Žižek for America: A Crisis of Ideological Enjoyment

— Introduction —

The United States of America aren’t so united. Is our current state of politico-ideological tension really one between two conflicting sets of ideas? To some degree it surely is. There is a certain battle between different ideals and principles being waged at the moment. However, as opposed to ideological meaning, I’m going to argue that the more pressing factor currently at play in America is located in our ideological enjoyment (jouissance). This distinction between ideological meaning and ideological enjoyment is crucial for us to grasp. In order to achieve this, we must turn our attention to the philosophical work of Slavoj Žižek (arguably the greatest thinker of ideology who has ever lived). Before going any further, I need say right now that I am a leftist and that I will explicitly be writing from this perspective. There’s no way for me to write this particular series of posts without getting somewhat personal. More than anything, this post is about a problem I detect in myself and is also an attempt to begin to work through it. In this post, I will mainly be laying out some of the basic concepts I’ll be using in this series.

What is ideological enjoyment? Well, the first thing that needs to be said is that “enjoyment” really isn’t the best word for what will be discussed in this post. The right word is the French term jouissance. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan utilized this term in his work and it’s his concept of it that I’ll be using here. English doesn’t have a word that truly captures the meaning of jouissance. Words like “enjoyment”, “pleasure”, etc., kind of capture it, but not fully. Jouissance refers to an excessive sort of pleasure, a pleasure-to-the-point-of-pain. This pleasure or enjoyment is of a sexual nature (“sexual” in Freud’s board sense of the term). The reason why translating it as “pleasure” is problematic is because Lacan himself made an important distinction between jouissance and pleasure (or, more accurately, the pleasure principle). For Lacan, pleasure has to do with homeostasis in body, that is, to a kind of libidinal equilibrium. Pleasure is precisely when there’s no excessive sensation or stimulation circulating throughout the body. Pleasure is the bodily calm that enables us to be functioning social subjects. Jouissance, on the other hand, is what lies on the other side of pleasure or beyond the pleasure principle, which is to say that it’s an intense sensation that overloads the body and disrupts our ability to be the subjects we normally are. As far as the term “enjoyment” goes, it carries too many connotations that are inconsistent with Lacan’s meaning of jouissance. For us, enjoyment usually means mild amusement and lighthearted entertainment. Jouissance is more serious and intense than all that, which is why I’m opting to leave it untranslated for the most part from here on out.

Now, jouissance, especially surplus-jouissance, is of central importance when it comes to individual subjectivity as well as to economics, politics and ideology. Lacanians and Žižekians are always going on and on about jouissance in all of its multiple forms. They are detectives of jouissance. They are constantly searching for the jouissance in a given situation. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who is imagined to have it? Who’s the object of jouissance in this scenario? Where is the jouissance located? I’ll be approaching the ideological division in America in this way. I want to point out the ways in which we get jouissance through our ideological confrontations. The key takeaway from this will hopefully be the recognition that ideological jouissance is a dangerous threat. This is precisely why the concept is so relevant. America has crossed a threshold in ideology — one concerning jouissance and not meaning. Why is this so important? Because people literally kill and die over jouissance. The past, especially the twentieth century, provides us with a whole host of sad, tragic examples of the violence that can spring from ideological jouissance and its relation to fantasy.

— The Žižekian Critique of Ideology: Two Methods —

In his classic book The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek argues that there are two main steps when it comes to critiquing a given ideology. The first involves interpreting and unpacking various clusters of meaning, whereas the second is geared toward locating the jouissance in the ideological formation.

There are also two complementary procedures of the ‘criticism of ideology’: one is discursive, the ‘symptomal reading’ of the ideological text bringing about the ‘deconstruction’ of the spontaneous experience of its meaning — that is, demonstrating how a given ideological field is a result of a montage of heterogeneous ‘floating signifiers’, of their totalization through the intervention of certain ‘nodal points’; the other aims at extracting the kernel of enjoyment, at articulating the way in which — beyond the field of meaning but at the same time internal to it — an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 140)

This is obviously a dense passage but it contains some profound insights. When Žižek says that an ideology is a “text”, he means that interpreting a particular ideology is like interpreting a book, that is, a collection of words (signifiers). Just as with books, ideological “texts” have certain key words (master signifiers, points de capiton, nodal points) that anchor and unify the rest of the words (floating signifiers). In other words, certain key words, be they the names of main characters, essential events or recurring themes, set the very context in which all the other words make sense. This is all to say that ideology critique is deeply connected to a specialized analysis of language. Žižek provides some helpful examples that make sense of all of this.

