Welcome to the Desert of 'Post-Ideology'

by Slavoj Žižek

During a recent visit to California, I attended a party at a professor’s house with a Slovene friend, a heavy smoker. Late in the evening, my friend became desperate and politely asked the host if he could step out onto the veranda for a smoke. When the host (no less politely) said no, my friend proposed to step out onto the street, but even this was rejected by the host who claimed that such a public display of smoking might damage his reputation with his neighbors. But what really surprised me was that, after dinner, the host offered us soft drugs, and this kind of smoking went on without any problem— as if drugs were far less dangerous than cigarettes. 

​The impasses of todays consumerism provide a clear case of the Lacanian distinction between pleasure and enjoyment: what Lacan calls “enjoyment” (jouissance) is a deadly excess rather than pleasure; its place is beyond the pleasure principle. In other words, the term plus-de-jouir (surplus- or excess-enjoyment) is a pleonasm, since enjoyment is in itself excessive, in contrast to pleasure, which is by definition moderate, regulated by a proper measure. We thus have two extremes: on the one hand, the enlightened hedonist who carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt; on the other hand, the jouisseur proper, ready to consummate his very existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment. Or, in terms of our society, on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected from all kinds of harassment and threats to health; on the other, the drug addict (or smoker) bent on self-destruction. Enjoyment serves ​nothing, and the great effort of our contemporary hedonist-utilitarian “permissive” society is to incorporate this un(ac)countable excess into the field of (ac)counting. 

Along these lines, Lee Edelman has developed the notion of homosexuality as involving an ethics of “now” of unconditional fidelity to jouissance, of following the death drive by totally ignoring any reference to the future or engagement with the practical complex of worldly affairs. Homosexuality thus stands for the thorough acceptance of the negativity of the death drive, of withdrawal from reality into the Real of the “Night of the World.” Along these lines, Edelman opposes the radical ethics of homosexuality to the predominant obsession with posterity (that is, children): children are the “pathological” moment that binds us to pragmatic considerations and thus compels us to betray the radical ethics of jouissance.

The first conclusion to be drawn from this is that we should reject the common-sense assumption according to which, in a hedonist- consumerist society, everyone has something to enjoy: the basic function of enlightened consumerist hedonism is, on the contrary, to deprive enjoyment of its excessive dimension, of its disturbing surplus, of the fact it serves nothing. Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it remains healthy, that it does not threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate yes, but fat-free; Coke yes, but diet; mayonnaise yes, but without cholesterol; sex yes, but safe sex. We are here in the domain of what Lacan calls the discourse of University, as opposed to the discourse of the Master: the Master goes to the end in his consumption, unconstrained by petty utilitarian considerations (which is why there is a certain formal homology between the traditional aristocratic master and a drug addict focused on his deadly enjoyment), while the consumerist’s pleasures are regulated by scientific knowledge propagated by the University discourse. The decaffeinated enjoyment we thus obtain is a semblance of enjoyment, not its Real, and it is in this sense that Lacan talks about the imitation of enjoyment in the discourse of the University. One prototype for this discourse is the multiplicity of articles in popular magazines advocating sex as good for our health: sexual activity works like jogging, strengthening the heart, relaxing our tensions—even kissing is good for our health. A similar celebration of desexualized vitality abounds in Stalinism. Although the total mobilization during the first five-year plan tended to oppose sexuality as the last domain of bourgeois resistance, this did not prevent it from trying to recuperate sexual energy in order to rein vigorate the struggle for socialism: in the early 1930s, a variety of tonics were widely advertised in the Soviet media, with names like “Spermin-pharmakon,” “Spermol,” and “Sekar fluid— Extractum testiculorum. ”Similarly, in todays Western societies, we see the proliferation of caffeine drinks supposed to give a powerful charge of “energy” (Red Bull, etcetera).

​Lacan gives us a precise insight into how the paternal prohibition functions: “In fact, the image of the ideal Father is a neurotics fantasy. Beyond the Mother ... stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind eye to desires. This marks—more than it reveals—the true function of the Father, which is fundamentally to unite (and not to oppose) a desire to the Law.” While prohibiting his son s escapades, the father discreetly not only ignores and tolerates them, but even solicits them—as with the Catholic Church, which today turns a blind eye to pedophilia. We should link this insight to Lacans critique of Hegel’s notion that it is the Master who enjoys, while the servant works, being compelled to renounce enjoyment: for Lacan, on the contrary, the only enjoyments are the little bits left to the servant by the Master when he turns a blind eye to the servant’s little transgressions: “Jouissance comes easy to the slave, and it leaves work in serfdom.”

