seen in our contemporary capitalist responses to poverty. These take the form of either band-aid super-ego solutions, such as charity and fair trade or a ‘purification’ of the capitalism process through institutions like the World Bank.

Alternatively, poverty-as-surplus is simply ignored, disavowed, much like the waste on Santa Monica beach.

What these responses have in common is that they are unable to acknowledge the fundamental status of poverty as a required reserve-surplus. A constitutive exception, which Zizek labels the concrete universal that allows for the continued functioning of capitalism.

Similarily we can use Zizek’s usage of surplus-value and surplus-jouissance to understand the failure of the environment movement, and lets be sure, as long as this movement is a capitalist movement, it will be a failure. We have previously considered the manner in which hysterical capitalist subjectivity is structured to maintain the constant desire for commodities; the green movement has been unable to break through this excessive demand for jouissance. Instead, environmentalism is articulated strictly within capitalist ideology, such that green initatives only occur if they conform to the logic of capitalism; hence the value of the green dollar and the power of the empty signifier ‘sustainable development’. This response fails to acknowledge capitalism’s fundamental requirement to revolutionise itself (just as it has in the face of the Green threat) to produce further surplus. Here we can easily understand Zizek and Fredric Jameson’s glib assertion that it is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of capitalism.

The more radical green response is the demand for lower levels of consumption. Although this response correctly, if naively, challenges the fundamental modality of capitalist subjectivity, it again shows a total lack of awareness of the dynamics of capitalism.

Such an argument allows us to identify what Zizek labels a parallax gap between the green movement and developmentalism. The two discourses cannot be held together; an increase in economic development would only produce more environmental degradation. By contrast, a truly green economy would susbstantially increase global poverty.

Indeed, latest research by the New Zealand government suggests that if the world’s population were to consume at the same level as New Zealanders, a mid-range OECD country apparently in desperate need for economic growth, we would need another five planets to support the levels of research consumption.

If the problem then is capitalism, what are the alternatives? The traditional Leftist response is located Marx’s notion of communism. Marxist commnism has, however, been thoroughly rejected by Zizek and other psychoanalytic critics, firstly because of the actualities of totalitarian repression, but also because of Marx’s reliance on the form of surplus-value.

For Zizek, Marx’s political response to capitalism and surplus-value was ultimately fantasmatic. What Marx missed was the logic of jouissance – that there is no jouissance without the obstacle that propels it. Marx believed that by removing the obstacle – wage labour and private appropriation – the productivity generated by surplus-value would remain and could be utilised for communal good. What Marx missed, however, is that it is this the inner contradiction of capitalism – between class and surplus-value – that drives capitalist productivity. That is, without class there is no surplus-value. Ultimately, perhaps Coca-Cola and Marxism have more in common that one might think, both attempting utopia by endeavoring to retain the object without the obstacle that propels the cause.

So, what does Zizek offer in the way of a program for future radical politics? Essentially and openly, Zizek offers nothing in terms of this form of political intervention. Instead he argues that we live in pessimistic times for radical politics. Asked about the revelance of his work for anti-capitalist struggle, a cause to which Zizek’s work has been increased orientated, Zizek stated in his characterisic manner;

‘I have a hat, but I have no rabbit’

This is not to suggest that Zizek work is not without political value. For Zizek, the proper political response is to reveal the surplus exclusion which structures ideology, a technique he labels ‘practicing the concrete universal.

An example of this approach occurred recently in the States with the ‘We are America’ campaign staged by illegal immigrants. In this campaign, the immigrants attempted to articulate themselves as the concrete universal, the necessary glue of American society. However, whilst this may be a good example of a protest based political intervention, it offers little basis for future movements.

I do not believe, however, that this is any reason to outrightly reject Zizek’s work and resort to the ‘rubber chickens’ that others are claiming as their rabbits. At a time when global capitalism has generated a paradoxical position where a small portion of humanity is living well beyond the capacity of the planet to support their activity, yet the majority of humanity is struggling to support their own material needs, the need to generate a new approach to political economy and the question of shared social life is as pressing as ever. These material concerns, remind us of the need to produce theory which has grounded political application, without losing sight of its theoretical convinctions. Thus, to quote Zizek;

"The theoretical task, with immense practical-political consequences, is: how are we to think the surplus that pertains to human productivity 'as such' outside its appropriation/distortion by the capitalist logic of surplus value as the primary mode of social reproduction?

Recent work within the discipline of psychoanalytic politics has made steps to reconsider the relationship between surplus and exception, most notably in the notions of the ethics of drive, love, comedy and the associated ‘traversing of the fantasy’. Yet, so far no stable position has been developed. Neither has it been considered exactly how this new articulation would apply to the production of shared social life, particularly in regards to the economy. It is this task, I believe, which forms the shared future of psycho-Marxist theory.

Thank You.

On the homology betweeen surplus-value and surplus-jouissance

Psychoanalysis and Marxism have long been used by left-orientated political theorists to explain the development of capitalism. Initially, psychoanalysis was attached to Marxism to explain the perceived shortcomings of Marxism in the face of the continued presence and development of capitalism. In this initial relationship, characterised by the Freudian Marxism of theorists such as Reich, and Frankfurt school theorists, Adorno and Marcuse, psychoanalysis was used to add a theory of subjectivity to Marxism in the face of the failure of the Marxist ‘revolutionary subject’. Hence, the Frankfurt school theorists moved onto analysis of culture.

