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