Traps of Meaning: A “Postmodern Neo-Marxist” Critique of Jordan Peterson

“There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them.”
— Jacques Derrida | Specters of Marx

Jordan Peterson often speaks of meaning. His major work is entitled Maps of Meaning. One could say that the problem of meaning is the fundamental issue his work is concerned with and seeks to answer. This is a very timely concern. There definitely is an unwelcome emergency of meaning that we are currently faced with. Its presence can be felt at the highest levels of society or the macro-order, that is, in economics, politics and religion, in education and the entertainment industry, in culture and mass media, in science, technology, art and philosophy. However, this problem resonates as much, if not more, in the smallest details of the micro-order. The feelings of stress, worry, depression, anxiety, fear, etc., that so many are having to cope with involve deep connections to the problem concerning meaning. This issue has latched onto people like a symbiote. We feel it at church, when we are at our jobs, while shopping, in dreading the “future”. It haunts our relationships with family and friends. You know it’s bad when even our cartoons are tackling the subject of nihilism, e.g., Rick and Morty and BoJack Horseman. One could argue that Peterson’s meteoric rise to fame directly stems from his focus on the meaning crisis. The question that needs asking is this: does Peterson truly understand the problem of meaning? If not, then his answer(s) to it will miss the mark and, thereby, inadvertently make the situation worse by adding a layer of confusion over the problem itself. But what is the problem of meaning?

First, we must get clear on Peterson’s concept of meaning, the lynchpin of his thinking. He romantically describes it in a number of ways, but there is one in particular that is a constant in his books, lectures and interviews. He locates meaning on the borderline between order and chaos. Meaning is a sort of friction generated in their relation to one another. This amounts to meaning requiring a risk between order and chaos. These two universal principles form the basic binary distinction in his metaphysics or outlook on Being. Meaning is a relation or ratio between them. Each individual must find the proper balance between the two principles that fits his or her life. Some people need more order and others will thrive with a little more chaos. Peterson says,

“Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both. No matter where we are, there are some things we can identify, make use of, and predict, and some things we neither know nor understand. No matter who we are, Kalahari Desert–dweller or Wall Street banker, some things are under our control, and some things are not. That’s why both can understand the same stories, and dwell within the confines of the same eternal truths. Finally, the fundamental reality of chaos and order is true for everything alive, not only for us. Living things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and situations that make them vulnerable.”
(12 Rules for Life, p. 44)

There is a certain universality to this notion of meaning. It’s obviously a truism to assert that human beings always exist on a spectrum between order and chaos, intelligibility and unintelligibility, familiarity and unfamiliarity, structure and void, controllable and uncontrollable, unconcealment and concealment, light and darkness, or, in Lacanian terms, between the Symbolic and the Real (consider how, in Seminar X, the cause of anxiety is the proximity of objet petit a, i.e., the Real). Peterson, being a good Jungian, thinks that the power of this formulation of meaning rests on its universality, its a-historicity, its archetypal ubiquity. Whether we are speaking of tribal, ancient, feudal or industrial societies, there is always the principles of order and chaos at work. Ready for another mindblower? All of the people in those various societies had to have air, food and water in order to survive. Peterson finishes up this line of thought by saying,

“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”
(12 Rules for Life, p. 44)

This gets at the connection between meaning and risk mentioned above. The big takeaway is that, for Peterson, the production of personal meaning is a universal procedure. This verges on a transcendental operation of the Kantian sort: the condition of the possibility of meaning is the relation between order and chaos. This is the one mechanism behind the creation of a meaningful life. Notice that he doesn’t even mention the possibility that there might be a historical or culturally relative aspect to it. Perhaps the determining factors in the production of meaning are not universal? This will come into play soon enough.

Peterson’s preferred illustration of the dyad of order and chaos is the yin-yang symbol belonging to the Taoist tradition. Yin is the principle of order and Yang is that of chaos.

“The schematic representation of Yin and Yang . . . utilizes the image of a circle to represent totality; the paisleys that make up that circle are opposed but balanced. The image is rendered additionally sophisticated by the presence of the white circle in the black paisley, and vice versa. Too much chaos breeds desire for order; so, Yin may serve as mother to Yang. Conversely — too much order breeds the desire for novelty, as antidote to stultifying predictability. In this manner, Yang serves as father to Yin.”
(Maps of Meaning, p. 339)

Through his study of mythology, he goes on to align many other binaries with these. Whereas order and Yin become associated with masculinity, day, the known, authoritarianism and fascism, chaos and Yang are linked up with femininity, night, the unknown, decadence and nihilism. He utilizes all of these categories in his analysis of what is entailed in the meaningful life, but the dyad of order and chaos remains the fundamental one. Now that we have a basic familiarity with his theory of meaning, we can move on and critique it.