An anecdote about Catherine the Great illustrates the point. On being informed that her servants were stealing wine and food behind her back, even going so far as to mock her, she just smiled, aware that occasionally dropping crumbs of enjoyment for them kept them in their position as servants. The servant’s belief is that he only gets little crumbs of enjoyment, while the Master enjoys fully—in reality, however, the only enjoyment is the servant’s. It is in this sense that the Father as the agent of prohibition or the law sustains desire or pleasure: there is no direct access to enjoymerit since its very space is opened up by the blanks of the Father’s controlling gaze. A negative proof for this constitutive role of the Father in carving out the space for a viable enjoyment can be found in the deadlock of todays permissiveness, where the master or expert no longer prohibits enjoyment but enjoins it (“sex is healthy,” etcetera), thereby effectively sabotaging it. Indeed, as Freud once remarked to his close friend Otto Bauer, a key figure of Austrian Social Democracy (and the brother of Ida, the legendary “Dora”): “Do not try and make men happy, they do not wish happiness.

What, then, is the status of the Real of jouissance? Is it just a presupposed virtual or fantasmatic point (like the Master’s jouissance presupposed by the servant) or a direct Real that threatens to overwhelm us, destroying the symbolic texture? We should maintain this “undecidability,” in no way reducing the Real of jouissance to a fantasmatic point of reference: the Real of jouissance effectively overwhelms the subject in psychosis. The only way to sustain the Real when it gets too close—that is, the only way to avoid psychosis—is to fictionalize it. Today, the threat of the over-proximity of the Real appears in the guise of two exceptions in the happy universe of healthy enjoyment: cigarettes and, up to a point, drugs. For different (mostly ideological) reasons, it proved impossible to “sublate” the pleasure of smoking into a healthy and useful pursuit: smoking remains a lethal addiction, a feature that obliterates all its other characteristics (it can help me relax, socialize more easily...). The strengthening of the prohibition on smoking is easily discernible in the gradual changes made to the obligatory warnings on cigarette packets: years ago, it was usually a neutral expert statement like the surgeon general’s warning: “Smoking may seriously damage your health.” More recently, the tone has become more and more aggressive, shifting from the University discourse to the Master’s direct injunction: “Smoking kills!”—a clear warning that excess enjoyment is lethal; furthermore, the warning is printed larger and larger on the packs and accompanied by graphic photos. 

The best indicator of this change in the status of smoking is, as usual, Hollywood. After the gradual dissolution of the Hays code from the late 1950s onwards, when all taboos (on homosexuality, explicit sex, drugs, and so on) were suspended, one taboo gradually imposed itself as a new prohibition, a kind of replacement for the multiple prohibitions of the old code: smoking. Back in the classic Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s, smoking on screen was not only totally normal, it even functioned as one of the great seduction techniques (recall, in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall asking Humphrey Bogart for a light). Today, the only people who smoke on screen are Arab terrorists, and assorted other criminals or anti-heroes, and the possibility of digitally erasing cigarettes from classic movies has even been discussed. This new prohibition itself indicates a broader shift in the status of ethics: where the Hays code focused on ideology, enforcing sexual and social codes, the new ethics focuses on health: the bad is what threatens our health and well-being. 

Symptomatic here is the ambiguous role of the “electronic cigarette,” which functions like sugarless sugar: an electrical device that simulates tobacco smoking by producing an inhaled mist with the physical sensation, appearance, and often the flavor and nicotine content of inhaled tobacco smoke, though without its odor, and apparently without (most of) its health risks. Most e-cigarettes are self-contained cylindrical devices the size of a ballpoint pen, designed to resemble actual cigarettes or cigars. The e-cigarette is proving difficult to classify and to regulate. Is it itself a drug? A medical product? Some airlines, for instance, have banned them because they display “addictive behavior” that may upset other passengers; others will offer them for sale during the flight. 