The multitude of ‘floating signifiers’, of proto­-ideological elements, is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (the Lacanian point de capiton) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning.
Ideological space is made of non-bound, non-tied elements, ‘floating signifiers’, whose very identity is ‘open’, overdetermined by their articulation in a chain with other elements — that is, their ‘literal’ signification depends on their metaphorical surplus-signification. Ecologism, for example: its connection with other ideological elements is not determined in advance; one can be a state-orientated ecologist (if one believes that only the intervention of a strong state can save us from catastrophe), a socialist ecologist (if one locates the source of merciless exploitation of nature in the capitalist system), a conservative ecologist (if one preaches that man must again become deeply rooted in his native soil), and so on; feminism can be socialist, apolitical; even racism could be elitist or populist . . . The ‘quilting’ performs the totalization by means of which this free-floating of ideological elements is halted, fixed — that is to say, by means of which they become parts of the structured network of meaning.
If we ‘quilt’ the floating signifiers through ‘Communism’, for example, ‘class struggle’ confers a precise and fixed signification to all other elements: to democracy (so-called ‘real democracy’ as opposed to ‘bourgeois formal democracy’ as a legal form of exploitation); to feminism (the exploitation of women as resulting from the class-conditioned division of labour); to ecologism (the destruction of natural resources as a logical consequence of profit-orientated capitalist production); to the peace movement (the principal danger to peace is adventuristic imperialism), and so on.
What is at stake in the ideological struggle is which of the ‘nodal points’, points de capiton, will totalize, include in its series of equivalences, these free­-floating elements.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 95–6)

Now, the “symptomal reading” of an ideology involves sorting through its “text” and pinpointing the master signifiers at work in it, but it also, more importantly, involves finding the internal points of tension or contradiction (blank spots) that undermine the very “text” itself. Žižek refers to these internal points of contradictions or ideological deadlocks as “symptoms” for reasons I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, these deadlocks are ones built into the very structure of a society and undermine its functioning from within. To negate the deadlock would be to negate the society to which it belongs, but so long as this “symptom” exists, it while problematize the social order. Here’s the thing: pointing out to us that society is built on all kinds of intrinsic deadlocks (exploitative antagonisms, e.g., proletariat vs. bourgeoisie) doesn’t shake us to our cores. We all know that this is true. None of us whole-heartedly believe in the system. We are all ideological cynics.

It is clear, therefore, that confronted with such cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. We can no longer subject the ideological text to ‘symptomatic reading’, confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency — cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance. Is then the only issue left to us to affirm that, with the reign of cynical reason, we find ourselves in the so-called post-ideological world? . . . It is here, at this point, that the distinction between symptom and fantasy must be introduced in order to show how the idea that we live in a post­-ideological society proceeds a little too quickly: cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 26–7)

In other words, at a conscious level, we all know that the game is rigged and we no longer need Marxist philosophers to explain this to us. We all know that politicians, advertisers, capitalists, the mass media, etc., are all full of shit when it comes to what they say about our society. None of us buy into the official ideology that circulates at the explicit level. Nevertheless, and this is the main point, we know very well that ideology is bullshit, but still we go along with it, that is, we still play its game. We act and behave ideologically. We do what ideology dictates. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the consumer society. Everyone knows all too well that consumerism is a soulless, stupid, empty, simulatory, illusory trick — and yet still we consume and desire to consume. For Žižek, this indicates that the real hold ideology has on us is not located at the level of consciousness, ideas, concepts, etc., but, rather, at the unconscious level of fantasy with all the jouissance it entails. Fantasy is corner stone of ideology insofar as it unconsciously determines our default behaviour. Ideology is not primarily a set of bad ideas that produce “false consciousness”, a distorted view on reality. Instead, ideology is a fundamental, unconscious fantasy that shapes and structures our social reality itself (the spontaneous actions of our material bodies and the surplus-enjoyment they get from them). We, ideological cynics, might not believe in ideology, but our unconsciouses do.

For our purposes, the second procedure of ideology critique is the one we are going to be focusing on. All across the internet, people are arguing about the meaning of various ideologies, about ideological “texts”. They might not be using Žižek’s terminology, but YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, 4chan and Reddit are filled with arguments over the master signifiers “capitalism”, “communism”, “libertarianism”, “socialism”, “fascism”, “totalitarianism”, “feminism”, “neoliberalism”, “nationalism”, “anarchism”, “globalism”, “racism”, “democracy”, etc., and their specific effects on the world. I’m certainly not saying that there’s no work to be done on the side of ideology critique engaged in “symptomal readings” (America could definitely use this critical procedure), but what is more urgently needed is detailed investigation into how ideological fantasy and ideological jouissance are currently operating in America. The question is not How do we think about ideology? The question is How do we enjoy ideology?

— Ideological Fantasy and Ideological Jouissance —

For Lacan and Žižek, fantasy is not merely about wish fulfillment. Yes, desire and fantasy are fundamentally linked, but in a specific way that relates to the Other (other people, society at large, institutions, political parties, churches, etc.). It’s not that we spontaneously find ourselves desiring x, and, then, construct a fantasy image of us getting our hands on it. No. The Lacanian perspective views fantasy as an answer to the desire of the Other. Given that fantasy and desire go hand in hand, we can say that desire (fantasy) is the desire of the Other. Here’s how it works. We are always being confronted by the desire of the Other, that is, we are constantly being assailed by others wanting something from us. Now, the Other’s desire can be the desire of a specific other (a person) or the desire of a social institution (say, for instance, a university). The Other can even be society itself. Oftentimes, the Symbolic order (matrix of intelligibility) lays out what the Other wants from us. Nevertheless, the Symbolic cannot make sense out of desire through and through. In the Symbolic, there is always the Real or the unsymbolizable. The Other’s desire often evades our attempts to comprehend it. People, institutions, society, etc., desire things from us, but we are often left guessing as to what these desires specifically desire.