Simply put, Peterson fails to properly frame the contemporary crisis of meaning due to his universal conception of it. If meaning is always the task of the individual in relation to order and chaos, then the issue is thought in personal and idiosyncratic terms. This means that if meaning fails to be realized, then the individual is to blame for this deficiency. Of course, individuals are often responsible for their shortcomings. Yes, indeed, individuals do have faults. But are personal flaws, individual weaknesses, behind the widespread sense of meaningless that permeates the world? If we all could just make a little effort, clean our rooms, stand up straight with our shoulders back, you know, baby step the shit out of our lives like Bill Murray in What About Bob?, then would this be enough to form the invisible hand of meaning? Would a meaningful world emerge from all individuals privately pursuing personal meaning? I think not. Perhaps Peterson’s “universal” concept of meaning will turn out far more ideological than intended to be. The problem with Peterson’s bourgeois concept of meaning (individualistic purpose) contains the same problem as Sartre’s radical theory of freedom owing to the fact they both fail to give structural facticity its just due. The pursuit of an existential purpose is predicated on a certain material leisure — but we are the precariat. To accurately contextualize the meaning crisis, we must not view it in terms of the individual relation between order and chaos, but, instead, see it as a structural complication in order itself.

The problem of meaning is rooted in the order of capitalism. It is not the fault of, nor can it be corrected by, the individual alone. It does the individual a disservice to talk about meaning as if it is just a personal endeavor through and through. We are individuals but we are always already individuals in the big Other. Peterson’s concept of meaning as the line of risk between order and chaos fails insofar as it does not take into account the historical and specific configuration of order itself. Ours is an order without order, i.e., other-imposed, machinic, soul-crushing order that nullifies self-imposed, spontaneous and life-affirming order. What if it is the disorder of order itself, i.e., the Symbolic order, that prevents the individual from ordering his or her life in a meaningful way? What if it is the structure of order that is the cause of our disorder? What if this is the truth? The order of capital is not there to serve the interests of human beings; rather, human beings serve the interests of capital accumulation. In fact, this order seeks to neutralize those human attributes that stand in its way. The code of consumption mechanizes us, that is, it establishes a automated “existence” wherein all opinions, thoughts, behaviours, values, etc., are modelled out in advance. A robust sense of meaning, a passion, “the idea for which I am willing to live and die” (as Kierkegaard put it), would entail a negation of this order. Meaning stands at odds with capital. In what follows, I will argue on behalf of this thesis in opposition to Peterson’s. But first things first, I must do some elaborating on the concepts through which I’ll be developing it.

What is the Symbolic order or the big Other (these terms are used synonymously)? This concept comes from the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan. It was inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic concept of langue (language) and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological adaptation of it. These two were the main figureheads of structuralism, which had a lasting influence on Lacan’s thought and it was from Lévi-Strauss’ The Elementary Structures of Kinship that he primarily got his concept of the Symbolic order. In the simplest terms, the Symbolic order is the social structure or transsubjective network made up of language, culture, law, practices, rules, rituals, customs, presuppositions, prohibitions, institutions, behavioral protocols, values, etc. In order words, the big Other is our social order, which is basically what Peterson has in mind when speaking of order. The Symbolic, along with the Imaginary and the Real, form the three domains of the human reality. Slavoj Žižek offers a helpful example:

“For Lacan, the reality of human beings is constituted by three intertangled levels: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. This triad can be nicely illustrated by the game of chess. The rules one has to follow in order to play it are its symbolic dimension: from the purely formal symbolic standpoint, ‘knight’ is defined only by the moves this figure can make. This level is clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way in which different pieces are shaped and characterized by their names (king, queen, knight), and it is easy to envision a game with the same rules, but with a different imaginary, in which this figure would be called ‘messenger’ or ‘runner’ or whatever. Finally, real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances that affect the course of the game: the intelligence of the players, the unpredictable intrusions that may disconcert one player or directly cut the game short.”
(How to Read Lacan, pp. 8–9)

