Capitalism, America, relationships, and the compulsion to enjoy!
I: INTRODUCTION
In this article I want to address
the relations between a country’s political landscape and its respective dating
culture and mating rituals. My thesis is that that more (economically)
right-wing/capitalist a country is, the more its culture is dominated by what
is known in psychoanalysis as “the super-ego compulsion to enjoy”, since that
itself is inherently related to capitalism (as Slavoj Zizek often points out). This
article is a rather more well-organized summary of a huge part of the ideas of
my upcoming book “Love, politics, social norms and sex”. I decided to write
this in order to put the main most important ideas of the book into “one place”
in a more coherent manner, since the book itself ended up being more of a
disorganized ramble, with me thinking out loud and developing my theory as I
was writing it. This year, in a month or two at most, I will release the book
where I develop each of these ideas into much more detail.
II: THE SIGNIFIER WITHOUT A SIGNIFIED
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan distinguished
between more types of signifiers. There is a type of signifiers with a clear “image”
behind them (a signifier with a signified): the word “tree” signifies the idea
of a tree in your mind, the American flag signifies the idea of the USA in your
mind, a white flag signifies the idea of “peace” in your mind, a certain facial
expression (which is itself a signifier) often signifies the idea of a certain
emotion or attitude, etc. And then, you have signifiers without a signified, or
self-referential/tautological signifiers: these are signifiers that signify
themselves. It is the latter that Lacan names “master signifiers”.
A master signifier presents itself
as either descriptive or tautological, but actually masks a hidden imperative.
In other words, a master signifier is an indirect injunction for the other to do
something. The question is – what the other subtly pressured into doing?
I argue that the other is pressured
to enjoy. This should be obvious to anyone familiar with Lacanian
psychoanalysis: any tautological “loop” creates a circuit that loops
around itself, this circuit is known as the circuit of the (death) drive and is
inherently tied to the concepts of “repetition-compulsion” and “ego-ideal”. The
death drive is a repetition of an act that goes beyond the limits
imposed by the Freudian pleasure principle. If you desire a piece of cake, the
Freudian pleasure principle may guide you to eat some cake until you are full
and satisfied. The death drive is whatever goes beyond the pleasure principle,
when you like the cake so much that after one piece, you repeat your act and
eat another piece of cake, and another, and another, and another, and you do
NOT stop even after you are full. The end-state of the death drive is what
Lacan calls “jouissance” – a pleasure that is so intense that it turns into
pain (ex: Liking a food so much that you eat until you get sick, liking a song
so much that you turn it so loud that your ears hurt, having sex that is so
rough that you end up sore or with various pains or scars, etc.).
Hence, a self-referential (“master”)
signifier can only guide one into an infinite, never-ending loop where its
definition includes the signifier itself that it tries to define. This circuit
is a never-ending search for that signified that could “stop” the loop and
function as the equivalent of the state of satisfaction gathered by eating a
piece of food and then stopping once you are full. Satisfaction is inherently
tied to the imaginary order (the realm of signifieds), not to the symbolic
order (the realm of signifiers), and its linguistic equivalent is the signified
behind a signifier that can personally function to someone as a “quilting point”
that could finally give meaning to the current discourse, giving that “aha, so
this is what this means!” moment.
A quilting point in Lacanian psychoanalysis is what
rests at the end of a discourse, giving retroactive meaning to
everything else that came before it. For example, read this sentence: “In one lovely
night of December, he was softly whispering in her ear and slowly stroking her
skin…”. You are probably imagining some amorous or sexual scene. Now read this next
sentence: “In one lovely night of December, he was softly whispering in her ear
and slowly stroking her skin… with the edge of a knife.”. Now you are imagining
something completely different, perhaps the scene of a horror movie. In the
latter sentence, the last signifier “…with the edge of a knife” functions as a quilting
point, giving retroactive meaning to everything else that came before it.
