Enjoyment and Submission in Modern Fantasy

Mihnea Panu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137513205
• eBook ISBN: 9781137513212
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

This book reveals the workings of the bourgeois passion for submission in a variety of contemporary contexts. By (re)introducing the concept 'bourgeois' as an analytical term and describing this contemporary subject as a psychic economy rather than just as a social class, Panu shows the intractability of contemporary forms of enjoyment and neoliberalism's periodic outbursts of aggressiveness to be connected by a recurrent circuit of trauma and anxiety originating in the bourgeois subject's difficult relationship with symbolic authority.

So far, most anticapitalist and decolonial struggles in the West have been hesitant when engaging with the issue of bourgeois enjoyment as the main source of capitalism's resilience. This exciting new work draws on an extensive range of theorists such as Butler, Copjec, Žižek and Zupancic to emphasise the importance of psychological mechanisms irreducible to rationality or knowledge such as desire, enjoyment, and the obscure nature of selfhood in the reiteration of the current capitalist reality. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Mihnea PanuEnjoyment and Submission in Modern FantasyStudies in the Psychosocial10.1057/978-1-137-51321-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Bourgeois Returns

Mihnea Panu¹

(1)

Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

End Abstract

This text discusses the role played by fantasy and enjoyment in perpetuating the capitalist order and harnesses the historical and class charge of the term ‘bourgeois’ to its undertaking. More than 50 years ago, Roland Barthes was defining the bourgeoisie as ‘the social class that does not want to be named’ (Barthes 1972, 138). According to Barthes, bourgeois ideology functions by erasing the name ‘bourgeois’, thus transforming bourgeois reality into natural reality, into Nature (Barthes 1972, 141). But while critical theory, including the interwar modernist avant-garde, investigated the subjectivity they called ‘bourgeois’ with a sort of anatomopathological minutiae, looking for the key to understanding and affecting the modern regime, the term is not often used in contemporary anti-capitalist analyses. It has been replaced, mostly, by structural analyses that focus on the ‘middle class’ or on the ‘neoliberal’ subject. The term ‘middle class’ is inadequate for an analysis of capitalist ideology because it is one of this ideology’s active elements. In England, for example, the incognito of the bourgeois class was insured by its self-description as the ‘middle class’ (Moretti 2014). By spatialising its appellative, the bourgeoisie self-represents as an intermediate stratum, partly subaltern, and therefore is not responsible for the effects of capitalism. The suggestion of spatial contiguity created by the terms ‘low’, ‘middle’, and ‘high’ also promises a potential for class fluidity not allowed by the old terminologies such as peasantry, proletariat, bourgeoisie, and nobility (Moretti 2014, 12). ‘Middle class’, then, participates in forging the bourgeoisie’s mystique as a universal class that will eventually include everybody.

The signifier ‘neoliberal’—which, unlike ‘middle class’, does carry critical valences—cannot perform the same tactical and analytical functions as ‘bourgeois’ because it fails to mobilise critically the genealogy of this subject. With its post-1970s connotations, ‘neoliberal’ misses the trajectory of a subjectivity—the bourgeois—devoted to liberal-capitalist ideology since its inception. Moreover, when using the concept ‘neoliberal’, it is tempting to exclude from analysis an important category of subjects: those who vociferously stand against neoliberal policies (marketisation and managerial control, privatisation of public resources, dismantling of welfare provisions and cutting down of public spending, aggressive pursuit and use of natural resources, pollution, etc.) while remaining passionately tethered to the colonial-capitalist dispositifs of enjoyment, even if it is in their organic, sustainable, responsible, and fair trade versions.

This book analyses capitalism starting from the play of enjoyment, identification, and desire—and not of rational interest, ignorance, education, or choice—because I believe that the unfruitfulness of our current anti-capitalist and decolonial tactics has to do with libidinal processes and not with reason as defined by the Enlightenment. At the moment, I do not think that one cannot radically question liberal-capitalism without engaging with issues of desire and enjoyment, without, in other words, analysing the mechanisms through which hegemonic fantasies condition our most private, cherished, and stubborn conducts, shaping the ‘substance’ of our ‘being’. This analytical focus is exactly what I understand by a psychosocial approach, an approach that starts from a subject driven by mechanisms placed at another level than (self-)consciousness and rationality. Within this psychosocial conceptualisation, it is only in the realm of enjoyment (jouissance) that we might encounter anything resembling ‘the truth of the subject’, even if it is a truth shaped by elements that are contradictory, fleeting, and obscure to the subject herself. It will be seen that the instability and self-opacity of bourgeois subjectivity do not impede the bourgeoisie to thrive on the already mentioned promise that, one day, everyone will have access to the enjoyment so alluringly staged by the symbolic productions of Western capitalism.