Even when the Other explicitly and straightforwardly demands something from us, we still cannot be sure when it comes to the nature of the desire beyond the demand. There is often a discrepancy between the Other’s demand and the Other’s desire. Lacan and Žižek like to express this inconsistency with the Italian question Che vuoi?, which means “You are demanding this of me but what do you really want?” The reason why we can never have full certainty of the Other’s desire is precisely because the Other itself cannot have it. Why? Because the Other (another person) has an unconscious that constitutes desire in a way that is imperceptible to the conscious ego. The Other’s desire is never understood by the Other itself, therefore, it can never make an explicit demand that is necessarily a perfect expression of that desire. I recently heard the philosopher-theologian Peter Rollins give a wonderful example of this. Picture two parents telling their child that it’s never okay to resort to violence. Soon after, the child is thrown into a confrontation with a bully. The bullying is relentless and quickly turns physical. The child decides to fight back and punches the bully. Once back at home, the parents continue to emphasize that resorting to violence is bad, but, strangely, the child detects in the parents a certain happiness, a gleam in the eye. It’s very subtle but clear. They are delighted, though hesitantly so, that the child fought back. The child immediately registers the inconsistency between the parents’ demand and the parents’ desire. Let’s turn this around and say that the kid decides to strictly obey the parents’ demand and refuses to fight back. The child relays the story to the parents and they say that they’re proud of the self-restraint and pacifism accomplished, but this time the kid detects a resonating disappointment in them. They secretly desire that the child had punched back.

The enigmatic desire of the Other provokes great anxiety. The gaze of the Other bears down on you but in a way that is fully mysterious and enigmatic. This is not confined to early childhood, but remains a permanent dynamic throughout all of our lives. Lacan dramatized this in Seminar X with his image of a person standing in front of a giant preying mantis while wearing a mantis mask. Does the mantis see you as a lover, a child, a rival? “What does the terrifying mantis want from me?” The desire of the Other is primarily in the register of the Real, since we cannot get a Symbolic, intelligible, conceptual hold on it. Remember, the other person has an unconscious, which means that they don’t even understand their desire due to the fact that its fundamental elements are not accessible to egoic self-consciousness and its reflective capacity for introspection. The Other cannot even tell us what it really desires of us. In order to escape this nightmarish situation, one that reminds us of Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial, we construct fantasies that serve to answer the question of the Other’s desire. “Oh, this is what the Other wants from me”.

Fantasy appears, then, as an answer to ‘Che vuoi?’, to the unbearable enigma of the desire of the Other, of the lack in the Other, but it is at the same time fantasy itself which, so to speak, provides the co-ordinates of our desire — which constructs the frame enabling us to desire something. The usual definition of fantasy (‘an imagined scenario representing the realization of desire’) is therefore somewhat misleading, or at least ambiguous: in the fantasy-scene the desire is not fulfilled, ‘satisfied’, but constituted (given its objects, and so on) — through fantasy, we learn ‘how to desire’. In this intermediate position lies the paradox of fantasy: it is the frame co-ordinating our desire, but at the same time a defence against ‘Che vuoi?’, a screen concealing the gap, the abyss of the desire of the Other. Sharpening the paradox to its utmost — to tautology — we could say that desire itself is a defence against desire: the desire structured through fantasy is a defence against the desire of the Other, against this ‘pure’, trans-phantasmic desire (i.e. the ‘death drive’ in its pure form).
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 132)

Now, for Žižek, this applies to ideological fantasies, which means that we construct fantasies that tell us what society (the big Other) desires. While there are many types of ideological fantasy, Žižek’s go-to example is the anti-Semitic fantasy of the Nazis, which, according to him, is the ideological fantasy par excellence. Imagine being a German in the time leading up to WWII. Society has all sorts of structural problems, which are far too complicated to understand and process. Yet, society still wants something from its citizens. It wants the German to be and to do something, but this something is without specific content — it is the x of the Other’s desire. Now, a German might try to get an answer from the Other (society) itself, but to no avail. The big Other had no real answer. It couldn’t really say what was required of the German people to actually fix the real, structural problems it was facing. In this sense, there is no big Other, which means that the Symbolic order does not possess all the answers. It itself is shot through with lack, filled with gaps. The reason why scapegoating — the conservative-fascist tendency — works so well is because of how it turns frantic confusion into precise “understanding”, how it exchanges a multitude of systemic problems for a single “empirical” one. The problem is simply the “Jew”. The big Other desired something from the Germans, but could not tell them what it wanted. The German’s produced an ideological (collective) fantasy to answer this question. Žižek gives us a brilliant analogy between fascist fantasy and Pokémon Go that shows how this works:

