Abstract
In this essay, we take issue with the historicist tendencies in Fabio Vighi’s reading of Jacques Lacan’s discourses on capitalism. We propose a formalist and analytical reading of the four discourses that encircles the ontological negativity to make way for subjective transformation. We argue for deploying the four discourses together as a conceptual matrix foregrounding the direction of movements from one discourse to another in its rotational structure.
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Notes
Lacan’s own discourse was ambivalent on this. On a number of occasions, he seems to be referring to a transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism. On others, the transition seems to be internal to capitalism, from a prohibitive to a permissive superego. For a more detailed discussion of this apparent inconsistency and our objections to what we call “the historicism of the quarter-turn” from the discourse of the master to the discourse of university, see Madra and Özselçuk (2014).
After remarking that the “unconscious only has to do with the dynamic that precipitates the see-sawing of one of these discourses into the other,” Lacan (1970) qualified this statement by saying “[i]n following my rough-hewn topology, one discovers in it the first Freudian approach in that the effect of ‘progress’ to be expected from the unconscious is censorship” (pp. 22–23). Lacan’s ironic remarks suggest that we situate the discourse of the university, which is supposedly “progressive,” as a “regression” away from the discourse of the master in so far as it avoids the division of the subject. Furthermore, one can find in Lacan’s discourse allusions to how this reaction is overdetermined by the discourse of the hysteric. For a discussion partly along these lines, see Soler (2002), who argues that the master/hysteric couple is “found throughout history.” Soler adds that the discourse of the hysteric is responsible for the scientific-capitalist couple functioning as the discourse of the university (2002, p. 47).
The dynamic here is not so much the disappearance of the anxiety-inducing dimension of objet a, but rather the regressive quarter-turn displacements in quadrupedal schemas that constitute a response to the impasses of each discourse: the university discourse as a response to that of the master, the discourse of the pervert as a response to that of the university. Shifts from one discourse to another enable us to make sense of capitalism as a discursive formation (with material effects) structured around a central, affectively-charged impossibility. The impasse that defines the discourse of the master is the incongruence between the surplus product, a and the hidden truth of the master, $. As Copjec (1994) once remarked, “[t]his less-than-useless surplus pleasure cannot, therefore, enter the calculus of capitalism except to undermine it” (p. viii). The university discourse, then, is a response to the impasse of the master’s discourse to the extent that it rallies all knowledge in order to completely domesticate a, such that nothing remains except a subject reduced to a void. Yet the impotence here manifests itself in the incongruence between the $ and the master signifier, S1, the loss of symbolic efficacy of the authority figures (Žižek, 2004, p. 145). Then the discourse of the pervert is a response to this crisis, by way of offering objects (“lathouses”) to fill the void of the subject. Yet, the surplus product of this process is a proliferation of master-signifiers (“père-versions”), father-substitutes, that cannot be totalized by a Universal Knowledge (S2). Recently, a number of commentators have begun to explore the radical and ethical potentials unleashed by the discourse of the pervert (McNulty, 2013; Wright, 2013; for an earlier exposition, see Dean, 2000).
Elsewhere we have proposed distinguishing methodologically and analytically the psychic category of drive at the level of the individual subject from the social category of “drive effect” at the level of social formation (Özselçuk and Madra, 2007). While the logic of capitalist drive-effect may appear to be homologous with the psychic category of drive, its constitution through a complexly overdetermined ensemble of social processes needs to be accounted for through a careful articulation of Marxian and psychoanalytic schemas. While there may be homologies, what makes and umakes the loop of the capitalist drive-effect must surely be different from that of the drive at the level of the subject.
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Madra, Y., Özselçuk, C. The direction of the movement does matter: A response to Fabio Vighi. Psychoanal Cult Soc 20, 20–28 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2015.11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2015.11