Similarly enough, I argue there, the signifieds behind the signifiers
themselves function as a quilting point for most humans, when someone
intuitively grasps the meaning of a word, for instance, and they get that “aha!”
moment, understanding the meaning of the entire sentence/phrase/etc. When a
signifier is self-referential, however (ex: the definition of a word includes
the word it tries to define), the message is: “Never stop searching for this
meaning!”. This is the hidden compulsion to enjoy behind every master
signifier, because the search for its meaning makes one engage in the death
drive (repetition-compulsion), which inevitably ends for the person as a state
of jouissance1. Hence, just like one may never stop eating
cake because “I enjoy it so much that I can’t stop!”, when one is encountered
with a master signifier, they are basically told to act like they enjoy that
signifier so much that they will never stop searching for its meaning.
The most “trendy” example of such a master-signifier
is the “woman” signifier. There is a growing trend in progressive American
ideology to turn woman into a self-referential signifier: “A woman is
someone who identifies as a woman”. What is the hidden message here? The
message is: “I am imposing you to like women so much that you’ll keep
trying to find out what a woman is and never stop!” (the eternal ‘hysterical
question’). The surplus-enjoyment produced by the never-ending search for what
a “real” woman is, is what Lacan calls “jouissance”, or more specifically in
this particular example, “joui-sense”.
III: LABELS FOR RELATIONSHIPS AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS
I argue that labels for
relationships and social interactions, in capitalism, are master-signifiers
that mask a hidden compulsion to enjoy. In the English language, this includes
signifiers such as “relationship” or “romantic relationship”, with its
associated signifiers of “boyfriend”, “girlfriend” and “S/O”; the signifiers “date”
and “dating”; and to a lesser extent, the signifiers “marriage”/”husband”/”wife”/”spouse”
as well as the signifiers “friend” and “friendship”.
The unconscious definition2
of many of these signifiers tends to be one that is self-referential: two
people are in a “relationship” if they say they are in a relationship, for
instance. This is a master-signifier that masks a hidden compulsion to enjoy –
this is why a relationship is not when two people are in love or when two people
are happy together (there are many unhappy couples who stay together and there
are many people who love each other and maybe even both know it but are too
afraid to talk about it and thus not in a relationship, or maybe two people who
are in love but are in separate relationships/marriages so they also can’t say
they are ‘together’, etc.); it is also not when people regularly engage in a
specific physical act (a relationship is not when two people kiss regularly, it’s
not when two people hold hands regularly, it’s not when two people have sex
regularly, and so on – you can always find many counter-examples of people
where everyone agrees that the two are in a relationship and yet they do not
fit such a definition) and it is not when two people informally agree to remain
monogamous (as seen with the rise of “open relationships”). Then what is a
relationship? It is indeed circular, it is when two people agree to be in a
relationship, but how can they agree whether to be in a relationship or not
without having an a priori understanding of what a relationship is in the first
place?
This is why I’m going to add to the
famous Lacanian formula “there is no sexual relationship” that there is no
romantic relationship either – it is just the word itself, and the rest is
a hidden imperative. Thus, a more accurate way to understand
relationships is this: a relationship is whenever two people are “supposed”
to be happy together, whenever two people “should” be in love or “are supposed”
to be in love, etc. In other words, a relationship is when two people
are pressured to enjoy each other. It is only the work of the ‘super-ego
compulsion to enjoy’. Whenever there is a pressure, expectation or “should” – we
are dealing with the over-bearing expectations of the super-ego/ego-ideal.
IV: CAPITALISM AND FEUDALISM
Romantic relationships and dating (by
that I am referring to freely choosing your life partner) started existing in
the beginning of capitalism. This makes sense as they essentially are a
capitalist market itself, but you are the marketed product. You can Google the
history of dating and the history of capitalism and see that they match quite
well. The transition from feudalism to capitalism (“mercantilism”) also matches
quite well, temporally, with the transition from arranged marriages to dating
(a form of “arranged dating”, so to speak, a "courtship ritual where young
women entertained gentleman callers, usually in the home, under the watchful
eye of a chaperone"3).
Under feudalism, love and sexuality
was inherently split. Sexuality was tied to the concept of marriage and to
reproduction, and your spouse was chosen by your parents (arranged marriages). Love
was reserved for extra-marital affairs. One could say, with a little exaggeration,
that everyone in feudalism was pressured to have Freud’s infamous “Madonna-Whore
complex”. Because of this, there was no such thing as a “pre-marriage trial
period” (a “relationship”, for instance). There was also no need for the super-ego compulsion to
enjoy, since in feudalism, regardless of whether we are talking about your
workplace or your love life, you didn’t have much freedom of choice. It is only
in the beginnings of capitalism that the super-ego compulsion to enjoy has
started to take root as the primary symptom of our economic system, since
capitalism gives one apparent freedom, and the injunction to do something is
less clear and must be suggested indirectly through various manipulation
tactics. In capitalism, you always have freedom of choice: the freedom between
working at a shitty job and dying of poverty5, and if you do not like
your job or your employer, you are always free to leave!