Released in July 2016, Pokémon Go is a location-based, augmented-reality game for mobile devices, typically played on mobile phones; players use the device’s GPS and camera to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures (“Pokémon”) who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player: as players travel the real world, their avatar moves along the game’s map. Different Pokémon species reside in different areas — for example, water-type Pokémon are generally found near water. When a player encounters a Pokémon, AR (Augmented Reality) mode uses the camera and gyroscope on the player’s mobile device to display an image of a Pokémon as though it were in the real world. This AR mode is what makes Pokémon Go different from other PC games: instead of taking us out of the real world and drawing us into the artificial virtual space, it combines the two; we look at reality and interact with it through the fantasy frame of the digital screen, and this intermediary frame supplements reality with virtual elements which sustain our desire to participate in the game, push us to look for them in a reality which, without would leave us indifferent. Sound familiar? Of course it does. What the technology of Pokémon Go externalizes is simply the basic mechanism of ideology — at its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of “augmented reality.” . . .
To simplify things to the utmost, did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology which made them see a specific Pokémon — “the Jew” — popping up all around, and providing the clue to what one has to fight against? And does the same not hold for all other ideological pseudo-entities which have to be added to reality in order to make it complete and meaningful? One can easily imagine a contemporary anti-immigrant version of Pokémon Go where the player wanders about a German city and is threatened by Muslim immigrant rapists or thieves lurking everywhere. . . .The point of the parallel between Nazi anti-Semitism and Pokémon Go is thus a very simple and elementary one: although Pokémon Go presents itself as something new, grounded in the latest technology, it relies on old ideological mechanisms. Ideology is the practice of augmenting reality.
(Incontinence of the Void, pp. 114–16)

Keep in mind that Lacan and Žižek use the question Che vuoi?, “What do you really want from me?”, as a synonym for the Other’s desire. The Other’s desire is a question. The Germans phantasmatically produced an easy and intelligible answer to the question of the desire of the Other. This answer was something like Germany desires for me to defend my blood and soil from the foreign invader. This fantasy gave them an identity — one that would help to make Germany great again. But this fantasy involved the production of a scapegoat, an Other in the fascist sense, an enemy, an external invader, a ill-intentioned foreigner, a disrupter of social harmony, a disturber of the organic community, etc. The fantasmatic-ideological figure of the “Jew” served the Germans in making sense of themselves in relation to the Other’s (German society’s) desire. This is an essential aspect of the Lacanian theory of fantasy — answering the elusive question concerning the desire of the Other is central to the subject’s desire, fantasy and jouissance.

But there’s a huge problem: the ideological figure of the “Jew” is total bullshit. Ideological fantasy is being deceptive whenever it tries to convince us that society’s structural problems are not actually structural, but, rather, caused by certain marginal groups of people, for example, Jews, muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, etc. Ideological fantasy, in its fascist mode, always involves a category mistake — it makes structural problems into elemental or empirical ones. The fascist ideological fantasy is often cruel but always stupid. This is not some ivory tower speculation. Again, people kill and die over this sort of fantasmatic framework. At this point in history, understanding how desire, fantasy and jouissance work is a social duty.

I would like to add one more observation. I said that Lacanian fantasy is not wish fulfillment. However, one could make the case that it is in a very precise sense. If the Lacanian structure of fantasy fulfills one wish, then it’s the wish for there to be an answer to the desire of the Other, that is, it fulfills the wish for the anxiety provoked by the Other’s desire to go away or, at least, recede to a degree that’s manageable. The fact that ideological fantasy subdues anxiety means that it simultaneously brings with it ideological jouissance. We enjoy the lack of anxiety. This is why people are so deeply invested in ideology at the unconscious level. The ideological fantasy and the ideological jouissance it provides undergird our ideological meaning and imbue it with jouis-sense (enjoyment-in-sense, enjoy-meant, the enjoyment of sense or meaning).

Different ideological fantasies can produce different types of ideological jouissance and these differences in enjoyment are by and large more significant than differences in ideological meaning. Ideology has it hooks in us whenever we fundamentally enjoy its basic form or structure. A particular ideology holds sway not when we consciously believe we have good reasons to adhere to it, not when we can logically or morally justify it, but when people simply enjoy the specific way it organizes their daily lives and their desires (in fact, our reasons and justifications of ideology serve to conceal its secret foundation in enjoyment). To put Žižek’s insight in Martin Heidegger’s terms, ideology is truly effective when Dasein enjoys the way it uniquely configures being-in-the-world. Žižek writes, “The real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the consistency of the ideological form, the fact that we ‘continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction’; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request — to make us obey ideological form — are there only to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus-enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 90–1).

