Lobster Fest: Happiness

[The following text is an introduction given for a viewing party of the debate between the Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek and YouTube lobster-based celebrity Jordan Peterson. The presentation was given in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada]

T o some, it may sound odd that the central question to the upcoming Žižek-Peterson debate is happiness — specifically, happiness in the context of capitalism versus Marxism. My intent today is to offer a short introduction to the debate, to provide a general sense of both of their positions and why the question of happiness is quite appropriate. Before we jump right in, we should consider some precursory questions about the state of our understanding of happiness today:

• Should happiness be central to human activity?
• And in presuming that we take happiness to be so, do we not then risk putting out of play other considerations over human comportment and ethics? For example, do not (neo-)liberal, capitalist notions of happiness as self-realizing achievement and success come with their implicative inversion in exploitation and deprivation of others from such happiness.
• And even if happiness were to transcend (neo-)liberalist and capitalist conditions and conceptions of it, is it not possible that happiness could have other analogous implications over its attainment?
• Basically, is happiness worthy and meaningful of its pursuit? Or is there something radically senseless and arbitrary to happiness as a guide of how we carry ourselves about in our lives?

Jordan Bjordan Peterson is a figure that is quite relevant to Alberta, once having ran for leadership of the NDP and having held a rapport with the Notley family, and also in his thematics being reflected in Jason Kenney’s Premier acceptance speech condemning “the politics of resentment”. Peterson raised to popularity through his YouTube channel and his notable resistance to a misreading of Bill-16 that was expanding rights and protections to Trans and Non-Binary people, perceiving it as a censorship attack. This is only the tip of the iceberg to the Peterson persona; however, I will be focusing on the positions he holds and the problem from which these arrive.

The problem at the core for Peterson is the crisis of modernity, where many values and ideas that oriented the way humans have historically carried ourselves about in the world have vanished or lost foundation. In lack of a center of gravity to orbit around, we have been struggling to reinstate traditional values or creating new ones that are more stable. We have been left with a restlessness and discontent over what comes next in both the individual and the social to fill this gap. What Peterson attempts to offer in both 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning is an alleged antidote to this chaos by rehabilitating the symbolic structures that once gave meaning to life.

Peterson turns to the notion of the higher Relation which is supposed to protect us from utter Chaos of the non-relation, as the Ordering Relation regulates and contains Chaos under check as it were. Peterson’s position can be described as a capitalist, Judeo-Christian apologetic perspective. Peterson holds his position through an appeal to the consistency of meaning in the world in a higher and archetypal sense — his response to the Nietzschean problematic of overcoming nihilism is by doubling down on decaying dogmatic meaning which is revived through a Jungian-Campbellian gesture of reclaiming ourselves in some hero’s journey, a larger narrative as the signifying structure itself: “Everything is something, and means something — and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn” (Peterson, 1999, 2, 5–6, and 94). We become resentful and unruly, according to Peterson, when we combat these essential meaningful structures.

We may consider the curious example of toxic masculinity and why so many young men have such a strong investment in Peterson. Two of the values that have reached a critical state in modernity are the notions of “Man” and “masculinity”. Toxic masculinity is best reflected as the decadence of a value which is now quite senseless and placeless. Instead of having a given role and place in civilization, men are anxious at the real encounter of freedom against their habitual, decaying masculinity. Though they may call someone “bro” or “brother” as a way to reassure themselves of having the relations, these are but platitudinous weak relations that do not patch the void in their hearts. Thus, the other side of toxic masculinity is manifested in a diversity of violence at the anxiety of freedom and the instability of their sense of self which is constantly falling under question, unable to resign themselves into the emancipatory potential of “being able not to be able to” (something Peterson’s successful-self formula pushes up against). Instead of the catastrophic loss of identity that may come with an emancipatory abolition of the non-relation, the narrative of the Relation that Peterson offers banks on and reassures identity as it is in a given and dogmatic sense in an attempt to keep catastrophe at bay.

We are, in essence, asking: How do we tell a story about ourselves when our myth-building devices and symbolic structures are under collapse or perhaps were never quite transparent to ourselves to begin with? Peterson reassures us that meaning can be consistent and essential to the very being that we are, whereby all specific and fragmented cultures nevertheless resonate the universal cultural structure that orders All without exception. (This is the core of Peterson’s preoccupation with post-modernism and moral relativism in Chapter 11 of 12 Rules for Life, but interestingly also against Marxism which still tries to offer an universal narrative — save that the Marxist narrative is rather of an universal exception rather than universality built on exceptionality) We will note that the Petersonian universal is nevertheless founded on an exception and is not-All.

Here we can start unpacking the differences between our boi Slavoj and lobsterboi himself. Whereas the Lacanian psychoanalyst highlights the lack of meaning inherent in the structure of meaning itself, someone like Jordan Peterson falls short at merely appealing and taking for granted the structure of meaning itself — he ultimately fails to contain the non-relation at the core of meaning, and instead denies and exploits it into success.