If this could be described as the first phase of ‘psycho-Marxism’, according to Miklitsch the second phase is dominated by Louis Althusser’s structuralist revision of Marxism. Althusser’s return to Marx through psychoanalysis was the first to be dominated by Lacan, rather than Freud. As such, it cultivated a re-reading of Freud as well, framed in Lacanian terms. Lacan had already re-read Freud après-coup via the turn to language of the latter half of the 20th century, characterised by the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. The focus on language as a structuring element of the human psyche has made psychoanalysis a necessarily sociological investigation, one that could be integrated with Marxism not by way of adding a theory of the psyche, as in Freudian Marxism, but rather as an equal contribution to a theory of intersubjectivity.

Despite these developments, Psycho-Marxism in all its forms has not been able to envisage a movement beyond capitalism, which does not fall prey to the traps of totalitarian socialism, as Žižek himself acknowledges;

"This is our situation today; after the breakdown of the Marxist notion that capitalism itself generates the force that will destroy it in the guise of the proletariat, none of the critics of capitalism, none of those who describe so convincingly the deadly vortex into which the so-called process of globalisation is drawing us, has any well-defined notion of how we can get rid of capitalism. In short, I am not preaching a simple return to the old notions of class struggle and socialist revolution: the question of how it is really possible to undermine the global capitalist system is not a rhetorical one- maybe it is not really possible, at least not in the foreseeable future"(Zizek, 1999: 352-353)

Žižek’s most accepted role as a Marxist, certainly concerning his earlier work, is as a theorist of capitalist consumer ideology, culture and enjoyment (Sharpe, 2005:9). Instead of the Frankfurt school, the tradition of psycho-Marxism which Žižek has most followed is Althusser, who was for a time banished to the theoretical netherlands (in part by his own critique) before being rehabilitated by Žižek, most notably in The Sublime Object of Ideology (Miklitsch, 1998: 228). Here, Žižek argues that Althusser’s work has been disavowed, particularly the debate between Althusser and Lacan, and masked by the division between Habermas and Foucault, because Althusser is the traumatic kernel that must be excluded from modern philosophy because of its association with radical Lacanian ethics, which break with the hegemonic logic of post-Marxist anti-essentialism (Zizek, 1989: 1).

Žižek’s use of Marxism attempts to restore the fullness of the tradition, even if this restoration occurs via a negatively charged ontological position which rejects strict Marxist essentialism. Instead, Žižek attempts to rehabilitate Marxist critique of political economy as a form of anti-capitalism political intervention by reference to a different kind of essentialism; the Lacanian Real.

The first hints of Žižek’s affinity with Marxism, occur in the opening section of The Sublime Object of Ideology when he contends that for Lacan, Marx invented the symptom (Zizek, 1989: 11-53). Marx’s ‘discovery’ of the symptom lies in his identification of a place with no place within a universal entity. Bourgeois ideology identifies this place as an external/contingent aberration to the normal functioning of capital, but, vitally, Marx contends that this symptomatic element contains the Truth of capital.

Žižek considers there to be a fundamental homology between the logics of the Marxist critique of political economy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. This homology is between the Marxist conception of surplus-value and Lacanian surplus-jouissance. This link, whilst regularly alluded to by Žižek, actually stems from Lacan’s 16th and 17th Seminars[i] . Lacan equated surplus-value with objet a, the object of surplus-enjoyment, although his concern was more with the psyche of the worker, rather than the structure of capitalism (Fink, 1995: 96). It is in this latter sense that Žižek has brought the link between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance to prominence. This homology adds greatly to our understanding of capitalism, suggesting that every Marxist critique of the logic of capitalism is always a Lacanian critique, excepting for a few Zizekian twists. In this sense we can regard surplus-value to be the logic of the capitalist symbolic order under the horizon of capitalism and surplus-jouissance the logic of the imaginary. By adding the Real as the third dimension in this analysis of surplus – the Real qua class struggle or the reserve army of labour – we can see how Žižek’s use of this homology can greatly increase our understanding of the dynamics of capitalism. Nonetheless, whilst this form of analysis opens up a new line of questioning about capitalism and the possibilities of radical political action, Žižek’s assertion of the constitutive nature of surplus, certainly in the psyche, if not the economy, and his rejection of a ethico-political movement from desire to drive in relation to capitalism does not bring us any closer to a notion of radical anti-capitalist politics.

Surplus- Jouissance: Compensation for the human condition

The human condition is constituted by a complex dialectic between lack and excess. Lack in the sense of the negativity at the heart of being, caused by the subject’s essential separation from jouissance by the signifier. Excess, because of the compensation the subject receives for this sacrifice, a surplus-jouissance found in objet a, the object cause of desire. Žižek, following Lacan and Freud before him, defines this movement between lack and excess as the death drive; being is never just being, such that; “ Human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (Zizek, 2006b: 62)

Because of this excessive dialectic, the human being operates as a being of desire. Desire is not a biological property of the human organism, but rather one impinged on the subject by the forced entry into language. Nonetheless, the human being, like any animal, is subject to a number of biological needs. These needs, often cited by socio-biologists and evolutionary theorists as the causal driver of psycho-social life, are not able to be directly expressed as they are in an animal[ii]. We humans lose access to any possible biological essence upon entry into the symbolic order. Indeed, given the helplessness of the newborn infant, it would be a stretch to assert any kind of biological essence.

This dependency means that the biological needs of the infant can only be fulfilled through the Other, normally via the parental unit. Thus need is always articulated as a demand to the Other, initially as a variety of cries and latter through language. The reliance on the Other to fulfil need comes to be seen as an expression of love from the Other (Fink, 1995: 89). Whilst need can be at least temporarily satisfied, demand, or more accurately the love sought from the Other in demand, can achieve no such satisfaction.