This is an issue concerning ends and means or goals and methods. How so? At the level of consciousness, the level of knowingly identifying with an ideology, we have to believe that it’s working towards some goal, some purpose, that it’s the means to an end. For the capitalist, the goal of capitalism (ideology) is something like full employment and economic equilibrium brought about through the invisible hand of the market. For the communist, the aim of communism (ideology) is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish a classless society free of exploitation and alienation. For the fascist, fascism (ideology) is working toward the eradication of intrusive foreign power and the reestablishment of organic social harmony. But what if this is ideology at its purest, that is, what if the very idea of ideology serving a purpose is thoroughly ideological? What if ideology itself is the goal? What if ideology is most fundamentally about the stupid jouissance we get out of it and the everyday consistency and intelligibility it supplies, and not about the goal it claims to be attempting to actualize? What if fantasmatic-ideological jouissance is every ideology’s goal? This is exactly what Žižek thinks to be the secret truth of ideology — a truth that must remain out of sight in order for ideology to properly function.

What is really at stake in ideology is its form, the fact that we continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction, that we follow even the most dubious opinions once our mind has been made up regarding them; but this ideological attitude can be achieved only as a ‘state that is essentially by-­product’: the ideological subjects, ‘travellers lost in a forest’, must conceal from themselves the fact that ‘it was possibly chance alone that first determined them in their choice’; they must believe that their decision is well founded, that it will lead to their Goal. As soon as they perceive that the real goal is the consistency of the ideological attitude itself, the effect is self-defeating. We can see how ideology works in a way exactly opposed to the popular idea of Jesuit morals: the aim here is to justify the means.
Why must this inversion of the relation of aim and means remain hidden, why is its revelation self-defeating? Because it would reveal the enjoyment which is at work in ideology, in the ideological renunciation itself. In other words, it would reveal that ideology serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything — which is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 92)

The misrecognition of the ends and the means, of purposeful meaning and jouissance, relates to another Lacanian insight Žižek highlights, namely, that the truth often necessities a fiction or that “the Truth arises from misrecognition” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 60). We find an example in Breaking Bad that brings all this together. Throughout the show, Walter White attempts to justify his criminal activities to himself and to Skyler, his wife, by reference to the duty he has to his family. Walter knows that his cancer is going to take him out at some point, so he feels that he must do whatever he can to leave his family with financial security. He’d emphatically say that he doesn’t enjoy what he’s doing at all, but, rather, has to do it for the sake of family, duty, morality, etc. The meth business is only a means to an end. Of course, this is all a lie Walter tells himself. He cannot bring himself to express the truth of the matter. Time and time again, Walter pleads with Skyler to understand that he’s making a dutiful sacrifice out of his love for her and their children. These attempts at moral justification drive Skyler insane. After everything has fallen apart, after Walter has had to go into hiding, he returns home and has one last encounter with Skyler. Just as it appears that Walt is about to make a last-ditch effort to justify his actions, Skyler interrupts him with pure disgust and says, “If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family . . . .” Walt cuts her off and finally confesses the truth: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really . . . I was alive.”

This is actually quite an authentic moment wherein the fantasy is traversed and an identification with brute jouissance (drive) occurs. Despite all of the tragedy Walter’s enjoyment has brought upon his family, he and Skyler are able to make peace through his confession. The truth is that Walt, the nerdy chemistry teacher, always secretly desired to be tough, powerful, strong, “the man”. In Lacanian terms, he wanted to have the phallus. Walt felt emasculated, compromised and subservient for most of his adult life. In proper Heideggerian fashion, his resolute confrontation with death via his cancer scare gave him the opportunity he needed to authentically act on his desire and break bad, since he now possessed a moral-ideological justification that perfectly served as a buffer between his conscious experience and the truth of his desire. The truth of his desire needed a lie (moral justification) in order to actualize itself. This example captures how it’s through a lie that the ends appear as means. For Walt, the meth business was, in truth, an end in itself. We justify our ideologies (falsely-perceived “means”) through lofty appeals to goodness, justice, equality, freedom, community, etc. (falsely-perceived “ends”), when, in fact, they’re primarily about some baseline enjoyment (the true end) we get out of them.

But it is rare, indeed, that a person can come to make an identification with their jouissance.”Oh, that’s me!” This process involves what Lacan and Žižek call “subjective destitution”. This refers to a total break down in the relation between subjectivity and it’s social meanings (Imaginary-Symbolic coordinates, ideological buffers, etc.) as well as transcending one’s fundamental fantasy. In other words, a kind of social-existential death must take place before one can fully identify with one’s drives (jouissance). This is incredibly painful. Think of the subjective hell Walter White went through in his isolation out in the middle of nowhere before he could finally bring himself to say, “I liked it”. The realization that your fidelity to a Cause was actually just an “addiction” to a type of surplus-enjoyment can be a total nightmare. Is this not exactly what Jesus is getting at in that famous passage from the Bible?