For Lacan, every Symbolic order is limited in scope, that is, given the configuration of its structure, it cannot incorporate and assimilate everything that is. There are always gaps, impossibilities, omissions and blindspots built into it. This means that different Symbolic orders will get ahold of certain aspects of things at the expense of other ones. Lacan says, “Anything from the real can always come out. But once the symbolic chain is constituted, as soon as you introduce a certain significant unity, in the form of unities of succession, what comes out can no longer be just anything” (Seminar II, p. 193). In the postface to “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”, Lacan offers a proof of this in the form of a game of coin tosses, i.e., heads or tails, but the argument is extremely complicated and unpacking it here is unfeasible (Bruce Fink provides an analysis and a simplified version of this in The Lacanian Subject). Luckily, there’s an alternative way to get the gist of Lacan’s argument that is much easier to understand. For this purpose, I defer to Jean-François Lyotard and his concept of the differend.

Simply put, a differend is a deadlock that occurs when different Symbolic orders, language games or frames of reference collide at a point of aporetic incompatibility. As Lyotard put it,

“As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both of the arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule).”
(The Differend, p. xi)

What we have here is a socio-Symbolic impasse wherein there is no higher order, no overarching code or rule, that can resolve the predicament. The trouble is that the two parties cannot simply accept it as a stalemate, shake hands and walk away. Things hang in the balance for both sides. This is a relatively easy concept to understand but we still need a good example. Thankfully, Simon Malpas gives a wonderfully lucid description of a differend:

“Imagine that you are an Australian judge (this story is based on a series of events that have happened recently in Australian courts — see Gelder and Jacobs 1998: 117–34). Before you are two plaintiffs. The first is a construction company who want to build a new development on an island; the second is a group of aboriginal women who claim that the island is a religious site for their community. If what the women say is true then the development, which has already cost the company many thousands of dollars, must be scrapped and the land returned. This, the company tell you, will probably bankrupt them and force them to make their staff redundant.

In order to substantiate their claim, the women must prove in court that the island really is a holy site. But this is where the problem arises. You are told by the women’s lawyer that, according to their beliefs, they can only discuss the meaning of the site amongst themselves: the site’s holiness rests on the belief that it remains a secret passed down from mother to daughter along the generations, and if this secret is revealed to a man or to anyone outside their group then the site loses its holiness. They are thus trapped. According to the law, if they don’t provide evidence in court then they lose the case; if they do speak out then they must reveal the secret, which means that the site loses its holiness in their eyes and, again, they lose the case.

This is the problem with which you, as the judge, are faced. You have no possible way of knowing whether or not the women are telling the truth, as they cannot give evidence in court. On the one hand, there is the possibility that you will wrong the women by allowing a place that is sacred to them be destroyed. On the other hand, you run the risk of bankrupting a company and making its workers redundant. What do you do?

. . . Any legal decision made by the judge will necessarily wrong one or both of the plaintiffs because they cannot adduce the same sorts of proof to support their claims. According to Lyotard, then, a differend ‘is signalled by this inability to prove. The one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is the victim [of a wrong], and who is perhaps the same one, is reduced to silence’ (1988a: 10). The women, put in an impossible situation before the court, are reduced to silence and become victims of the judicial system; or, if the judge decides in their favour, the developers are wronged because the court has employed rules that are different from those established in law to find against them.”
(Jean-François Lyotard, pp. 57–8, 60)

What this goes to show is (1) there are multiple big Others, (2) each is incomplete, “barred” and shot through with lack, i.e., each lacks the ability to assimilate and accommodate aspects of other big Others as well as aspects of the Real, (3) there is no metalanguage, metanarrative or metadiscourse that can mediate all Symbolic orders. Lyotard defined our postmodern condition in terms of our disbelief in the reality of a metanarrative or grand story that can reconcile all discourses. This is a defining feature of our particular Symbolic order.