With the entry of the signifier, the demand to the Other in the articulation of need becomes desire, desire being the excess of demand in need. Desire structures the human experience in the sense that reality only exists to the extent that need becomes mediated by the signifier, creating desire. That is, symbolic castration creates the conditions under which we are able to pursue our desires. Desire is never an individual matter, one that is pursued by an autonomous ego; rather desire is always constituted in the symbolic order, structured by a fundamental fantasy that coheres the subject’s relationship to castration. Put more simply, for Lacan, desire is always desire of the Other. Because the Other is always lacking, desire is unable to be satisfied; having been forced to give up need, the subject finds that the symbolic order is no substitute. Instead, as I will soon advance the subject receives a compensatory enjoyment in surplus-jouissance, embodied in objet a, the object cause of desire. Such compensation establishes the dialectic of enjoyment in both the psyche and capitalism; lack breeds excess, but this excess is always lacking.

This dialectic is characterised by the movement between the Real – that which resists symbolisation – and jouissance. According to Bruce Fink, the Real can be divided into two basic categories, the Real ‘before the letter’ (R1) and the Real ‘after the letter’ (R2). R1 is the name we give to the (mythical) time before language, a time that is created only by signification itself. There is no absence in R1. It is only R2 that cuts up the Real of R1 through the act of creating what is labeled as reality via the symbolic. These cuts in the Real before the letter occur because of the distance between reality and the Real that is created by the symbolic, which cannot fully grasp what is beyond its limits. In reality, R1 exists only as an absence, this absence is given a name and thus an existence; without the operation of naming in the symbolic, R1 would only be felt as an absence- through the process of naming, R1 is given a symbolic existence in reality (Fink, 1995,p.24-5).Therefore the Real cannot simply be considered external to symbolisation either in the form of R1 or R2. The Real is not just what is excluded from the symbolic, but rather has what Lacan termed an ‘extimate’ relationship with the symbolic order in that the Real is both within and outside the symbolic at the same time. This is the case for R1 because it establishes the very limits of symbolisation, but also for R2. R2 operates as the factor that distorts symbolisation from within; it is the disavowed ‘X’ that warps symbolisation in a manner in which we cannot be aware at the time of ‘knowing’. In this sense, the Real is an effect without a known cause. Although the Real is disavowed, however, it is also at the same time the elemental pre-condition and support of reality in the sense that it constitutes its very limits (which, in this case of R2, are internal, rather than internal to the symbolic) and thus the conditions of possibility for the symbolic (Kay, 2003,p.168).

Whilst the Real operates with the symbolic realm as a lack, at the same time the Real produces an excessive affect. Lacan labels this affect jouissance. Jouissance is a paradoxical state of suffering/enjoyment that lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ (Evans, 1996,p.92). Jouissance, often translated into enjoyment, is not simply enjoyment or pleasure, but rather it goes beyond this into a kind of troubling, excessive pleasure that includes elements of transgression and suffering. As with the Real, according to Fink (1995:60) there are two orders of jouissance, before (J1) and after the letter (J2).

J1 is the pure unmediated jouissance that is sacrificed with the castrating entry into language. J2 occurs as a substitute for the loss of J1, a compensation that occurs through fantasy in the staging of impossible acts to regain J1 (impossible because the subject cannot return to a time before language). J1 itself is a fantasy creation, produced because of the lack within the symbolic order (maintaining the feeling that there was a time before lack). Because J1 is a creation of language, Žižek contends that there is no jouissance for the subject before J2, surplus-jouissance. Therefore, social analysis should always focus on J2, or surplus-jouissance, rather than seeing it as a secondary effect. Nonetheless, neither should the fantasmatic form of jouissance be dismissed; the operation of jouissance can only be understood as a relationship between modalities – an excessive compensation for an originary lack, one which is simultaneously an imaginary illusion and very Real.

Surplus-jouissance is embodied through objet a. In The Parallax View (Zizek, 2006b), Žižek contends that objet a is; “The object of psychoanalysis… the core of the psychoanalytic experience” (p.19). Žižek identifies objet a as being the cause of the Parallax gap (the incommensurable gap between two objects of a totality), objet a being the unknowable ‘X’ that forever eludes the symbolic and that produces a multitude of symbolic responses through which the subject seeks to give it form. In light of its ineffable form, objet a is a, if not the, central concern of fantasy. Fantasy constructs desire around the objet a; fantasy does not seek to satisfy desire, but rather constructs it, teaching the subject how to desire (Zizek, 1997,p.7).

Objet a can be considered to be the residue of symbolisation, a remainder produced with the breakdown of the unity of jouissance. In this sense it is the positive ‘waste’ of symbolisation (Zupancic, 2006: 159). Objet a can be considered the site of fundamental lack, the void at which the subject remains perpetually riven. Objet a connects the lack of the Real and the excess of jouissance. Objet a is also both the object-cause and the logic of desire; its paradoxical logic is such that whilst an object may appear to be the cause of desire, that object has actually been created by the process of desire. Thus objet a may operates as both the object and cause of desire (Kay, 2003: 166). An object, say a commodity item like a pair of shoes, may appear to be the cause of desire; ‘I have to have those shoes, they are perfect for me because…’. The illusion, however, is that this object has taken the place of objet a which is causing the desire for the object. There is, however, always a gap between the cause and object of desire, a gap which further prevents the satisfaction of desire; the object can be obtained, but when it is it ceases to be the object of desire. Instead desire continues on its metonymical chain. This impossibility is the central element of the role of fantasy in desire; fantasy supports the subject’s desire, maintaining an appropriate distance from the object. Such is the emptiness of desire that the subject does not really want to obtain the object, instead what is desire is desire itself, a distance which is maintained by the construction of fantasy (Fink, 1995: 90). In this sense, as Fink suggests; “Desire is an end in itself: it seeks only more desire, not fixation on a specific object” (Fink, 1997:26)

Objet a is able to function as this paradoxical object-cause because it is the remnant of the Real, R1, that remains in the subject after the subject enters the symbolic order and an element of the Other, the lack that persists on account of the inability of language to connect with material reality[iii]. The manner in which objet a functions is thus dependent upon the manner in which lack is constructed in fantasy. This fantasmatic construction creates the illusion of consistency in the subject. For this consistency to operate, some object must be postivised such that it can stand in for the inherent lack that would otherwise threaten consciousness (Zizek, 1997,p.81; 2001,p.149). This object is then retroactively posited as the cause of desire.
Thus we can consider objet a to be the embodiment of surplus-jouissance, the ‘coincidence of limit and excess, of lack and surplus… the left over which embodies the fundamental, constitutive lack’(Zizek, 1989: 53).

As well as objet a, surplus-jouissance – in its form as a renunciation of jouissance – is also a form of the super-ego. The super-ego is a transgressive site of jouissance; we enjoy submitting to laws through the surplus-enjoyment supplied by the super-ego. Super-ego jouissance occurs because of the (forced) choice the subject makes away from pure jouissance and into language. The impossibility of a return is repressed; what is repressed is that the subject never had 'it' in the first place. Through the maintenance of this possibility, a form of guilt is forced upon the subject when it submits to the law. However, as this submission necessarily fails to suture the symbolic order, the more submission is required. It is through fantasy the subject learns to control their access to jouissance and thus structure their desire.

Coca-Cola as a Reader of Lacan

Žižek describes coca-cola as the perfect embodiment of objet a and as such the ultimate capitalist merchandise, deeply embedded in the logic of the super-ego and surplus-jouissance. In coke, we have a drink removed of all the objectively necessary properties of a satisfying drink; it provides no nutritional benefit – it certainly does not quench thirst – or provide the ‘satisfied calm’ of an alcoholic beverage. Instead, all that is left is the mysterious ‘X’, the surplus over enjoyment that is characteristic of the commodity. Žižek describes diet-coke as the final step in this process – the commodification of nothing itself – since the caffeine that gives coke its distinctive taste has been removed. ‘We drink the nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a property that is in effect merely an envelope of a void’ (Žižek, 2000:23)

The coke marketing team have perhaps taken this critique as a challenge –
they certainly seem to have been reading Žižek’s books[iv] – witness the recent launch of Coke ‘Zero’, literally nothing in a can. Coke’s marketers further revealed their understanding of Lacanian theory with the marketing campaign which accompanied Coke Zero. This campaign portrays Coke Zero as an element of perfection as its malignant elements have been removed; advertising slogans are culturally specific variations of “Why can't all the good things in life come without downsides” or “Ridding the world of the negative consequences that limit us all”. As both Žižek and Alenka Zupancic note, the production of commodities without their destructive qualities is an increasingly noticeable element of late capitalism in which the hysterical search for the perfection of desire has reached it’s nadir (Zupancic, 2006: 172). This impossibility – there is no enjoyment, or desire, without hindrance – leads to a position of enjoyment without enjoyment; only the fantasy of enjoyment remains.

The logic of jouissance – that there is no jouissance without the obstacle that propels it – was also missed by Marx’s in his work on surplus-value and productivity. Marx believed that by removing the obstacle – private appropriation of surplus-value – the productivity generated by surplus-value would remain and could be utilised for the good of all. For Lacan, what Marx missed was that the logic of surplus-value is structurally similar to surplus-jouissance in that the obstacle to full expression is the logic’s very condition of possibility. Let us now turn to Marx’s work on surplus-value.

Surplus-Value: What can the logic of the psyche tell us about the workings of capitalism?

Although Žižek regularly sites the homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment, he does not expand upon it, particularly in regards to the manner in which he is using surplus-value[v]. Thus, it is worth us considering the status of surplus-value, both in the traditional Marxist sense and the manner in which it is used by Žižek.

In the strictest Marxist sense of the term, the origin of surplus-value lies in the labour theory of value. According to this theory, labour is the only source of value. Surplus-value is the value produced by the worker over and above the cost of employing the worker; the value created by labour for which the worker receives no equivalent (Wood, 2004:137). For Marx, in contrast to other socialists of his time (see Wood, 2004: 135), there is no exploitation in the appropriation of surplus-value. The capitalist does not purchase the value created by labour (as in the product of labour), but rather living labour power, or labour time. Thus once the labour has sold their labour power, they have no rights to the products of that labour.

In this sense, the capitalist is paying full value to the worker; there is nothing in the transaction between worker and capitalist that suggests the capitalist need pay the worker for the surplus generated by labour[vi]. Indeed, the worker generally benefits more from employment that the capitalist. Where the worker risks starvation, and ultimately death, without income the capitalist is set to lose only a small amount of profit and can easily replace the worker (Wood, 2004). This, of course, is no defence of capitalist society, simply an indication of the horizon of possibility for capitalism. Additionally, and this will be vital for our later argumentation, capitalism is able to appropriate surplus-value because of the bargaining position of the capitalist class – the oversupply of workers[vii] (Wood, 2004:229).