But who is this Other whose addictive behavior—in short, whose display of excessive enjoyment—disturbs us so much? It is none other than what, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is called the Neighbor. A neighbor by definition harasses, and “harassment” is another of those words that, although it seems to refer to a clearly defined fact, functions in a deeply ambiguous way and perpetrates an ideological mystification. What is the inner logic of the standard discourse regarding sexual harassment? The very asymmetry of seduction—the imbalance between desire and its object—is rejected. At every stage in an erotic relationship, only contractual reciprocity with mutual agreement is allowed. In this way, sexual intercourse is desexualized and becomes a “deal,” in the sense of a market exchange of equivalents between equal and free partners, where the object of exchange is pleasure. The theoretical expression of this turn to pleasure is marked by the shift from Freud/Lacan to Foucault: from sexuality and desire to desexualized pleasures striving to reach the extreme of the raw Real. The explosive expansion of pornography in the digital media is exemplary of this de-sexualization of sex. The promise is “always more sex,” to show it all, more and more of the raw Real, from extreme fisting (a favorite of Foucault’s) to snuff movies, but all it delivers is an endlessly reproduced void and a pseudo-satisfaction. The only satisfaction one can get from this reduction of sexuality to a gynecological display of the interaction of sexual organs is an idiotic masturbatory jouissance.

Within such a libidinal economy, the relationship to the Other is gradually replaced by what the late Lacan baptized with the neologism les lathouses—consumerist object-gadgets that captivate the libido with the promise of delivering excessive pleasure, but which actually reproduce only the lack itself. A couple of decades ago, a charming beer advertisement was shown on British TV. Its first part staged the well-known fairy-tale scene: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, upon which, of course, the frog turns miraculously into a handsome young man. The story did not end there however: the young man then embraces and kisses the girl, who promptly turns into a bottle of beer, which the man holds triumphantly in his hand. For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signaled by the kiss) turns an ugly frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence; for the man, the point is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (the objet petit a). The unexpected reversal here thus perfectly exemplifies the shift from neighbor to lathouse. 

Likewise, the rise of political correctness and the increase in interpersonal violence represent two sides of the same coin. Jean-Claude Milner has argued that insofar as the basic premise of political correctness is the reduction of sexuality to a contractual mutual consent, the gay rights movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts that stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochistic sex (treating a person like a dog on a lead, slave-trading, torture, even consensual killing). In such practices, the market freedom of the contract sublates itself: slave-trading becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom. It is as if the motif of “Kant with Sade” becomes reality in an unexpected way. 

Two things are thus clear. First, if Thomas de Quincey had to rewrite the opening lines of his famous essay Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts today, he would undoubtedly change the final word (procrastination): “If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and smoking in public.” Second, the underlying problem here is that of loving ones neighbor—as usual, G. K. Chesterton hit the nail on the head: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” So what happens when these problematic neighbors strike back? 

Although the UK riots of August 2011 were triggered by the suspicious death of Mark Duggan, it is generally accepted that they expressed a deeper unease—but of what kind? Similar to the riots in the Paris suburbs in 2005, the UK protesters had no message to deliver. The contrast with the massive student demonstrations of November 2010, which also turned violent, is clear. The students had a message—the rejection of the governments higher education reforms. This is why it is difficult to conceive of the 2011 riots in Marxist terms, as indicative of an emerging revolutionary subject; much more appropriate here is the Hegelian notion of the “rabble”—referring to those outside the organized social sphere, prevented from participating in social production, who are able to express their discontent only in the form of “irrational” outbursts of destructive violence, or what Hegel called “abstract negativity.” Perhaps this is the hidden truth of Hegel, of his political thought: the more a society conforms to a well-organized rational state, the more the abstract negativity of “irrational” violence returns.

We were told that the events of 1989-91—the disintegration of the Communist regimes—signaled the end of ideology. The era of grand ideological projects that inevitably ended in totalitarian catastrophe was over, as we entered a new era of pragmatic rational politics, and so forth. However, if the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense at all, it is here, in these ongoing outbursts of violence, that it becomes discernible. During the UK riots of 2011, no particular demands were made by the protestors: what we had was a zero-level protest, a violent act which demands nothing. There was an irony in watching the sociologists, intellectuals, and commentators trying to understand and to help. Trying desperately to translate the protests back into their familiar language, they only succeeded in obfuscating the key enigma the riots presented. 

The protesters, although effectively underprivileged and de facto excluded, were in no sense living on the edge of starvation or reduced to the level of bare survival. People in much more terrible material straits, even in conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organize themselves into political agents with clear agendas. The fact that the protests had no program is thus itself a fact to be interpreted, one that tells us a great deal about our ideologico- political predicament: what kind of universe do we inhabit that can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only alternative available to an enforced democratic consensus is a form of blind acting out? The sad fact that opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a coherent utopian project, but only takes the form of meaningless outburst, is a grave indictment of our epoch. What function does our celebrated freedom of choice serve when the only choice is effectively between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence? 