While the present project aims to reactivate the symbolic weight accumulated historically by the signifier ‘bourgeois’, it also expands this signifier’s range beyond the usual referents, the owners of the means of production for example. As the first two chapters detail, the term ‘bourgeois’ points to a constellation of psychological mechanisms specific to subjects formed in the post-war Europe and especially post-1990. However, while it makes claims about a contemporary European subject, this analysis does not aim for socio-historical exactness: its spatial-temporal frame defines a political focus rather than the specificity of its central object, ‘the bourgeois’. My aim is to propose an apparatus for the critical investigation of contemporary liberal-capitalism, to the extent that this apparatus might help rethinking anti-capitalist tactics. As such, the precise spatial-temporal boundaries of bourgeois subjectivity are less important than this apparatus’ ability to identify the symptomatic conducts supporting European liberal-capitalism. Thus, the term ‘bourgeois’ does not make either universal claims or strong claims for specificity, taking some critical distance from the understanding of social position in terms of a specific space, place, time, or class that drives ‘either/or’ sociological taxonomies. One might encounter bourgeois traits outside the territories mapped here. My onto-epistemological framework then, as suits a psychosocial approach, works with an overdetermined concept and its shifting libidinal charges, creating a tool that is fairly precise when discussing issues of fantasy and enjoyment but that otherwise remains ambivalent. My description of the bourgeois will navigate between current events and various genealogies of this subjectivity in manners that preserve this analytical fluidity.

I conceptualise ‘Europe’ as a symbolic production: ‘Europe’ as a global resonance chamber of resources, authority, power relations, knowledge, and violence, and ‘Europe’ also as the phallic signifier of our modern fantasies. When discussing ‘Europe’, then, I am not referring to an objective political-administrative, geographic, or historical entity and even less to the European Union, but to an ideal shaped by this already mentioned modern fantasy. And at this level of conceptualisation, there is no point in dissociating North America from Europe: as Sartre (2004, lviii) argued, North America is nothing but a ‘super-European monster’.

I have also opted to describe the current order as ‘modern’ rather than ‘capitalist’ or ‘neoliberal’. This is not because modernity is not capitalist: I agree with Fredric Jameson’s (2002) argument that detaching these concepts from each other is politically and theoretically dubious. But this is because I regard ‘modernity’ as the ideological branch of capitalism or, more accurately, as the fundamental fantasy fuelling capitalism, an approach which makes visible interesting connections between the capitalist governing apparatuses and bourgeois enjoyment. That is, once we approach ‘modernity’ as a fantasmatic construction, we gain access to an analytical framework in which liberal-capitalist apparatuses are intractable only to the extent that the bourgeois subject invests them libidinally. Within this framework, as Chap. 3 details, the global mystique of bourgeois enjoyment can be understood not only in relation to the European colonial practices but also in relation to the seduction that the modern fantasy exerts on the very subjects it disqualifies from the status of modern.

The theory of subjectivity I propose makes use of concepts central to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the unconscious, of course, but also desire, jouissance, fantasy, ego ideal, disavowal, and identification. More accurately, it makes use of the way in which these concepts have been reshaped and put to work by various psychoanalytically inspired theories that address the question of who we are now and how we could experiment with affecting the elements of our being that we find unacceptable. At the same time, and equally importantly, any radical interrogation and transformation of the current liberal-capitalist regime must have a decolonial ethos. The two aspects are related: a true transformation of our reality, which involves experimenting with new modalities of being, desiring, and enjoying, passes through the obligatory decolonial moment of turning our backs on the Euro-bourgeois master and learning to avoid being interpellated by its look; of learning how not to mistake this look for the omnipotent gaze; and of learning how to give up the pleasures that submission to authority provides the bourgeois with. As many know by now, this is not an easy task: this book argues that one is bourgeois to the extent that one adopts a mechanism of self-preservation based on the refusal to recognise any event that threatens one’s identification with authority.

I will be pitting Lacan-inspired work against equally crucial theoretical innovations coming from fields concerned with the same fundamental questions, but that remain attentive to the discursive effects of psychoanalysis. This means that psychoanalytical theory is not taken to be an objective lens through which one apprehends the truth of the social, but a libidinally charged discourse that reflects the anxieties and psychic investments of its producers and users. And, when dealing with a seductively universalist discourse like psychoanalysis, I think we should keep in mind Mary Ann Duane’s (quoted in Fuss 1995, 36) insight that psychoanalysis, far from representing a universal science, functions as ‘a quite elaborate form of ethnography, as a writing of the ethnicity of the white Western psyche’. The present work employs psychoanalysis as a tool for the investigation of the Euro-bourgeois psyche and as a compendium of the symptoms of its various producers. In other words, psychoanalysis is at the same time a useful instrument for the critical analysis of bourgeois order, one of the master discourses of modernity, and an explanation of bourgeois being and reality that reflects the fantasies of its authors. Thus, the blind spots of psychoanalysis map, to some extent, the framework of the modern fantasy in general.