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
(Matthew 7:21–23)

Can you even begin to imagine what it would be like on Judgment Day for certain Christians to hear Jesus say these words to them? And we’re not talking about the worst kinds like the rich televangelists that take advantage of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society. No, we’re talking about people who devoted their lives to Christianity, to missionary work, to preaching the Bible, and all the rest of it. Jesus’ words can be read as saying, “You claim that you did all things for me, for the Cause of Christianity, but, in truth, you did them merely because you enjoyed them — depart from me!” You would be absolutely crushed. Subjectivity is destroyed.

Let’s now briefly return to the problem of scapegoating. The reason why Žižek thinks that the most basic ideological fantasy is conservative is because it presupposes the idea that a society without internal conflict, systemic deadlock or built-in antagonism is possible — a fantasy pushed to its limits in fascism and especially in Nazism. We even find this conservative image of a perfectly harmonious society (utopia) at play in certain strands of leftist theory (lots of Marxists, for example, thought that if we can just negate the fundamental antagonism between wage laborer and capitalist, then we’ll be well on our way to that contradictionless society called Communism).

However, for Žižek, every society, every Symbolic order, has a structural “symptom” and this means that we must transcend all utopian fantasies. Yet this is a truth people are unwilling to accept and this is why scapegoating, the ideological fantasy that constructs a blameworthy Other, is so easily effective. The power of fascist ideology lies in its simplicity. It generates a quick and easy answer to all of society’s structural complexity. “The problem is them over there!” Immediately, things become clearer for the scapegoaters: “If the cancer can be cut out of the body, then things will be great again.” The master signifier “Jew”, for instance, served to give a name to all of the anxieties floating all over German society. It brought about a conceptual clarity (one deeply rooted in misrecognition) through how it organized the Symbolic order. Žižek explain this by way of Spielberg’s Jaws. The quaint summer resort town of Amity Island faces all sorts of issues, but is able to exchange this complexity with the simplicity of the “shark”.

The emer­gence of the shark as symbol does not add any new meaning, it simply reorganizes meanings which were already there by binding them to the same signifier — ideology is at work in this purely symbolic gesture, in the addition of a signifier which “quilts” the floating plurality of anxieties. What remains outside this formal symbolic gesture, what resists absorp­tion into meaning, is, however, the horrifying power of fascination that pertains to the presence of the shark — its enjoyment, to use the Lacanian term for it. . . . The analysis focused on the “ideological meaning” of mons­ters overlooks the fact that, previous to signifying something, previous even to serving as an empty vessel of meaning, monsters embody en­joyment qua the limit of interpretation, that is to say, nonmeaning as such.
(Enjoy Your Symptom, p. 134)

On the one hand, “shark” (or “Jew”) is a Symbolic device, a master signifier, which organizes semiotic chaos into coherent meaning, but on the other, it is also a concentrated reserve of jouissance. Yet the ideological meaning itself brings with it its own surplus-jouissance. However, the price of the ideological enjoyment of this clear-cut “intelligibility” is one’s soul. At his core, the fascist simply enjoys hating the ideological scapegoat, that is, the very structure of fascist ideology. The secret goal of fascism is the eternal hatred, degradation and humiliation of the scapegoat, since this is where fascist jouissance is rooted. That means that fascism secretly desires the permanent existence of the scapegoat and not its eradication, or, more accurately, the desire is for eternal eradication. To destroy the scapegoat is to destroy the fascist. To negate the source of this perverse enjoyment is to negate the very enjoyment that organizes the everyday life of the fascist. The fascist needs the “Jew” (of course, this would be denied by the fascist with seething disavowal). Therefore, the scapegoat is the embodiment of an impossibility, and not just an impossibility inside of the fascist’s desire and also a structural one inside society itself.

The ‘Jew’ is the means, for Fascism, of taking into account, of repre­senting its own impossibility: in its positive presence, it is only the embod­iment of the ultimate impossibility of the totalitarian project — of its immanent limit. This is why it is insufficient to designate the totalitarian project as impossible, utopian, wanting to establish a totally transparent and homogeneous society — the problem is that in a way, totalitarian ideology knows it, recognizes it in advance: in the figure of the ‘Jew’ it includes this knowledge in its edifice. The whole Fascist ideology is structured as a struggle against the element which holds the place of the immanent impossibility of the very Fascist project: the ‘Jew’ is nothing but a fetishistic embodiment of a certain fundamental blockage.
The ‘criticism of ideology’ must therefore invert the linking of causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze: far from being the positive cause of social antagonism, the ‘Jew’ is just the embodiment of a certain blockage — of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogeneous totality. Far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the ‘Jew’ is a point at which social negativity as such assumes positive existence. In this way we can articulate another formula of the basic procedure of the ‘criticism of ideology’, supplementing the one given above: to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility. Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it ‘projects’ this internal negativity into the figure of the ‘Jew’. In other words, what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporatist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the ‘Jew’.
We can also see now how ‘going through’ the social fantasy is likewise correlative to identification with a symptom. Jews are clearly a social symptom: the point at which the immanent social antagonism assumes a posi­tive form, erupts on to the social surface, the point at which it becomes obvious that society ‘doesn’t work’, that the social mechanism ‘creaks’. If we look at it through the frame of (corporatist) fantasy, the ‘Jew’ appears as an intruder who introduces from outside disorder, decomposition and corruption of the social edifice — it appears as an outward positive cause whose elimination would enable us to restore order, stability and identity. But in ‘going through the fantasy’ we must in the same move identify with the symptom: we must recognize in the properties attributed to ‘Jew’ the necessary product of our very social system; we must recognize in the ‘excesses’ attributed to ‘Jews’ the truth about ourselves.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 142–3)