Alain Badiou has claimed that we live in a social space that is progressively experienced as “worldless”: within such a space, meaningless violence is the only form protest can take. Even Nazi anti-Semitism opened up a world, however ghastly: it described its situation by positing an enemy, the “Jewish conspiracy”; it named a goal and the means of achieving it. Nazism disclosed reality in a way that allowed its subjects to acquire a global cognitive map, which included a space for their meaningful engagement. Perhaps it is here that we should locate one of the main dangers of capitalism. Although capitalism is global,encompassing the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu “worldless” ideological constellation, depriving the vast majority of people of any meaningful cognitive orientation. Capitalism is the first socioeconomic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global “capitalist worldview,” no “capitalist civilization” proper. The fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without- meaning, as the real of the global market mechanism. 

This is why both conservative and liberal reactions to the UK riots clearly missed the mark. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism, all necessary means to restore order must be used, and what is needed to prevent further explosions of this kind is not more tolerance and social intervention but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What is false in this account is not only that it neglects the desperate social situation that drives young people to such violent outbursts, but, perhaps more important, the way those outbursts echo the subterranean premises of conservative ideology itself. When, back in the 1990s, the British Conservative Party launched its infamous Back to Basics campaign, its obscene supplement was clearly indicated by Norman Tebbitt, “never shy about exposing the dirty secrets of the Conservative unconscious”: “man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.”10 This, then, is what Back to Basics was really about: the reassertion of the barbaric “basic instincts” lurking beneath the semblance of civilized bourgeois society. And do we not encounter in the recent violent outbursts these same basic instincts— not of the lower underprivileged strata, but of the hegemonic capitalist ideology itself?

Even further back, in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of “repressive desublimation” to explain the “sexual revolution”: human drives can be desublimated, deprived of their civilized coating, and still retain their “repressive” character—is not this kind of “repressive desublimation” what we see on British streets today? Not ​men reduced to “natural beasts,” but the historically specific “natural beast” produced by capitalist ideology itself, the zero-level of the capitalist subject. In Seminar XVIII (Le savoir du psychanalyste, 1970-71, unpublished), Lacan plays with the idea of a specific capitalist discourse (or discourse of the capitalist) that is the same as the discourse of the Master, but with the first (left) couple exchanging places: $ occupies the place of the agent and the Master-Signifier the place of truth:

$ S2
​S1 a

The connecting lines remain the same as in the Master’s discourse ($—a, S1—S2), but they run diagonally: while the agent is the same as in the discourse of the Hysteric, the (divided) subject, it does not address itself to the Master, but to the surplus-enjoyment, the “product” of capitalist circulation. As in the discourse of the Master, the “other” is here the Servant’s Knowledge (or, increasingly, scientific knowledge), dominated by the true Master, capital itself.

​The UK’s urban violence thus cannot be accounted for merely by poverty and a lack of horizons, or the dissolution of the family and other social links. As to the form of subjectivity that fits this constellation, we might begin with “The Stranger,” the famous prose poem by Baudelaire:

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,
Your mother, your sister, or your brother?
I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
Your friends?
Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.
Your country?
I do not know in what latitude it lies.
Beauty?
I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.
Gold?
I hate it as you hate God.
​Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds ... the clouds ... that pass ... up there ... up there 
... the wonderful clouds!

Does this “enigmatical man” not provide the portrait of an internet geek? Alone in front of the screen, he has neither father nor mother, neither country nor god—all he needs is a digital cloud to which his internet device is linked. The final outcome of such a position is, of course, that the subject itself turns into “a cloud in pants,” avoiding sexual contact as too intrusive. In 1915, Vladimir Mayakovsky entered a train carriage in which the only other occupant was a young woman; to put her at ease he introduced himself by saying, “I am not a man but a cloud in pants.” As the words left his lips he realized the phrase was perfect for a poem and went on to write his first masterpiece, “A Cloud in Pants”:

No longer a man with a mission, something wet and tender 
— a cloud in pants

How, then, does such a “cloud in pants” have sex? An ad in the United Airlines in-flight magazine begins with a suggestion: “Maybe its time to outsource ... your dating life.” It goes on: “People hire professionals to handle so many aspects of their lives, so why not use a professional to help you find someone special? We are matchmaking professionals—this is what we do day in and day out.” After outsourcing manual work (and much of the pollution) to Third World countries, after outsourcing (most) torture to dictatorships (whose torturers were probably trained by US or Chinese specialists), after outsourcing our political life to administrative experts (who are obviously less and less up to the task—see the morons who compete in Republican Party primaries)—why not take this process to its logical conclusion and consider outsourcing sex itself? Why burden ourselves with the effort of seduction with all its potential embarrassments? After a woman and ​I agree to have sex, each of us need only designate a younger stand-in, so that while they make love (or, more precisely, while the two of us make love through them), we can have a quiet drink and conversation and then retire to our own quarters to rest or to read a good book. After such disengagement, the only way to reconnect with reality is, of course, through raw violence. 