The obvious example is the way in which psychoanalysis simultaneously imagines and obscures the relationship between race and sex/gender, and if using psychoanalysis for decolonial tasks, one needs to take seriously the idea that its racist-colonial logic is not simply an appendix of the Freudian theoretical body but subtends it in its entirety. The racialized ‘primitive’ is the figure, first invoked and then erased, that secures Freud’s fantasy of a civilised European society, a ‘civilized sociality that can seemingly exist and be (sexually) analysed independent of colonialism and racial problematics’ (Eng 2001, 12). The issue being that, by ignoring the techniques of racial categorisation and regulation intrinsic to modern sexuality, the psychoanalytical theory of (hetero)sexual differentiation is complicitous with the hegemonic, unmarked whiteness that sustains both psychoanalysis and the current colonial-heterosexist regime (ibid. 13 and 139–142). As David L. Eng argues:

… the conceptualization of racial and sexual difference as if they were distinct categories of analysis is a false construction that serves the political power, economic interests, and cultural hegemony of a mainstream social order. We cannot isolate racial formation from gender and sexuality without reproducing the normative logic domination that works to configure these two categories as opposed, independent discourses in the first instance. (Eng 2001, 19)

Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, further put to work psychoanalysis in its dual form, as both a symptom and a diagnostic of modernity, to discuss critical aspects of the contemporary dispositifs governing race and sex/gender, familism, and reproduction.

I will add that, however, this work’s purpose is not polemical and that all throughout I have tried, with varying success, to take seriously Foucault’s warning:

… I think this serious and fundamental relation between struggle and truth … only dramatizes itself, becomes emaciated, and loses its meaning and effectiveness in polemics within theoretical discourse. So in all of this, I will therefore impose only one imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never engage in polemics. (Foucault 2007, 3–4)

In my attempt to escape the lure of polemical debate without abandoning a direct engagement with the discourses that currently have some weight in shaping reality, I bring to the fore the politico-theoretical points of convergence and disagreement in related intellectual productions only when this helps sharpen the analysis.

Dispositifs of Enjoyment

It is suitable to start by making clear my analytical premises, and this section will describe the events that inaugurate the bourgeois ego, desire, and enjoyment. I understand subjectivation as the process through which one becomes recognisable by the Other. And by ‘Other’ I mean a disembodied representation of the socio-symbolic structure, which assumes the function of governing the subject’s social and libidinal fate. This is why, in the bourgeois subject’s libidinal economy, this representation condenses a plethora of elements: authorities, institutions, language, discourse, the law, norms, symbolic codes, and so on. ¹

One of the central premises of the ontology adopted here is that ‘the Other lacks’, which is to say that the symbolic governing of (inter)subjectivity is not as firm as the subject imagines it to be. In fact, the Other’s lack points out that there is nothing intrinsic in our symbolic structures (institutions, language, law, and norms) that allows them to stabilise meaning in a particular configuration or to reveal the ultimate truth of either subject or the social. The only thing that confers authority to such symbolic structures is the subject’s libidinal investment in them and more precisely her desire to believe that these structures have the essential ability to speak the truth, to regulate, to prohibit, and so on. The lack condenses several levels of indeterminacy and most notably the incomplete nature of the symbolic order, its absence of a definitive, extra-linguistic referent, and its production of meaning through a system of relations between signifiers. This indeterminacy includes the processes that shape the ego, the unconscious, or desire and, at the level of subjective experience, means that the subject’s ideal (e.g. ‘man’) is constructed through disavowed exclusions that return to destabilise it (e.g. ‘woman’). It also includes the subject’s formation under intersubjective conditions, most precisely in relation to the desire of the Other over which she has no control and which is unknowable. Irrespective of this conundrum of the lack, the Other remains the most significant figure in the subject’s being.

Becoming recognizable by the Other is initiated by the person’s insertion in an economy of signifiers (I/you, woman, daughter, white, Canadian, Jane, etc.). These signifiers govern the process of subjectivation by staking out a symbolic position that will become the subject’s ‘being’. Being created as a virtual position charted by names is not something any of us can control: this position represents a condensation point of desire, enjoyment, power, and knowledge produced before our symbolic/biological birth within the apparatuses that connect the family, the State, media, the medical profession, biological science, and a myriad other authorities. This ‘alien’ process of being named gains a much more intimate dimension for the subject once she ² realises that these signifiers—Jane and so on—are related to the Other’s desire. Once this connection becomes clear, the subject’s effort to obtain the Other’s love involv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Bourgeois Returns
• 2. The ‘Will-To-Not-Know’
• 3. The Nonmodern Bourgeois
• 4. Bourgeois Sex Fantasy
• 5. The Fantasmatic Revolution
• Backmatter