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements — narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.”
(The Postmodern Condition, p. xxiv)

Postmodernity involves the realization that there is no centralized Symbolic order that can consistently and fully incorporate all discourses into its administration. “But, but, science . . .” We in philosophy circles make a distinction between science and scientism. Science is one discourse among others. It recognizes its own discursive limits, and, in doing so, thus, leaves room for other discourses (religion, aesthetics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, etc.). However, scientism is the absolutization of the scientific discourse. It’s what I call a totalitarian discourse or despotic semiotic insofar as it dismisses any point of view that doesn’t conform to scientific parameters — it rejects all codes that it cannot overcode. The overcode: one code to rule them all. It’s of the utmost importance to emphasize that the vast majority of scientists are not scientismists. Take, for example, the first-person experience of being in love. Neuroscience will attempt to explain this experience in terms of certain brain activity. Of course, the neurological approach will never capture the phenomenon of love. For this, we need other discourses better suited to the task, e.g., phenomenology, poetry, etc.

Alright, we now have a clear understanding that there are many Symbolic orders or social formations. The concept of the history of these orders has been fundamentally shaped by Marx’s historical materialism (influenced by Hegel’s dialectic), which holds that the history and development of modes of production (economic orders) is the history of society in general. Different modes of production comprise the material basis of different types of superstructures, societies, ideologies, i.e., different Symbolic orders.

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
(‘Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy’, Early Writings, p. 425)

As discussed in The German Ideology, Marx held that the four main modes of production have been (1) the tribal, (2) the ancient, (3) the feudal, (4) the capitalist. It’s quite difficult to overstate just how influential this model of history as been. Along with Hegel and Nietzsche, Marx is responsible for getting thinkers to think in historical terms. The following are most certainly irreducible to Marx’s historical materialism, but without it, we probably wouldn’t have Heidegger’s history of Being, McLuhan’s history of media, Foucault’s archaeology of epistemes, Sloterdijk’s spheres, and Deleuze and Guattari’s modes of social-production and regimes of signs. And, no, I haven’t forgotten about you, Peterson. I’ll get back to you soon enough.

To frame the problem of meaning, let’s turn to some of Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G’s) ideas located in Anti-Oedipus. In Chapter Three, D&G engage in a genealogy of the Oedipus complex. They argue they Oedipus is the mechanism that represses desire only in capitalist society. However, this mechanism includes aspects of other modes of social-production, i.e., savagery and despotism, which it takes and organizes in a unique way. All three modes of social-production or “social machines” are specific ways in which desire gets repressed through the organization of society. D&G think of these machines in terms of the dynamic interaction between two primary categories: power (Nietzsche) and economics (Marx). Each machine also consists of six key factors: a socius, a mode of anti-production, a type of surplus-value, an order of debt, a form of coding and a system of inscription. Needless to say, each mode of social-production is deeply complicated and nuanced (and the terminology employed by D&G definitely makes them even harder to grasp). For the sake of our purposes, I will limit the concepts to their most relevant and insightful facets.

In his commentary on Anti-Oedipus, Eugene W. Holland supplies us with an extremely helpful Deleuzoguattarian typology of basic social organization:

Holland explains,

“Briefly, savagery in this scheme represents something like “primitive communism,” a pre-caste, pre-class form of social organization where power is diffused throughout the community rather than concentrated in any one group or individual. Yet because of the absence of economics, savagery is also the social form most harshly governed by exacting codes of conduct, belief, and meaning. Under despotism, by contrast, differential codes of conduct, belief, and meaning are promulgated precisely in order to establish caste divisions and hierarchy, and are bent to the service of overt political power and direct imperial domination unalleviated by the freedoms that become possible in economic society. Despotism thus represents the worst of both worlds, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view: it is power society par excellence, and not economic. Capitalism, finally, is characterized by power and economics, which conflict with one another: the ceaselessly enhanced productivity of the capitalist economy could contribute to the general enrichment of human life-activity, but because of the capitalist power-structure it gets appropriated privately and/or devoted ascetically to increasing production for its own sake, instead. Capitalism, for schizoanalysis, is an economic society that has yet to shed its power component; the fourth term of the combinatoire (economics without power), which I have called “permanent revolution,” appears only on its horizon, as the end of universal history.”
(Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, p. 60)

With Holland’s words in mind, I want to focus in on two of the key features of social-production: the socius and coding. The socius is the organizational base, center or hinge upon which desire becomes invested in society. D&G write, “To code desire — and the fear, and the anguish of decoded flows — is the business of the socius” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 139). In savagery, the socius is the earth; under despotism, it is the body of the despot; finally, for capitalist society, the socius is capital itself. Coding has to do with the semiotic organization of desire and society. I borrow Daniel Chandler’s definition of the term: “Semiotic codes are procedural systems of related conventions for correlating signifiers and signifieds in certain domains. Codes provide a framework within which signs make sense: they are interpretive devices which are used by interpretive communities” (Semiotics: The Basics, p.). Codes are essentially semiotic orders that bestow fixed meaning in a systematic way. To quote Holland again, “A mode of social-production/anti-production comprises a specific form of organization for flows of matter and energy. Ultimately, there are two ways such organization can be accomplished: qualitatively or quantitatively, symbolically or economically. Savagery and despotism are organized symbolically, via codes and over-codes, while capitalism is organized economically, via axioms” (Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, p. 64) .

In tribal society or savagery, what we find is an extremely rigid system of qualitative meaning, but a lack of any quantitative value systems. Economics, mathematized exchange value, the principle of general equivalence, commodification, etc., are nowhere to be found in the tribal order. This social machine is qualitative insofar as it is structured around the kinship system, intratribal relations, extratribal relations, relations to the earth, etc. As D&G put it, “And the functioning of such a machine consists in the following: the declension of alliance and filiation — declining the lineages on the body of the earth, before there is a State” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 146). This code is ordered in direct relation to the immediate, qualitative environment, that is, the “earth” is the socius (focal point of social organization). Think about how much a tribal society is built around its relation to a particular region of nature, i.e., a territory. Marcel Mauss, in The Gift, showed that this sort of society organized around the “system of total services” or ceremonial gift exchange, e.g., potlatch and kula, was fundamentally different from modern capitalism or political economy. One of the structural differences between tribal and capitalist society is that the former’s code prevents the extensive accumulation of wealth and power (it does this through obligatory, ritualized destruction of the surplus) whereas the latter’s “code” is predicated on it. While the tribal order has the merit of mechanistically and horizontally denying power, it has a big defect. Due to the highly regimented structure of the tribal code, a member is totally locked into place. One’s desire is so determined by the Symbolic order that it effectively is a destiny. This semiotic system literally inscribes itself on the flesh of its members through marking (cutting or burning), which is why D&G speak of it in terms of cruelty.

Things change with the arrival of despotism (ancient and feudal societies). Now society gets configured around a single person. The body of the despot, the ruler, the king, becomes the socius. With the shift from the earth to the despot’s body being the hinge of the Symbolic order, so, too, a modification in coding occurs. What happens is that the despot takes all local codes or ways of life, exemplified by the tribal order, and overcodes them. In other words, the despot forces all other codes under the reign of his code. The main mechanisms that function in despotic overcoding are that of tribute money and the infinite debt the subject has in relation to the despot. This system of debt-value is what traps local codes in the clutches of the despot’s universal, godlike Law. In savagery, debt was reciprocal, temporary and finite, but it becomes one-sided, eternal and infinite under despotism. You owe everything to the despot — even your very life. “There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism: the debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 197).

The overcode establishes a hierarchal system in which all codes must bend the knee to a single, supreme overcode. It is always the despot that champions hierarchy. The overcode does not destroy local codes, however. It only decodes them to the point at which they can be recoded in a way that captures them. Simply put, the overcode negates, prohibits or erases the aspects of local codes that are incompatible with it (this is decoding), and, then, goes about assimilating them in such a way as to make each one subservient to it (and this is recoding). Once the overcode hierarchically incorporates a local code, it basically leaves it alone from then on. As long a local community behaves in those ways demanded by the despot, as long as they live up to his imperial decrees, he doesn’t really care what they do outside of that. Local codes are preserved yet not without a fundamental modification. The despotic machine, in particular instances, utilized doctrines such as the great chain of being and the divine right of kings to justify itself and maintain its hierarchical structure of power. Local codes remain but with an imperial overlay, a verticalizing supplement.

Here’s the problem. Society is now organized around the will of an absolute master and his essentializing, exploitative, authoritarian order. One’s desire, one’s existence, is totally governed by the whims of an arbitrary authority figure. Sure, he’ll probably never cause you any other trouble besides forcing you to absolutely obey him in an imposed, unilateral and unquestionable obligation. He’ll leave you be but only if you do everything he commands of you as his “loyal” subject. But just try marching up to the despot and saying, “Fuck you and your imperial overcode! You’re not a god-man, you’re not a god-king, or even appointed by God, or whatever. You’re no better than I am in essence, asshole! Your position atop society is socially constructed. Your status is merely the effect of your Symbolic order, and not vice versa. It’s the cause and you’re the effect. You’re the despot simply because we treat you like one out of fear. We don’t treat you like a despot because you, in fact, are one. You idiot, you get the causality backwards! Stupid! Mr. From on High, my ass. You have to eat, shit and sleep just like me. I get to determine who I am — not you and your bullshit Law! Now fuck right off and let me do me! Mic drop. Peace out. Deuces.” Well, I sure hope that was fun. Now say goodbye to your head, friend. In fact, you’ll be lucky if that’s the full extent of the punishment. Alright, we have a working understanding, albeit just a sketch, of D&G’s take on savagery and despotism, so let’s move on and discuss their concept of capitalism.

One of the biggest changes brought about by the onset of capitalism is the way that it transforms codings. In both the savage and despotic machines, codes were qualitative. These Symbolic orders were organized around qualitative relations. Relations between people, things, events were made sense of and given worth in terms of other people, things and events. With capitalism, the quantitative takes precedence over quality. Our whole world turns around the exchange of quantities. Marx spotted this transition from quality to quantity in the difference between commodity circulation (C-M-C) and capital circulation (M-C-M). Commodity circulation is all about the procurement of qualitative use-values for the purpose of consumption, the things one needs, whereas capital circulation aims at the quantitative augmentation of capital itself through the sale and purchase of exchange-values.

“The path C-M-C proceeds from the extreme constituted by one commodity, and ends with the extreme constituted by another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of needs, in short use-value, is therefore its final goal. The path M-C-M, however, proceeds from the extreme of money and finally returns to that same extreme. Its driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is therefore exchange-value. . . . The simple circulation of commodities — selling in order to buy — is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.”
(Capital: Volume One, pp. 250, 253)

D&G refer to this process of ultra-quantification as axiomatization. The idea is that the moment capital becomes the socius, the center of society, is when all qualitative codes, be them local or imperial, begin to wither away through decoding. In capitalism, quantitative axioms usurp qualitative codes. Everything of symbolic quality is destroyed and remade in the image of economic quantity. D&G state, “Hence capital differentiates itself from any other socius or full body, inasmuch as capital itself figures as a directly economic instance, and falls back on production without interposing extraeconomic factors that would be inscribed in the form of a code” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 249). Axiomatization has to do with viewing and organizing the world in terms of economic principles. Everything gets perceived through money, calculation, price, investment, cost-effectiveness, profit, resources, interest rates, marketability, efficiency, functionality and speed (this way of looking at things was called instrumental rationality by Horkheimer and enframing by Heidegger).

“Axiomatization not only does not depend on meaning, belief, and custom, but actively defies and subverts them, giving capitalism its distinctive dynamism and modernism. Quantified flows under capitalism get conjoined solely on the estimation that this or that conjunction will produce surplus-value; such estimation involves economic calculation rather than belief: symbolic meaning has nothing to do with it. And the conjunction is direct, completely unmediated by codes; indeed, the qualities attributable to axiomatized flows arise from the conjunction itself, rather than pre-existing it: in commodity-production and consumption, the qualities of the product (“use-values”), as well as the qualities with which the consumer is endowed by consuming it (“taste”), and also the qualities of the labor-power (“skills”) and of the capital invested in machinery (“technologies”) required to produce it — all depend on the conjunctions effected beforehand in the market via the medium of money as abstract universal equivalent.”
(Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, pp. 66–7)

Axiomatic organization turns the concrete world of different things into abstract exchange-values consisting of the same “substance”. Concrete heterogeneity becomes abstract homogeneity. D&G say, “unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 33). But what is the existential effect of all this? The reduction of qualitative differences to lifeless quantities makes the world a very empty and meaningless place, which is why Marx and Engels warned, “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers” (The Communist Manifesto, p. 43). The best things in life are now captured by capital and become mere commodities to be profited off of.