Ultimately, for Marx, the production of surplus-value is the key to capitalist productivity and the expansion of capital through circulation, which ‘realises’ surplus-value, turning it into profit; it is surplus-value, based upon the historical over-supply of workers, which is the goal (object) of capital. Essentially, although the worker is fully compensated from their labour-power, the nature of labour as a commodity is that its use value produces greater value than its own; a constitutive surplus which is appropriated by the owner of the means of production (Zizek, 2006b: 57).

In addition, although definitions can only ever be inferred from his texts, Žižek’s usage of surplus-value is extended beyond the labour theory of value. Žižek takes the fundamental logic of surplus-value; an element of lack that generates more than itself, and extends it to the operation of capitalism as a totality. In this definition, capitalism is characterised by a dialectical circulation of lack and excess, which corresponds to the relationship within the psyche of the Real and Jouissance.

As such, Žižek’s concept of surplus-value has perhaps more in common with that introduced by Marx in Volume III of Capital (Wood, 2004: 230). Here surplus-value comes not only from labour, but also is vitally converted into profit through the circulation of commodities and their consumption, ultimately by workers themselves (Zizek, 2006b: 53). Žižek’s point is that under capitalism there is a commodity that, through exchange, produces more than itself; the natural operation of labour is surplus. The appropriation of this surplus by the owner is expanded through the circulation of commodities which turn money into capital; capital is embedded with a quality which makes it capable of producing a surplus, a surplus we can now label profit.

Because surplus-value acts as the core driver of capitalism, Žižek contends that the production of surplus has the same structural role in capitalism as objet a has in the psyche. Indeed, surplus-value is the objet a of capitalism. However, by labelling surplus-value as objet a, Žižek suggests that there is more to surplus-value (profit) than a simple goal. Rather, profit embodies the logic of objet a, in that it simultaneously operates as the condition of possibility and impossibility of the capitalist logic. Žižek signals this when he describes surplus-value as an inner contradiction within capitalism, but one that operates as the condition of possibility of the system. Indeed, for Žižek capitalism is full of contradictions, of symptoms which simultaneously contradict and allow the ‘official’ operation of capitalism. In doing so, Žižek famously contends that Marx ‘invented’ the Lacanian symptom by;

“Detecting a certain fissure, an asymmetry, a certain pathological imbalance which belies the universalism of bourgeois ‘rights and duties’. This imbalance, far from announcing the ‘imperfect realisation’ of these universal principles – that is, an insufficiency to be abolished by further development – functions as their constitutive moment”(Zizek, 1989: 21).

As an illustration, the notion of freedom, one very dear the heart of the liberal-democratic-capitalist operation, operates as a universal principle. However, there is a specific freedom which subverts all other notions of freedom, yet remains internal to freedom itself. That freedom is the freedom to sell one’s labour on the market, a freedom that allows for all other freedoms (through the production of surplus which allows for under freedoms within capitalism) yet subverts the very notion of freedom; once the worker sells their labour to capital, they are enslaved to the market (1989: 22).

Further to this, the same symptomatic element exists in relation to the production of surplus value. Žižek argues that once labour becomes a commodity – that is, for sale on the market – ‘equivalent exchange becomes its own negation’ (p.22). Although the worker is fully paid for their labour (according to the market), the very form of surplus-value is one of exploitation. The worker is exploited not because they are underpaid, but because of the position in which the worker exists; having to sell their labour as a commodity. For Žižek, Marx’s utopian illusion was the possibility of universality – full and equivalent exchange – could occur without a symptom (p.23). Žižek argues that Marx’s mistake was to “assume that the object of desire (the unconstrained expansion of productivity) would remain even when it was deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus value)” (2000:21).

However, it is not only Marx who believed that capitalism needs to rid itself of these symptoms. The whole capitalist edifice is driven to avoid its own inner contradictions, but in doing so only produces more. Capitalism cannot be stable; rather it has to operate in a state of constant revolution of its own conditions in order to function, generally either by producing new commodities or selling existing commodities in new markets (Jameson, 1996). Hence, the World Bank acknowledgement of the world’s poor as the ‘customers of the future’ (Moore, 2002). Capitalism is in essence a system in crisis, but a constitutive crisis which produces the upwards spiral of productivity which is the basis of capital (Zizek, 1989: 52).

Ultimately, perhaps Coca-Cola and Marx have more in common that one might think, both attempting utopia by attempting to retain the object without the obstacle that propels the cause. The consumer is always searching for the perfect commodity, pure jouissance, as opposed to surplus­- jouissance, which would finally put an end to desire. This is, of course, not what the subject really wants, but rather the fantasmatic construction of desire which leaves the consumer searching for the ultimate ‘IT’. The constant desire for more is a continual theme in the marketing of commodity, where the product is never the product by itself. It is always offered with something ‘more’ attached, whether that ‘10%’ extra or a competition offer.

Thus, capitalism, like the hysterical psyche of capitalism consumer subjectivity, is never at a state of rest, there is never just value or jouissance; capitalism is a system based on movement (circulation) and the production of excess that hides an ultimate lack. Capitalism’s inherent and disavowed strength is its ability to revolutionise its own conditions, which is to create markets out of its own failings. The threat of global warming and the capitalist response of sustainable development and the ‘Green Dollar’ is perhaps the strongest contemporary example of this logic. This has led to what Alenka Zupancic (Zupancic, 2006 :175) describes as a ‘paradoxical convergence of power and resistance’ where threats to the system are now simply opportunities for profit. It does not take long for 21st marketers to commodify the latest counter-culture movement. Indeed, some would argue that the marketers are generating this culture.

Thus, the structural homology between surplus-value in capitalism and the surplus-jouissance of the psyche can tell us much about the operation of capitalism. In both the surplus is not an excess which is tagged onto the normal state of affairs. Rather, this surplus is the normal state, the cause which drives the excessive balance of the system. Just as in the logic of objet a (the object of surplus-jouissance) in surplus-value there is produced what appears to be a waste, an unaccounted for surplus, in the normal operation of the system (Zupancic, 2006 :162). For Zupancic, surplus-value comes about when this waste is valorised, accounted for, not as waste but as an integral part of the system; profit (170). Thus, in capitalist ideology, there is never surplus; all things are accounted for profit is simply the appropriate return for the investment of capital

What Žižek does not emphasise in this homology is the role of the Real in surplus-value. We have already discussed the operation of the Real in terms of the psyche, both in castration and the Real that continues after the letter, objet a. Conversely, in terms of capitalist political economy and surplus-value, Žižek does not make a strong link to the Real. Elsewhere, however, Žižek does make a strong link between the Real and class as the hitch within the capitalist logic. In order to properly understand the implications of surplus-value/surplus-jouissance, we must integrate the Real in order to extend the homology to the three Lacanian registers, the symbolic (surplus-value), the imaginary (surplus-jouissance) and the Real (class)[viii].

Return of the Real; Class as surplus

The Real is the third modality of surplus to add to the equation. Žižek has previously referred to capitalism as the symbolic Real, in the sense that it is the point to which all symbolisations return; it has hegemonised hegemony. Class as the Real, is more in the sense a lack in the symbolic formula of capitalism and a historical exclusion that founds capitalism. As previously noted, Žižek contends that labour as a commodity is symptomatic of capitalism because it produces exploitation even when the worker is fully paid, simply because they are forced to sell their labour on the market, rather than own the means of production. This latter fact is a symptom, a constitutive flaw within the capitalist formula, what Fink might label R2 or the Real after the letter. That capitalism is able to operate and exploit this fault is something akin to R1, the originary Real upon which the system is founded and must be repressed, that which Marx labelled primitive accumulation.

Although these elements are constitutive of capitalism, capitalist ideology cannot acknowledge this excess, although it is constitutive. For Žižek, this is the role of class. Class is not a positively existing element; rather it is a hitch within capitalism that cannot be integrated into the system. In this sense, class is Real – that which cannot be symbolised. Thus, as well as a lack within the system, class is also an excess in the sense that it is the surplus of workers – Marx’s reserve army of labour – which produces the vulnerability that allows the labour market to operate and as such provides the founding moment of surplus-value. These workers are surplus to capitalist requirements, but not in the same sense of surplus-jouissance or surplus-value, where the surplus is the only attachment. Rather, these people are surplus as waste; they are not strictly required for the operation of capitalism, although, paradoxically it is this waste that allows capitalist surplus to be produced – without this ‘waste’[ix], production wages would not be able to stay at a sustainable level of the continued extension of capitalist profitability. Additionally, given the pressing concerns with environmental degradation the world simply cannot allow for the development of this capitalist waste. Latest research suggests that if the entire world were to consume as we do in New Zealand, a mid-range OECD country, we would need another five planets to support the levels of research consumption.

There is increasingly empirical evidence of this ‘waste’ of humanity, particularly in the build-up of urban slums in Third World cities such as Dhaka, Jakarta, Lagos or Rio de Janeiro, as portrayed in Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s masterpiece, City of God (Cidade de Deus). Mike Davis has suggested that in 2004, for the first time, the urban population of the world will outnumber the rural, creating a huge urban proletariat (Davis, 2004). These landless worker, forced to sell their labour for whatever price, outside of the legal protection of ‘western’ minimum wage laws, constitutive the true motor of capitalism and surplus-value. Yet, as Žižek suggests, these citizens are almost outside of the capitalist space, a wasted lawless horde in the sense of Orwell’s proletariat in 1984. As such the Proletariat operate as a ‘living contradiction’ of capitalist production, a wasted contradiction that capital almost literally feeds off (Zizek, 1999: 225). For Žižek today’s urban slums (proletariat)are the concrete universal of capitalism, the constitutive exception that allows for the coherence of the abstract universal horizon (Zizek, 2006b: 268-9). As such, they hold the possibility (as an element which is incommensurable with the capitalist horizon) of creating a rupture within capitalism.

Is then, the task of radical anti-capitalist politics simply to capture this rogue element in the name of the historical revolutionary Marxist subject? If our earlier discussion has taught us anything, the answer is no. Capitalist surplus excess cannot be tamed, nor integrated into a new form, i.e. Marx’s communism. Instead, the question is, as Žižek suggests;

"The theoretical task, with immense practical-political consequences, is here: how are we to think the surplus that pertains to human productivity 'as such' outside its appropriation/distortion by the capitalist logic of surplus value as the mobile of social reproduction? The lesson of the past failures of emancipatory economic projects is clear: it is not enough to demand a different appropriation of the surplus (collective instead of private) while retaining its form. Surplus-value and its capitalist appropriation are two sides of the one coin" (Zizek, 2007b: 55)


Ethics of Drive

The most notable alternative to the capitalist discourse of surplus (desire) is that of drive. In contrast to desire, which posits objet a as its goal, in drive the goal is loss itself; the perpetual circulation around objet a. Rather than the fantasmatic attempts to obtain the object, drive only has an aim, that of movement around the object. Within Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject of the drive comes at the end, or even beyond analysis. Although Lacan had originally seen desire as somewhat radical, he came to see it as an integral part of the (symbolic) law. The subject of desire is firmly embedded with the Realm of the Other. Instead, he placed his hopes in the subject of drive. Whereas the subject of desire cannot achieve satisfaction because it is weighed down by the Other, the drive always achieves satisfaction, precisely by its own failure (Fink, 1997: 208).