Žižek just said a whole lot but his main point is that ideology via fantasy displaces an intrinsic, structural, social deadlock, a “symptom”, onto an empirical “referent”. It’s not merely an empirical referent, since it’s actually a constructed fantasy-image, that is, the image of the “Jew” does not actually represent actual Jewish people. In the case of the Nazis, it was the “Jew” that came to embody a social contradiction. The real problem in Germany was a structural one and not some specific group of people, but the structural deadlock gets masks by its fantasmatic displacement onto the “Jew”. The trick of fantasy brings surplus-jouissance and cognitive orientation while remaining a total deception.

Ideology, especially fascist ideology, is always stupid insofar as it produces a social misrecognition of a structural reality for an elemental fantasy-image projected onto actual people, but it is also stupid in another way. It prevents a person from being able to perceive disconfirming data as disconfirmation. In fact, ideology even twists disconfirmation into conformation. This is at its most lethal when it involves scapegoat fantasies:

An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality — that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself. How then would our poor German, if he were a good anti-Semite, react to the gap between the ideological figure of the Jew (schemer, wire-puller, exploiting our brave men and so on) and the common everyday experience of his good neighbor, Mr. Stern? His answer would be to turn this gap, this discrepancy itself, into an argument for anti-Semitism: ‘You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide behind the mask of everyday appearance — and it is exactly this hiding of one’s real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature.’ An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 48–49)

One last thing about the ideological scapegoat: it is often identified as an foreign invader but perhaps what we need is a clear example of a true foreign invader in order to perceive how seldom the scapegoat figure actually is one. When Genghis Kahn and his hordes come crashing into your little village and start killing, raping and plundering, then, yes, the problem your community is facing is that of a foreign invader, but this is not what is going on with the various ideological scapegoats fantasy produces. Think about how strongly the fascist fantasy-structure must have taken hold in a person for one to perceive the people at the Mexico-United States border as brutal conquerors. To see Genghis Kahn in a Mexican migrant worker is to see nothing but a reflection of oneself, that is, a fantasmatic image of one’s own creation.

— Ideological Jouissance and the Postmodern Superego —

There is another important aspect of ideological jouissance and that is the role played by the postmodern superego. As far as consumer ideology goes, as opposed to more traditional ideologies that declare “Thou shalt NOT enjoy!”, Lacan and Žižek have claimed that one of our current master signifiers is the superego’s perverse injunction to “Enjoy!” Lacan said, “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy (jouir) except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance — Enjoy!” (On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, p. 3). Just try to go anywhere in the consumer society without being told to “Enjoy!” You’d think that the primary job of every waiter, barista, bartender, salesclerk, and so on, is to hurl the postmodern superego’s injunction at us. The injunction to “Enjoy!” is inescapable and it is this master signifier which gives structure to our entire social world. In Žižek’s words, “Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction ‘Enjoy!’, from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening. Enjoyment today effectively functions as a strange ethical duty: individuals feel guilty not for violating moral inhibitions by way of engaging in illicit pleasures, but for not being able to enjoy” (How to Read Lacan, p. 104). The idea is that all of our activities, social practices, spontaneous behaviors and automatic reactions are centered around the “Enjoy!” It pins down the meanings of other signifiers by providing them with an overarching point or final reference, a “totalizing” consistency. Baudrillard, too, saw the ubiquitous status of this master signifier: “It is no longer desire, or even ‘taste’, or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease — it is the ‘fun morality’ or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one’s potential for thrills, pleasure or gratification” (The Consumer Society, p. 80).

Nowhere has the “Enjoy!” had greater dominance over daily social life than in America during the height of consumerism. This injunction has had major consequences on our relation to jouissance. We are commanded from every direction to affirm whatever jouissance we get out of everyday life. We affirm it not out of some spontaneous personal preference, but out of a sense of duty. It is our duty as Americans to enjoy — jouissance is our obligation. Now, it’s easy to see how this served the interests of capital throughout the golden age of consumption (let’s say from 1945 to 2007). In this context, “Enjoy!” practically translated into “Enjoy all of the enjoyment suburban middle class life has to offer!” In other words, it functioned has an unconscious command for us to enjoy malls, movie theaters, arcades, restaurants, pop culture, TV, rock concerts, sporting events, miniature golf, interior design, lawn care, etc., that is, the whole array of enjoyments produced through the consumption of commodities (capital accumulation). But the one essential condition to all this is having enough money to spend on these consumer practices. The onset of the Great Recession in 2007 marks the crossing of a certain threshold. The vast majority of Americans could simply not afford to consume like they used to, which, in turn, means they could not fulfill their social duty. Wages have been stagnating since the ’70s and Americans had maxed out their credit, but, still, everywhere they heard the resounding “Enjoy!” An exponential tension was produced in the friction between the material impossibility of enjoyment and the relentless command of the superego.