However, capitalism does compensate for the absence of any lasting, stable and qualitative system of shared meaning by way of a process of recoding. What we get is the bare minimum of a code. We can think of recoding in terms of the fashionable, the trendy, the cool, the must-have, and so on. Historically speaking, consider how generational identities are new social phenomena. Once again, I go to Holland: “And so the form of coding characteristic of capitalism involves a contradictory process of decoding and recoding, whereby extant codes of meaning and conduct are swept away by a wave of axiomatization which generates a temporary recodification of new meanings and practices, that are themselves swept away in turn by the next wave of axiomatization, and so on” (Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, p. 68). This is, in part, the mechanism that produces generational identities. Starting in the 20th century, capitalism began to shape generations into determinate groups in a way never seen before. The greatest generation, baby boomers, X-ers and millennials are really defined by their location in the culture industry via the commodities, fashions, gadgets, music and films they consumed. Pop culture is generational identities. Simply put, consumer capitalism has to keep people buying new shit and the production of generational styles, fads and crazes is one such way. But while certain things are valued by one generation, they are not by another. We know all too well how different the values of the boomers are in comparison to those of millennials. This is the only type of “code” that we can speak of, according to D&G, when it comes to the capitalist Symbolic order. This “code” (recoding) is rooted in capital and merely serves to simulate a vague sense of coding meant to pacify and distract the exploited working class. This is our “world”. I mean, who in their right mind could ever forgive recoding for the abomination that was pastel shorts?

Well, hello there, Mr. Peterson. Let’s talk. The problem concerning personal meaning becomes a lot more problematic when historically situated, wouldn’t you agree? What we find is that the three main types of Symbolic orders are traps of meaning, that is, traps of personal meaning. None of them actually serve to facilitate the individual’s pursuit of the type of personal meaning praised nowadays. The possibility of attaining a strong sense of personal meaning, self-produced and self-legislative, in each of these orders gets trapped, imprisoned and caged in varying ways.

In the tribal order, the overall system of meaning, though lacking a power structure, is deeply rigid, codified, qualitative and absolute. The individual is totally locked into place by the organization of alliance and filiation. In this order, one is one’s imposed position in this sprawling network of social relations. Individuality, the very concept of the individual, wasn’t even a concept in the tribal world — that Symbolic order made no room for it. Even if a member had a flicker of the impulse to individualize him or her self, the Symbolic order didn’t provide any way to make sense of it and no path toward its actualization. Desire was fully attuned to the tribe and the territory and there really was no way for an “individual” to sever ties with this system. This social formation did attempt to balance order and chaos, but it did this for each member. The individual had no meaningful say in the ratio between of order and chaos he or she had to live.

The same is essentially true of the despotic order, with its preservation of local codes, but now there’s an extremely oppressive power structure or overcode at play as well. One’s desire cannot fundamentally organize around the pursuit of personal meaning or meaningful individuality, since the desire of the despot is the focal point of it in this society. First and foremost, you have to spend your life conforming to the desire of the despot, to fulfilling the demands he imposes, to living in the image of you he paints. Now the “individual” is caught in a top-down hierarchy that forever neutralizes the possibility of self-creation, liberty, freedom and the like. The overcode only cares about the order it imposes and your full submission to it. If you’re looking for chaos, then just defy the overcode — it will be all too happy to oblige you.

I can hear it now. “But capitalism does make this possible”. Well, it certainly always promised to make it happen, but . . . . In hindsight, it’s easy to see how tribal and despotic orders coded and overcoded the “individual” and effectively prevented individuality from occurring, but things get much trickier with capitalism given its esteem for the category of the individual. However, a close study of capitalism, especially its consumer form, reveals that “individuality”, in this Symbolic order, is just another commodity to be bought and sold. One way capital keeps our desire subservient to it is by having us chase individuality or authenticity through the commodities we consume and enjoy. We “differentiate” ourselves by identifying with specific commodities and their associated status connotations. But if this is the case, then we are all “individuating” ourselves in the exact same way. Consumer individualism is conformism in disguise. In The Consumer Society, Jean Baudrillard pointed out that the only individuality we have is a simulated type, that is, we possess the signs or indicators of individualism without there being any real and meaningful referents to them. They are simulacra insofar as they do not correspond to anything real, that is, anything we do. Consumer “individuality” is inauthentic “authenticity”. This is the type of individuality capitalism produces — this is actually-existing “individuality”. Pursuing personal meaning via the commodity-system is existentially unsatisfying. It gives rise to the pervasive discontent embodied by the Narrator in Fight Club and that guy’s room was squeaky clean.