The left-liberal response to the riots, no less predictably, was to stick to their mantra about neglected social programs and integration efforts, the failure of which has deprived the younger generation of immigrants of any decent economic and social prospects. Instead of indulging in conservative revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of their violent outbursts: can we even imagine what it means to be a young man living in a poor and racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, surrounded by destitution and broken families, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope for the future? The moment we take all this into account, the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear—supposedly. The problem with this account is that it merely lists the objective conditions for the riots, ignoring the subjective dimension: to riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to ones objective conditions, how one subjectivizes them. We live in an era of cynicism in which we can easily imagine a protester who, having been caught looting and burning and pressed for the reasons for his violence, will suddenly start to talk like a social worker, sociologist or social psychologist, citing diminished social mobility, rising economic insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, but he does it nonetheless, as in the famous “Gee, Officer Krupke” song from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), which contains the line “Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease”:

We never had the love
That every child oughta get
We ain’t no delinquents
Were misunderstood
Deep down inside us there is good
...
My daddy beats my mommy My mommy clobbers me
My grandpa is a commie
My grandma pushes tea
My sister wears a mustache My brother wears a dress
Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess
...
This boy don’t need a couch He needs a useful career 
Society’s played him a terrible trick 
And sociologically he’s sick
...
They tell me get a job 
Like be a soda jerker Which means I’d be a slob It’s not I’m antisocial 
I’m only anti-work

Such subjects do not simply represent a social disease, they declare themselves to be incarnations of one, ironically staging different accounts of their predicament (just how a social worker, a psychologist, a judge would describe it). Consequently, it is meaningless to ponder which of the two reactions to the riots, conservative or liberal, is worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and this includes the warning voiced by both sides about the real danger of these outbursts residing in the easily predictable racist reaction of the “silent majority.” This reaction (which should absolutely not be dismissed as simply reactionary) already took place in the guise of a “tribal” activity of its own, as local communities (Turkish, Afro-Caribbean, Sikh...) quickly formed their own vigilante units to protect their hard-earned property. Here, too, we should reject the injunctions regarding which side to take in this conflict: are the small shop-keepers defending the petty bourgeoisie against a genuine if violent protest against the system, or are they representatives of the genuine working class resisting the forces of social disintegration? The protesters violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the stores looted were not those of richer neighborhoods, they were the ​hard-won acquisitions of the very stratum from which the protesters originated. The sad truth of the situation lies in this conflict between two poles of the underprivileged: those who still succeed in functioning within the system and those who are too frustrated to go on doing so and are only able to strike out at the other pole of their own community. The conflict that sustains the riots is thus not simply a conflict between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, a conflict between non-society and society, between those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose, between those without a stake in their community and those whose stakes are the greatest. 

But why were the protesters pushed towards this kind of violence? Zygmunt Bauman was on the right track here when he characterized the riots as acts of “defective and disqualified consumers.” More than anything else, the riots were a consumerist carnival of destruction, an expression of acquisitive desire violently enacted when unable to realize itself in the “proper” way (by shopping). As such, of course, the riots also contain a moment of genuine protest, a kind of ironic reply to the consumerist ideology by which we are bombarded in our daily lives: “You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the possibility of doing so properly—so here we are doing it the only way open to us!” The violence thus, in a sense, staged the truth of our “post-ideological society,” displaying in a painfully palpable way the material force of ideology. The problem with the riots was not their violence as such, but the fact that it was not truly self-assertive— in Nietzschean terms, it was reactive, not active, impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force, envy masked as a triumphant carnival.

One danger is that religion will come to fill this void and restore meaning. That is to say, the riots need to be situated in the series they form with another type of violence perceived by the liberal majority as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a deadly vicious circle, each generating the very forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à lacte, where the recourse to violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the Paris or UK riots conceived as “zero-level” protests, violent outbursts that demanded nothing, terrorist attacks are carried out on behalf of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.

​But then there are the Arab uprisings. Do they not offer an example of a collective act of resistance that avoids this false alternative between self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism?

Slavoj Žižek/THE YEAR OF DREAMING DANGEROUSLY/Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology