...if one looks carefully enough, one will notice that, in capitalism, things work a bit differently than they had before in past forms of ideological closure. Here, in the ideological space of capital, individuals seek their enjoyment in desired objects and desired knowledge that are interned within the very ideological system that produces these desired items. Therefore one’s enjoyment remains rigidly confined within the very order it should otherwise be transgressing. Or rather, one’s enjoyment is, paradoxically, rigidly confined in an extremely polymeric ideology: capitalism gains strength, its interpellative agency becomes more potent, its very structure bends and swells and thrives with every transgression. Why? Because with capitalism, in capitalism, everything is reduced to a brutal economic reality (including science itself; for the lion’s share of scientific discoveries end up serving only the networks of capital), and in such a space capital’s objectivism becomes our only reality, and thus literally everything, prohibited or not, eventually becomes absorbed into the world of capital. This is precisely how capital is able to self-engender. Let us not forget, too, and this is important, that human subjectivity is that which is constantly attempting to overcome a lack, to reconcile these gaps in the symbolic social field — that is why capitalism exists in the first place: it sinisterly dons the visage that it completes this lack, tessellating the social field with false images of wholeness, despite never really doing so; so we continue to play the game precisely because we desire something we’ll never have but which capitalism nonetheless vows to offer us: wholeness. So capitalist ideology tells us to enjoy, to enjoy it all; but because no single thing, no object, no commodity can ever fully satisfy our desires and make us complete, capitalism, as a system, therefore relies on this inbuilt inadequacy precisely in order for it to continue to function. We keep producing and buying, producing and buying… It’s this very contradiction between capitalism as a system and capitalism as an ideology—the fact that capitalism cannot give what it demands of us to desire — that sustains and perpetuates capitalism per se as a function of human desire. Frank Smecker
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:35:26 +0000
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