Capitalism abolishes codes and overcodes, qualitative systems of meaning, for the sake of its accumulation. It cannot have various rituals, religious practices, feasts, fixed identities, etc., getting in the way of the augmentation of capital. Nature is commodified and so are we. Money makes the world go round. Ultra-quantification and exploitation leave existence devoid of any meaningful meaning and floods us instead with meaningless meaning, i.e., information. It traps us in a rat race ever increasing in speed. The vast majority of people have no time and no energy to devote to the activities that make them feel alive, that give them an enduring sense of significance and worth and integrity. We are the precariat. There is no job security. The threat of climate change looms. Ongoing automation is going to reducing the availability of jobs. The shitty food we are forced to eat will make us sick. Then there’s the student loan debt crisis as well as the problem of medical debt. I could keep on going. All of these problems are rooted in the structure of the capitalist Symbolic order.

Our problem of meaning is not one of the personal or individual relation between order and chaos. Our problem of meaning concerns our shared order of meaning or the social order itself. We cannot simply accept the current state of the Symbolic order in some Stoic fashion. No resignation! There is no room for detachment from it. Our nihilistic dispositions of indifference, irony, ennui, etc., all stem from the fact that it seriously matters to us. We are the big Other. As Lacan’s famous refrain goes, “desire is the desire of the Other” (Seminar XI, p. 235). The big Other has totally shaped how we desire and fantasize, what we want for our lives, what matters to us, and so on. But it is precisely what is blocking us from realizing all this. It simultaneously produces our desires while stifling them. There’s a kind of Marxian contradiction here. Vaporwave is getting at this very tension. If you live in accordance with the truth, then you see that your situation is completely fucked. You need to have meaning in your life but to have it necessitates changing the Symbolic order, which you certainly cannot do on your own, so this causes a nihilistic fallout. This is intrinsic to the consumer paradigm Mark Fisher called capitalist realism. This is the problem! And baby-stepping it will fix nothing, since the problem is not psychologically, morally or existentially individualistic in character, but, rather, structural and systemic. “Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you” (12 Rules for Life, p. 198). No, it’s the world. To deny this would be to lie. “Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell” (12 Rules for Life, p. 198). Geez, I get it, Dolores. I must not tell lies. Now stick this Black Quell where the sun don’t shine, bucko.

If meaning is to have any place in our lives, it has to be futural. We need a new Symbolic order. We cannot fall back on old ones. We are not going to buy into rigid essentialism and prescientific superstition. We would hate being in those social formations. The past symbolic orders are not options and the current one is making our lives a living hell. All three of the semiotic machines fail to allow us to find a personal meaning. Capital has produced the very problem of mass nihilism. The only option is to resurrect the future. Only a new Symbolic order can save us from the quantitatively ordered chaos of capital. Peterson uses the allure of pre-capitalist meaning, old school meaning of myth, meaning that is thick and refined, but goes on to hold that this sort of meaning is possible in our capitalist realist paradigm and that the individual can establish it. But, as Deleuze and Guattari showed, meaning and capital do not mix. The future, if such a thing is to come to pass, may not be communist — but it certainly will not be capitalist. The precariat cannot gain any Jungian-esque balance because of capital. When it comes to giving our lives a personal meaning or a balance, capital is the chaos dragon par excellence. Slay the chaos dragon!

Works Cited

— Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (1987) Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

— Chandler, Daniel. (2007) Semiotics: The Basics (second edition). London: Routledge.

— Holland, Eugene W. (1999) Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. London: Routledge.

— Lacan, Jacques. (1991) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, Sylvana Tomaselli (trans.). New York: Norton. First original language publication 1978.

— Lacan, Jacques. (1977) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI, Alan Sheridan (trans.). New York: Norton. First original language publication 1973.

— Lyotard, Jean-François. (1988) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Georges Van Den Abbeele (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. First original language publication 1983.

— Lyotard, Jean-François. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Geoff Bennington & Brain Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. First original language publication 1979.

— Malpas, Simon. (2002) Jean-François Lyotard (Routledge Critical Thinkers). London: Routledge.

— Marx, Karl. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Ben Fowkes (trans.). New York: Vintage Books. First original language publication 1867.

— Marx, Karl. (1992) ‘Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy’, Early Writings, Rodney Livingstone & Gregor Benton (trans.) London: Penguin Books.

— Peterson, Jordan B. (2018) 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Canada: Random House Canada.

— Peterson, Jordan B. (1999) Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. London: Routledge.

— Žižek, Slavoj. (2006) How to Read Lacan. New York: Norton.