This is not to suggest that the subject of drive is not grammatically structure, some kind of blob, living only for a pleasure obtained through the very failure to obtain satisfaction. It is just that desire no longer plays a role in the dialectic of satisfaction (210). Objet a still exists for the subject of drive, and it is to this object (rather than to the Other) that the subject of drive orientates themselves; the subject recognises the presence of the Other, but does not appeal to it for satisfaction – the subject can finally ‘enjoy their enjoyment’(209-210). Thus, for Lacan, the course of analysis takes the subject from demand, to desire and ends in drive. This change in position, involving the vital move of ‘traversing the fantasy’, brings about a change in the relationship between desire and satisfaction and end of analysis. Yet Lacan, according to Fink, is ultimately unsure of the status of subject within drive.

This ambiguous support for an ‘ethics of drive’ continues amongst contemporary (political) readers of Lacan. Jason Glynos suggests, through a reading of Žižek’s work, that contemporary anti-capitalism needs to exit the realm of desire and the belief in the ultimate existence of the Big Other and enter into an ethics of drive. He finishes he argumentation, however, with the question, ‘What would a community of subjects of the drive look like?’ (Glynos, 2001). Analysis like these give drive a kind of mystical quality, one that can only be explained by the fact that it is not desire.

Likewise Lacanian political theorists Yannis Stavrakakis (Stavrakakis, 1999, 2007) and Alenka Zupancic (Zupancic, 2000) have argued for an ‘Ethics of disharmony’ and the ‘Ethics of the Real’ respectively. Additionally, Žižek, in his earlier work at least, was politically supportive of the ethics of drive. In For They Know Not What They Do, Žižek suggested there were four predominant ethical attitudes; the ethics of hysterical desire, obessional demand and pervert enjoyment. The fourth ethical attitude was the ethics of drive. For Žižek, ‘the status of drive itself is inherently ethical’; Lacan asserted that the subject must not give way to their drive (Zizek, 1991: 272). Žižek goes onto describe the ethics of drive as the “only possibility for the Left to attain a distance on the present and discern the signs of something new” (273).

Yet, latter Žižek comes to reject the possibility of an ethics based upon drive. Arguing against Stavrakakis’ notion of partial enjoyment as a supplement to Ernesto Laclau’s radical democracy. Stavrakakis’ argument (as quoted by Žižek) appears to be pure Lacan;

“The central task in psychoanalysis - and politics - is to detach the objet petit a from the signifier of the lack in the Other /.../, to detach (anti-democratic and post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutionalization of lack, making possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy. /.../ Only thus shall we be able to really enjoy our partial enjoyment, without subordinating it to the cataclysmic desire of fantasy. Beyond its dialectics of disavowal, this is the concrete challenge the Lacanian Left addresses to us ”(Stavrakakis, 2007: 280-282).

In reply, Žižek states that Stavrakakis is in ‘total contradiction’ with Lacan in reducing objet a to an element of fantasy and suggesting a society beyond objet a (Zizek, 2007a). Žižek goes on to argue that objet a still exists in drive, but with a different relationship to desire; “in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object”. Further to this, Žižek states;

“However, this in no way entails that, in drive, we "really enjoy our partial enjoyment," without the disturbing excess: for Lacan, lack and excess are strictly correlative, the two sides of the same coin. Precisely insofar as it circulates around a hole, drive is the name of the excess that pertains to human being, it is the "too-much-ness" of striving which insists beyond life and death (this is why Lacan sometimes even directly identifies drive with objet a as surplus-jouissance.)”

A society without excess, then, is what is properly utopian. Even an ethics of drive will operate around the constitutive excess of objet a, perhaps more than ever. Žižek has also rejected drive, arguing that it is now the logic of capitalism in its purest form. Whilst, in terms of the hegemonic form of subjectivity amongst capitalist subjects, desire remains predominant, informing the discourse of the hysteric. However, for Žižek, capitalism is structured to operate as drive because the capitalist machinery is engineered only for its own continued expansion. Money becomes an end in itself, rather than being tied to some notion of ‘actual material progress’. Thus, whilst desire is tied to a goal of some kind, drive is only aim as movement and circulation (Zizek, 2006b: 61).

Žižek’s main target here is financial capital and its continual expansion of the circulation of money in which there is no actual goal other than the more money. Currency trading and arbitrage, in which money is bought in one market and quickly sold again in another to take advantage of a temporary misalignment in prices (Moles & Terry, 1997: 19) are examples of this kind of symbolic money-for-money transactions within capitalism. The movement of drive is thus exemplified in financial capital where the goal is circulation and movement around the goal (money for the sake of money) as opposed to surplus-value in desire, which is linked to imaginary desires for notions such as progress, under the guise of commodity fetishism.[x] In this sense, the transgressive elements of drive have certainly disappeared, and this is a major problem for Žižek; how can we revolutionise a system that is already revolutionary?
Žižek may be correct in his description of the pure structure of capitalism adhering the dynamics of drive. Nonetheless, drive always has a relationship to desire in some sense. Although the human-less structure of capital may adhere to the structure of drive, to those involved it still operates as desire. While those embedded in the process, say currency traders, may be aware on some level that money is ultimately empty, they still operate in a discourse of desire, whether to fulfil their personal budget, to get further status or to get a pay raise, at this level capitalism remains driven by desire, even if the resulting structure is only that of drive.