A baseline (suburban) jouissance was hollowed out of our lives. This is not to say that suburbia had been some perfect, libidinal paradise free from all worries. Not at all. It did, however, manage to provide most consumers with basic patterns of ideological enjoyment, orienting routines of surplus-jouissance, that led them to gladly affirm their suburban lifestyle. People often struggled with money, with financial burdens, but most them were able to get by and partake of the various enjoyments offered by the consumer society. 2007 changed all this. Yes, you can still find people going to the movies, eating out, shopping, etc., but things just aren’t the same and Americans are all too cognizant of it. This sense of loss permeates all of America. People cannot enjoy like they used to. To make matters worse, the loss of this actual ideological enjoyment tends to make people retroactively idealize and mythologize it. None of us were walking around the mall in otherworldly bliss, but that’s sure seems to be how it was for us now.

Again, on top of all this, the injunction to “Enjoy!” has never let up, in fact, it has kept on building in pressure (the less we enjoy, the more guilt we feel and the more we need to enjoy). This brings us to the crucial point: Americans have had to find new ways to enjoy in order to obey the perverse superego, in order to do their duty. Americans’ new ideological jouissance is concentrated in their online activities and especially those of the political sort. The online culture war has become the new source of America’s ideological jouissance. Ideologically speaking, this is a perfect storm. The consumerist “Enjoy!” still has an immense bearing on us, which brings us to radically affirm the ideological jouissance we get out of politics. No matter what we say, no matter how much we disavowal it, this ideological jouissance serves no purpose other than itself. This means that Americans are now fundamentally invested at an unconscious level in the prolongation of this conflict. They enjoy it and, by doing so, serve their unconscious duty to “Enjoy!” America is currently a crisis in ideological jouissance. Of course, the jouissance of the Right is different from the jouissance of the Left and there all kinds of variations within them. The fascist tendencies of the alt-right libidinally operate in ways that leftist ideological jouissance does not. They function in many different ways, but, secretly, are underpinned by old consumer dynamics. Online politics is the new consumerism. This must be explored in further detail in another post.

I want to close out this post with a personal confession. It’s very easy to point fingers at everyone else and blame them for their ideological jouissance. The far more important task is to take yourself to task, that is, to ideologically beat the shit out of yourself (like Edward Norton in Fight Club). I’ve spent years of my life studying leftist theorists, e.g., Marx, Engels, Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Debord, Althusser, Baudrillard, Deleuze & Guattari, Žižek, Badiou, etc. I can critique the consumer society from a thousand different directions. Its elusive codes, its secret meanings, have all been exposed. “That right there is commodity fetishism, over there is alienation, that’s sign-value, and there’s the master signifier.” However, none of the conceptual tools given to me by these thinkers have ever depleted my enjoyment in dumb consumer activities. I know that the mall was bullshit, but I still have an undying enjoyment in it. I enjoyed every scene of Stranger Things 3 that was shot at that old mall. I have deep nostalgia for mall “culture” despite the fact that I consciously understand how it was used to manipulate, placate and tame the proletariat. I know very well that the mall was an ideological trick used by capital to lock me into the consumer way of life, but . . . still . . . I enjoy it. Žižek’s insight into how ideology primarily has a hold on us at the level of enjoyment seems to simple, and in a way it is, but there’s so much complexity wrapped up in it. We must fight ourselves over our own enjoyment — this is ideology critique.

John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), a neglected masterpiece of the Hollywood Left, tells the story of John Nada (Spanish for “nothing”), a homeless laborer who finds work on a Los Angeles construction site but has no place to stay. One of the other workers, Frank Armitage, takes him to spend the night at a local shantytown. While being shown around that night, he notices some odd behavior at a small church across the street. Investigating the next day, he accidentally stumbles on several boxes full of sunglasses hidden in a secret compartment in a wall. When he later puts on a pair of the glasses for the first time, he notices that a publicity billboard now simply displays the word “OBEY,” while another urges the viewer to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” He also sees that paper money now bears the words “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” What we get here is a beautifully naïve mise‐en‐scène of the critique of ideology: through the critico‐ideological glasses, we directly see the Master‐Signifier beneath the chain of knowledge — we learn to see dictatorship in democracy, and seeing it hurts. We learn in the film that wearing the critico‐ideological glasses for too long gives the viewer a bad headache: it is very painful to be deprived of the ideological surplus‐enjoyment.
(Less Than Nothing, p. 999)