The Exploitation of Social Antagonisms

Presentation for the Absurd Collective

The following presentation draws insight from Alenka Zupančič’s What is Sex? as well as from a short commentary text that I wrote on a section from that book titled “The Invisible ‘Handjob’ of the Market”. This was presented for a variety event put on by the Absurd Collective in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

The point we are going to consider is rather simple: fundamental social antagonisms, anti-social behaviour, individuality and difference in social relations are exploited and appropriated for the sake of some higher Relation. We will consider examples of such positions, as in Jordan Peterson’s account of what makes life meaningful, as well as Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” which is allegedly working towards the good of society as a whole from self-interested individualist practices.

We will nevertheless hold that Zupančič reverses the fundamental logic that is used to justify capitalist exploits in order to reveal their obverse and perverse side. The problem is shown to be more complicated as capitalism is sustained by the individual’s pretense and disavowal of the fundamental antagonisms that keep capitalism productive and profitable.

Zupančič’s discussion helps expound some of the key commonalities between Marxism and Psychoanalysis, especially in discussing the structure of the capitalist mode of production. And by displaying the obverse side of the logic of capitalism and the invisible hand, Zupančič reveals how in following the logic of Adam Smith’s new economic idea the whole way, we find its continuation in the eventuality of economic crises.

We may begin by noting that “non-relation is at the heart of every relation” (Zupančič, 32). This is neither a mediation that stands in between relations nor a homogeneity in relations, but rather a radical heterogeneity that is implicatively found in differences in identity and antagonisms as they come to generate any sense of identity or relation — “it is the inherent (il)logic (a fundamental “antagonism”) of the relationships that are possible and existing” (Zupančič, 24).

This implicative non-relation is found in all forms of social bonds. Zupančič notes that social relations of power — such as domination, exploitation, and discrimination — are first and foremost forms of exploitation of the non-relation and fundamental antagonisms.

It is here that we must draw a distinction between the abolition of the non-relation and narratives of the Relation in the service of exploiting the antagonisms. We will start by focusing on the narratives of the Relation.

When we turn to the notion of the higher Relation, it is supposed to protect us from utter Chaos of the non-relation, as the Relation regulates and contains Chaos under check. This is common in contemporary discourse. Most notably the capitalist and Judeo-Christian apologist Jordan Peterson, who maintains his position through an appeal to the consistency of meaning in the world in a higher, hierarchical, and archetypal sense — his response to the Nietzschean problematic of overcoming nihilism is by doubling down on dogmatic meaning which is revived through a gesture of reclaiming ourselves in some hero’s journey, a larger narrative structure making things significant. He argues 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 “totalitarian” critiques of it: “The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being” (Peterson, 2018, 154). It is ironic that what he offers us, however, is a totalitarian relation to the Higher Being.

We can contrast this to the abolition of the non-relation, which coincides with emancipatory and radical projects. Often intertwined to catastrophic results, as Zupančič sees it to be “inherent in the very honesty of the will to abolishing the non-relation” (Zupančič, 31). As in all these cases, for instance, the emancipation at hand is from identity, from a certain given place and belonging in the world. We could even argue that we identify ourselves with our symptoms, as our attachments and detachments may be telling of who we are. The honesty at hand is one that admits and yields to the catastrophic loss coinciding with emancipation, whereby the modus operandi at hand pertains a new order and a new notion of who we are in opposing the non-relation and attempting to force out the non-relation by all means possible (Zupančič, 31).

The Lacanian psychoanalyst highlights the lack of meaning inherent in the structure of meaning itself, whereas 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. Instead, Peterson denies the non-relational antagonism and exploits it.

Instead from the catastrophic loss of identity that may come with emancipation, the narrative of the Relation banks on and reassures identity as it is in a given and dogmatic sense, in an attempt to keep catastrophe at bay. 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?

Yet, from the Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective that Zupančič puts forward, power is how relations of domination are placed and perpetuated through a fundamental negativity of the signifying structure, its constitutive non-relation, and building a narrative of a higher Relation. Or as Zupančič writes: “actual, concrete exploitation is based on, made possible (and fuel) by,… this privatization of the negative” (Zupančič, 31). The distinction is further pronounced through an illustration draw from Bertolt Brecht: “what distinguishes… the robbing of a bank (common theft) from the founding of a bank (a double theft which appropriates the very lever of production and its exploitation)” (Zupančič, 31).

We may turn to consider Adam Smith. The importance of Smith, according to Zupančič, rests in a transition from an older sense of economics to new economics.

The former sense is characterized by mercantilism, which understood wealth as a constant, whereby the only way to increase the wealth of a nation is at the expense of another. The relation is one of subordination, contrasting weak nations against those that are powerful. Wealth is conceived of as a closed totality ensures the visibility of the difference (in wealth).

On the other hand, the new economic idea associated with Smith looks to move beyond the totality-based relativity of mercantilism while prizing/pricing the productivity of the newly discovered antagonism — basically the exploitable glitch to how Wealth could be conceived of on the basis of industrial labour. The move away from the restrained totality of Wealth comes with respect to the Industrial Revolution and the increase what counts as wealth itself — one no longer needs to take wealth from another to have any, as a new sense of productivity is developed.

Thus, we are presented to the invisible hand and the mythology that sustains capitalism as meaningful. Social antagonisms are placed as fundamental in Adam Smith, where the elements of social order are individuals assembling society through egoistic drives and the pursuit of self-interest. Egoism is portrayed as the good of society as a whole in both welfare and justice. Society is led in a laissez-faire attitude that supposes that promoting the good of society is best done indirectly — no one likes being told what to do, and yet we do not do what we think we are doing.

We may note that the mythological figure of the invisible hand brings about the good of society through the indirect means. We may understand this indirectness as the very implication of what falls short in Smith’s account of the new economical mode of production by not following its logic far enough. Where at first we find at the core of self-interested enjoyment the good of society; inversely, at the core of the good of society, we find the most masturbatory self-enjoyment. Much like the individual, the Market and its invisible hand do not do what they think are doing as well (Zupančič, 32).

What becomes apparent in the reversal of Adam Smith’s portrayal of capitalism is the logic behind an economic crisis. Zupančič writes: “Left to itself, the market (the Other) is bound to discover ‘solitary enjoyment’” (Zupančič, 32). This inversion of Smith’s logic moves us from the invisible hand (whose goals aim at welfare and justice) to the invisible handjob where “most of the wealth is decidedly out of common reach” (Zupančič, 32).

We set a distinction between absolute wealth and relative difference in wealth as distributed. What is counted as wealth has certainly increased in the absolute sense of it, where even the poorests are living better than two centuries ago. This has been done so through the exploitation of the antagonisms in relative wealth, where “the differences… are also exponentially greater, fed by the non-relation in its ‘higher’ form” (Zupančič, 32 and 33).

Therefore, we must ask: why exactly is the non-relation so productive and profitable?

Zupančič draws from Karl Marx the insight that: in order to be economically productive and profitable, the non-relation (antagonism, anti-sociality) has to be built into the very mode of production (Zupančič, 33). Labour is present in the market as yet another commodity, which is symptomatic of a paradoxical redoubling of labour, its place, and its appropriation in the mode of production of capitalism: “what makes the products (namely, labour power) also appears with them on the market as one of the products, objects for sale” (Zupančič, 33). Labour as the production of wealth and labour as wealth feeding onto the entropy of social-economic system to “make itself rich”, or “nothing has been stolen from the workers” (Zupančič, 33). The place of the market’s “miraculous” productivity is labour as a commodity, for this is what sets absolute wealth to work and grow, through the antagonism inscribed into the very mode and form of production.

As Zupančič writes: “if we were indeed just commodities, capitalism would not work; we need to be free persons selling our labour power as our property, our commodity” (Zupančič, 33). In turning labour into a commodity, capitalism conceals its inherent productive gap asserting that “the Worker does not exist” — if the Worker existed, it would actually be a slave; we need to be “free” for capitalism to work, as in the exemplar fantasies of “pulling yourself by your bootstraps”, self-made business men, women, black, or even trans CEOs, or tech-daddies like Elon Musk demanding workers to be dedicated to give +40 hours of work. In this sense, the Proletariat is neither just one class amongst others nor the sum of all workers, but rather more fundamental and symptomatic to class relations and social stratification altogether. The Proletariat is a knotty non-relation.

Patching this discrepancy of capitalist realism comes by way of a fundamental perverse fantasy to capitalism that disavows the exploitation of the non-relation, where one may convince oneself that one cannot be a worker because that would actually be slavery. Even if we do the math (as if it were the purest discourse to determine the matter), fantasy distorts the fundamental impasse of capitalist being and its structuring. Perhaps example from the Office is due:

Kevin: The pie shop is 13 miles away. So at 55 miles an hour, that just gives us 5 minutes to spare.

Angela: So, wait, when pies are involved, you can suddenly do math in your head?

Oscar: Hold on, Kevin, how much is 19,154 pies divided by 61 pies?

Kevin: 314 pies.

Oscar: What if it were salads?

Kevin: Well, it’s the — carry the four and the — it doesn’t work (The Office, Season 9, Episode 4).

Much like Kevin’s inability to do pure math and see past the little differences of pies and salads, the fundamental fantasy that sustains capitalism operates in a similar manner. The very structuring of Being itself is biased, cracked from within informing it of what it is — where fetishized objects, such as the commodified difference between pies and salads, seem as if they make a difference.

We may conclude by elaborating on the logic of the paranoid misdiagnosis of our current crisis as being sourced in globalist, unrestricted internationalism as opposed to global capitalism. Whereas for Kevin the accountant, pies are a structural core of the very notion of being qua being as pure mathematics (for if they were salads, by a fantastical leap, the math is disturbingly different), we may consider how this patching over of the fundamental non-relation plays out in the ideological fantasies that sustain racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and the like. The moment it is not a white person we are dealing with, but someone racialized person, they are counted differently and through distortions into being only under the implicit claim that there is still a substantial little difference after all.

This is also what distinguishes feminism’s understanding of woman as an excluded point of society as opposed to the traditional, dogmatic metaphysical account of what is woman understood as identity to be assumed with belonging and place in the world — “the mythology of the female identity is precisely what has made this exclusion possible, and what sustains… the difference and exclusion on the prepolitical level, on the level of belonging to two different worlds” (Zupančič, 36). The central politicizing gesture of feminism then is asserting that “the Woman does not exist” as an emancipatory loss of identity, one that recognizes the female identity to reinstate the exclusion characteristic of social antagonism as if it were belonging.

Or in the perverse logic of anti-Semitism, for example, Slavoj Žižek writes that: “In the domain of ideology, the primordial fantasmatic object, the mother of all ideological objects, is the object of anti-Semitism, the so-called ‘conceptual Jew’: beneath the chaos of the market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there lies the Jewish plot” (Žižek, 679). In the absence of any Jew, much like in the absence of Woman, It is everywhere patching all inconsistencies into conspiracies and contrivances that never quite detect the Real antagonism — conspiracies and contrivances amount to symbolic fictions that grant the semblance of any meaningful and significant order.

And yet, the Jew, the Woman, the Black, and so on are but the fantasmic specter of what fantasy tries to patch over and bring into the semblance of consistence. These conceptual figures stand in as the objet a, (de-)central to traversing the fantasy by showing its obvert side, not as symbolic, but as hauntingly real. Or as Žižek writes: “To ‘traverse the fantasy’ therefore means, paradoxically, to fully identify oneself with the fantasy — with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality” (Žižek, 689). Object a stands in, “taking the place of the image that ‘one has never seen’” (Zupančič, 18), containing meaning and the signifying structure before they collapse and spill out of themselves in their exceeding point — as in the economic crises that realizes that at the core of the Other (the Market), we find the most masturbatory self-enjoyment of Capital making themselves enriched.

When we look at the claim that “globalism” is the real contemporary threat (as it is regularly claimed by right-wing and nationalist groups,), we may highlight that the “globalist” claim is only sustained by conspiracies and contrivances that exploit racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism that nevertheless reinstate and perpetuate the state of crisis as if it were meaningful. Instead of relying on this misdiagnosis, we may note that global capitalism is not meaningful, it only comes across as such in the form of a higher Relation and Purpose that seeks to justify and exploit the irrational state disenfranchisement at hand. It is in an eventual break, like an economic crisis where capitalist realism cannot be contained from collapse, that it becomes apparent that the real contemporary threat is, in fact, global capitalism prolonging its State and the hoarding of enjoyment.

Reference 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.

Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012. Print.

Zupančič, Alenka. What Is Sex? Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2017. Print.