Certainly much of capitalism appears to have lost its attachment to the ideological notions of progress and freedom that supplement it. Rather, developments and commodification appear to occur for their own sake, as opposed to retaining any notion of ‘improving life’. My stove-top is an example of this process. Rather than simple turn knobs to set temperature, the elements are now controlled by a digital system. This system requires to be turned on, the element selected and then set to the appropriate temperature by tapping the electronic buttons several times. It is technology for technology’s sake. Yet it maintains an ideological presence of improving the consumer’s life.


Professional sport is an example of this logic. The financial reality of professional sport is that teams are owned as franchised commodities; the structure of a professional sports team[xi] is no different from that of a fast-food franchise; an owned licence in an overall structure. The purpose of both is profit for the owners; winning is but a by product, although winning and profit are generally mutually accommodating goals. Thus, in professional sport, any notion of the ‘point’ is missing; the teams are not representive a geographical area to any extent. Yet, this is all disavowed. Supporters are a passionate as ever; there is a huge desire for their team to win, to obtain the fantasmatic objet a – along with nationalism and consumerism, sporting passion must be one of the most prominent sites of enjoyment in contemporary society. Some supporters live only for their teams. This passion is well exploited by the club (franchise) with the commodification of the players and game itself in tickets, television rights and merchandise. Brands are highly developed; sports marketing is perhaps the most developed and successful form of marketing. Team identities are created, including colours, logos and slogans, right down to nicknames, which once where organically developed, now have little reference to anything representative of the region[xii].

This despite fans ‘knowing’ the emptiness of the pursuit; the player market is regularly discussed and transfers passionately celebrated. There appears to be a parallax at work here; fans know the team is nothing but a business (and who would support a business; can you imagine fans passionately engaged in the struggles of McDonalds Windsor Park against McDonalds Belmont? Discussing the latest burger figures and the franchises’ requirements in the employment market? ‘We’re weak in fry production – I hear Smith is off contract at Burger King, we need to pick him up!), yet they remain engaged with the team as ‘their’ representatives – geography remains the principal reason for supporting a team, even if none of the players stem from that region. In this sake, even if there is no ‘point’ to professional sport – who cares if this bunch of merchanaries beats that bunch – it matters very much to the people involves. On a structural level, professional sport results in an operation of drive, but it is embodied by desire.

Perhaps sport is a powerful exemplar of our current situation. The actual playing of sport relates to this relationship between drive and desire. Although players maintain a strong desire to win, to obtain objet a, their passion is really in the playing itself, enjoying the process of physical exertion and generally feeling alive; enjoying one’s enjoyment. Without the lure of desire however, for many sportspeople, the enjoyment of drive disappears as well; the passion goes out of the game. It may be that at the level of enjoyment, what we need today is a different relationship to surplus which produces an ethics of drive that goes beyond desire. However, at the level of the economy, of the resulting structure, capitalism and professional sport are already at drive. Perhaps what is required here is a relationship to surplus that is simply beyond analysis. That is, if Žižek’s lesson is that we are resigned to surplus-enjoyment, are we also resigned to a form of political economy based upon surplus-value?


Conclusion – Zupancic?!
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[i] Lacan made very clear that the link between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment is one of homology, a structure link, as opposed to analogy which is a functional link without structure origin
[ii] Evolutionary psychology is perhaps the hegemonic brand of social-psychological analysis for the masses, in no small part because it suggests a degree of certainty to human behaviouir
[iii] Although, as Žižek notes, to define objet a as the which emerges at the point of loss is to stay within the realm of desire, as opposed to drive, which we shall expand upon latter (Zizek, 2006a)
[iv] Previous marketing campaigns – coke ‘Enjoy!’ and ‘Coke is it’ suggest that this is the case
[v] This is a regular criticism of Žižek, that he cites traditional Marxist concepts that appear in contradiction with his Lacan theoretical framework without any indication of the manner in which he is using them
[vi] This just does not stem from a political or legal framework, but rather the economic base; under capitalist political economy this is the only possible just modality of distribution (Wood, 2004: 138)
[vii] The worker is forced to labour, to join the labour force, not forced in the same sense that a slave is forced, but rather because they have no alternative but to sell their labour under the terms of capitalism
[viii] I have made something of a jump here in describing surplus-value as the symbolic and surplus-jouissance as the imaginary, but I will extend on this at a latter date. The link betweent them is by way of a parallax gap.
[ix] A euphenisum if ever their was one
[x] This movement is characterised by the change for C-M-C (The commodity is exchanged for money in order to obtain under commodities) to M-C-M (Money is used to obtain commodities in order to make more money). The latter is certainly the logic of capital, but it operates under the illusion of the former, which carries the ideological illusion of a progression towards the object. This parallax split between the two images of circulation is vital to my understanding of capitalism
[xi] I am making a notable exception of national sports sides
[xii] New Zealand’s first professional sports team, based in Auckland was nicknamed the ‘Football Kingz’. Following a widescale apathy of support for the unsuccessful team, the name was changed to the ‘Knights’, who were equally unsuccessful. Ultimately the team failed and moved to Wellington, becoming the ‘Phoenix’