It is here that Slavoj Zizek’s tale
about the two types of authoritarian fathers comes extremely handy. Zizek explains
that you must imagine that you are a small kid and that your father wants you
to visit your grandmother. The first „classic” type of authoritarian father
would tell you „I don’t care about how you feel about it, but it is your duty
to visit your grandmother, so I’m gonna make you visit your grandmother”. You
have the freedom to protest, but you have no choice. The second „post-modern”
type of totalitarian father may say something like „You know how much your
grandmother loves you and how upset she would be if you wouldn’t visit her.
Despite all this, I am not forcing you to visit her, you should only visit her
if you want to”. Every child knows that the second father exhibits a much
stronger pressure to visit their grandmother, despite the apparent freedom („I’m
technically not forcing you to visit her”). Not only that, but the child is
also less free to complain about visiting his grandma.
My argument is that the former
father is feudalism and the second father is capitalism. In capitalism, you are
“technically” free to quit any time, you just will die of hunger if you don’t
work, so practically, you are indirectly forced to work to your employer
because of the lack of alternatives. Capitalism is similar to a rapist that
tells you “I’m not forcing you to have sex with me, but if you don’t then you
would be useless to me so I’m going to have to kill you”4 – not only
are you coerced into sex, you also lose the right to complain/protest.
As such, capitalism needed an “indirect
manipulation tactic” to keep people together due to the lack of an explicit
law, such as in feudalism. This was the rise of romantic relationships and
of dating, a “pre-marriage trial period” where the emotional bound is sometimes
forced not through explicit prohibitions (“the name of the father”, in Lacanian
psychoanalysis), but through implicit moral guilt (“the ego-ideal”, in Lacanian
psychoanalysis) – if you are in a relationship with someone, you “should” or “are
supposed to” be in love and to be happy, even if you aren’t, and this is the “super-ego/ego-ideal
compulsion to enjoy”.
V: AMERICA AND THE COMPULSION TO ENJOY
With the evolution of capitalism,
signifiers for relationship labels themselves evolved, stratifying into more
and more “pre-“ periods: fiancé, S/O, date/dating, friends with benefits and so
on.
My argument is that the more
economically right-wing a country is, the more of an emphasis is put on these
labels (in the sense of “importance”, as well as in the sense of how many there
are, as well as in the sense of how clear the line between them is). The USA is
a prime example of a correlation between an economically right-wing country with
a bigger emphasis on rigid labels, while the Scandinavian countries (Finland,
Norway, etc.) are an example of the opposite in both regards.
The line of reasoning is this: the
more economically right-wing a country is, the more capitalism is on steroids.
The more capitalism is on steroids, the more the compulsion to enjoy is on
steroids (as I’ve explained why previously). The more the compulsion to enjoy
is on steroids, the more relationship labels there are, since relationship
labels themselves are the compulsion to enjoy (each in a specific way,
with a specific intensity or duration…). However, while the correlation is
clear to me, correlation does not equal causation, so it is unclear which way
the causation goes:
1.
Is
it that unregulated capitalism influences dating culture?
2.
Is
it that dating culture influences a country’s political landscape and macroeconomic
decisions?
3.
Do
they mutually influence each other into a downward spiral?
4.
Is
there no causal link between the two and in fact there is a third factor that
causes both, hence why the two are correlated?
You can notice the overbearing compulsion to enjoy in American
culture outside of their love life too. Cashiers at the supermarket and other
public workers are often instructed and obliged by their management to
always smile and seem happy to customers. People smile at strangers in public. Like
Lacan said (in his rant on why ego psychology is “Americanized psychoanalysis”,
which I agree with), America is defined by certain timeless signifiers such as “happiness”,
“success”, “progress” or “self-actualization”6. In American culture,
if you do not enjoy, if you are not happy, then you are a bad person. The ideal
American is someone who is never satisfied with their current life situation
and who always “hustles” to obtain more and more. If they are happy then they
should seek to be even happier, and they are “bad” for settling with less. To
be successful becomes an imperative and enjoyment becomes a moral obligation.
This persistent compulsion to enjoy automatically translates
into a compulsion to consume, hence why capitalism ‘feeding off’ this
tendency. Without people constantly feeling pressured to want more and more,
there would be no “surplus, artificial value” to buy with your money and no capitalism.
The best example of this in economics is a “Veblen good”: a good that does not
obey the law of supply and demand, where the demand for it increases as the
price increases (for example: certain jewelry or brand clothes, which people
buy not because of the good in-of-itself but just because they want to brag to
others about how much money they have).
A lot of signifiers commonly used and emphasized in
American culture (“date”, “crush”, “friend with benefits”, etc.) often either
do not have a translation in the language of other cultures, or are less
commonly used with a recently-developed “forced” translation as a neologism due
to the globalization of information (or may be left untranslated, as a third
option). In cultures like Finland and Norway, which have had a strong welfare
state and economic interventionism for long, people sleep with each other until
they “wake up” in a relationship. The line between relationship statuses becomes
very “blurry”.
There is
one Lacanian personality structure that is most dominated by the
super-ego/ego-ideal moral guilt: the obsessional neurotic. This is why I
often argue in my upcoming book that American culture is an obsessionally
neurotic culture, since the structure of obsessional neurosis is closely linked
to the compulsion to enjoy necessitated by unregulated neoliberal capitalism.
The ideal American worker is an obsessional neurotic: always “busy” with something,
always putting on a higher and higher workload on themselves until it is
impossible to finish it all and they end up disappointing everyone, etc. The
stereotypical cliché “Hollywood movie” type of American dating is also a prime
example of an obsessional neurotic culture (which does not mean that the
individuals themselves are obsessional, but that regardless of their clinical
structure, they have to pretend to be obsessional to the “big Other”, so
to speak): their psychoanalytic time is “fixation” (“let’s move the
future into the present”), where you have to express an interest/desire for
someone before it is chronologically possible for you to get to know the person
well enough in the first place (not surprising for a fast-paced consumerist
culture like America).
It is the exact same tendency that we see across job interviews in all cultures (we know that individual obsessional neurotics often make their love life suffer because of their work/career, so I often like to joke that “at a job interview, everyone is an obsessional”): you do not know whether you want to work for your company or not, and it is impossible to know yet, you will only find out later, retroactively (maybe the real reason you chose them is because your other company that you liked more rejected you after all the interviews) – but you still are asked by the HR: “why do you want to work for us?”. The structure of the cliché American date is the same as the structure of a stereotypical job interview: tell me why you want me before either of us two have the ability to find out. We know that individual obsessional neurotics often “rush” to get many tasks done in a short amount of time out of the fear that they may run out of time (their unconscious question is “Am I dead or alive?” or “How much time do I have left to live?”). In other words, obsessional neurosis is when you “move the future into the present” – then it is no surprise that an obsessional culture, like the USA, turned their love life into a job hunt, where in a job hunt, everyone has to pretend to be obsessional.
FOOTNOTES:
1: In this
specific example, the form of jouissance that is engaged in is what Lacan calls
“joui-sense”, the jouissance produced by the search for meaning.
2: The unconscious
definition of a signifier is whatever people behave as if the definition
is, not what people claim the definition is. For a refresher on
unconscious definition, read the first parts of this previous article of mine: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/09/unconscious-belief-transgenderism-and.html
3: Brenda Wilson
(June 8, 2009). "Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships" https://www.npr.org/2009/06/08/105008712/sex-without-intimacy-no-dating-no-relationships
4: This is what
the “Amazon review killer” told his victim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GL8gk3b2L8
5: Hegel’s famous
phrases of “freedom or death!” or of “Give me your money or your life!”, which
are also explored by Lacan in his eleventh seminar, are of particular relevance
here. In the latter phrase, if you choose your life, you lose your money, if
you choose your money, you lose both. Capitalism functions by the same formula:
if you choose your employer, you lose your freedom, if you choose your freedom,
you die and lose both your freedom and your employer.
6: https://nosubject.com/Factor_C
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