In short, narratives of the Relation render social injustice into a higher Justice. The fundamental antagonism that constitutes the given simultaneously disavowed and appropriated as a generic and productive point of social power. In bad faith, one continues to assume a certain place and sense of belonging in the world in some meaningful way, a way that may stand besides us and in spite of us. In the case of a figure like Peterson, it is argued that we have no right to anything but to assume responsibility for where we stand and how we stand there, that true meaning is found in taking on one’s place in the world as responsibility instead of offering bickering, “totalitarian” critiques of it: “The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being” (Peterson, 2018, 154). However, what may be painted as “assuming responsibility” or “claiming one’s own burden” can be also expressed in its overt sense as a roundabout form of self-destruction — we are only for the sake of something greater, who are we to question it? Doing so would only amount to a “resentment-ridden ideology”, according to Peterson.

With some predictions for the debate: Peterson will be for happiness, but happiness will mean taking one’s place in the world as if it were a realization of our truest self (archetype or transcendental meaning). Žižek will be like”fuck no”, happiness is bullshit and the structure of meaning that sustains our constant fetishistic pursuit of happiness is only a lure in the lack of any actual consistent meaning. Happiness and its meaning are not consistent, and that is ostensibly speaking apparent when we see happiness built in the backs of repressed others.

Now, we have to note that Žižek’s Marxism is not an orthodox form of Marxism. With Žižek, it is not as if we could communize happiness or make happiness more authentic and genuine. With Peterson wanting to act as if happiness can still be a reclaimable thing under capitalist conditions, it ultimately does amount to a purely ideological disavowal of the conditions under which we have a given sense of consistent, meaningful happiness. And consistent and meaningful is exactly what Peterson is looking to push in his capitalist and hierarchical apologetics, that we should take responsibility by taking our place in consistent and meaningful Being. Clean your room to be happy! He tries to unflatten happiness by mystifying it, certainly. But we will see some problems with that.

Though in posing the question of “Will happiness through Marxism truly be more genuine and pure (let’s say authentic) than with capitalism?” to a Marxist in a general sense — as many Marxists do hold pursuits for the authentic self lost to alienation — I will certainly push that Žižek has a certain difference in navigating a question of happiness. Simply, Žižek would want nothing to do with happiness or joy — that we are merely commanded to enjoy ourselves or to pursue something like happiness (you know, like how logos or mottos do) is a pretty superfluous question. The joke of course being the whole “I prefer not to” bit.

And when we face the concerns of totalitarianism as expressed by Peterson and the question “Can Happiness be coerced?”, Žižek would certainly say that we are given a forced choice in both capitalism and Communism. The curious thing about capitalism, however, is that it really obscures that forced choice over little fetishistic differences — like how our (neo-)liberal, capitalist notion of freedom basically amounts to choosing between Pepsi or coke, or that I can compulsively order pizza every frigging day, fuck yeah, freedom, I do what I want MOM. The meaningful difference, that someone like Peterson kind of hangs onto with his all meat diet, is but a platitude — meaning, and the question of happiness too, are pretty superficial. In capitalism, semblances of freedom are there, it feels like freedom — but is it freedom? Like could a compulsive freedom, like the urge to do the common “freedom of speech” argument, really be an expression of freedom? Žižek would certainly say it is quite the fantasy and the dream that sustains such things as meaningful.

What only remains for us to do is to revisit the question of the forced choice. Certainly in his look-backs to communist Yugoslavia, Žižek jokes a lot about how the forced choice is certainly there, but it parodies itself in being more apparent. The only structure of collective, symbolic meaning there is admittedly inconsistent. So to that extent, Žižek does end up stressing that one has to look back at 20th century communism as a failure — note that we are quite supposing capitalism is a success, but it certainly likes to talk more about success and of itself as if it were successful. But we can certainly see some differences over how this forced choice operates in these two ideological apparatuses.

So whereas Peterson falls into a purely ideological reclamation of happiness, Žižek will always remind us of the fantasy that structures ideology and the meaningful, and thus the frames by which we may understand joy, pleasure, and happiness (and perhaps even our most destructive tendencies that run alongside them). Žižek’s Lacanian psychoanalytic influence certainly makes him more interested on this excess to ideology and the meaningful, which makes him not quite the conventional Marxist.

I myself, from my own Lacanian-Marxist takes, would highlight that the question is not so much to get hung up on happiness for its own sake (or even forgetting the fantasy that sustains it as meaningful), but rather to understand how to intervene and disrupt the fantasies that frame happiness and the meaningful. And that experience is not quite necessarily happy, like disturbing people’s fantastical pursuits for the meaningful and happiness can also show their inverse side in aggressive and destructive tendencies that run parallel to that positivity culture. Happiness is not really getting at the root of issues, it is quite a platitude.

References and Citations

Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Canada: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Peterson, Jordan B, Norman Doidge, and Sciver E. Van. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018. Print.