The real, the phantasy of dating, of the obsessional and of capitalism

 

I: LOVE AND FAITH AS THE INVERSION OF CAUSALITY

 

            Slavoj Zizek used to say how love and faith are the two things in which causality and time “stop working”, so to speak. True love is when you do not know why you love someone, true faith is when you do not know why you believe what you believe. He says about faith that you can’t say that “I did a comparative analysis of all religions and realized that Christianity has the best arguments”, and to quote him: “Oh my God, if we were in medieval times right now I would burn you down a rug for saying that. The proper Christian argument is to say: ‘yes, there are reasons to believe in Christ, but to understand these reasons you have to first believe’”.

            It is the exact same thing in love, because love is not a comparative analysis of compatibility. It does not work like this: “girl 1 has 3/10 boobs, 6/10 ass, 7/10 face, 5/10 personality; girl 2 has 5/10 boobs, 4/10 ass, 9/10 face, 7/10 personality; and so on and you add up the scores and marry the person with the most points”. The only way to love is to not know why you love, or to love for no reason. Just as with faith, the proper argument is: “yes, there are reasons to love the person I love, but to understand them you must first love them”.

 

II: THE REAL, ITS TRAUMA AND ITS JOUISSANCE

 

            “The real” for Jacques Lacan is not just “physical reality”, but instead is defined as whatever is neither symbolic, nor imaginary. In other words, it is unimaginable and unsymbolizable, it is whatever is impossible to think about (unimaginable) and impossible to talk about (unsymbolizable). It is the locus of “nonsense”, contradiction, chance, randomness, the unexplainable, etc. Despite the real being “invisible” to both thought and speech, it has a profound effect on our reality. It is exactly that nothingness, that nonsensical void that still changes our reality. You can never directly interact with the real, but you can feel its effects.

The best example of “the real” in our universe is the singularity of a black hole. It morphs time and space around it, and yet time and space stops working inside the singularity itself, and thus, by definition, we can never perceive what is inside the singularity of a black hole because our perception relies on the working of time and space in the first place. So, despite the fact that we will never see or even become able to imagine what is inside a black hole, it has a huge effect on the space around it.

I will build upon Zizek’s arguments to argue even further that love and faith are the two primary experiences of the real in our lives. The cause of love and the cause of faith are the unexplainable, the unimaginable, the unsymbolizable, the nonsense, the contradiction, the randomness and the chance. We do not know why we love or why we believe, but love and faith simply strike us like lightning out of nowhere.

Since Christianity is the religion that talks about faith and love as being interrelated and almost the same thing, you could define it as the Abrahamic religion of the real.

Similarly to the singularity inside a black hole, these two profound experiences, despite being impossible to directly perceive, structure the reality around them, becoming the fundamental pillars around which we build up everything else. Once we are in love, it is not a good or a bad thing that we love someone, despite what everyone else around us tells us, but everything else is a good or bad thing depending on its relation to our beloved. And when we believe, it is not a good or a bad thing that we believe what we believe, despite what everyone else tells us, but everything else is good or bad depending on its relation to our faith. Such “fundamental pillars” around which everything else revolves around are what Lacan calls master signifiers.

Since we can never experience the real (by definition), it must be mediated through fantasy. Whenever we experience the real, it is too much of a traumatic experience to deal with, so we must create a “story inside our heads” to retroactively explain what just happened after our encounter with the real. As a fun fact, this was Freud’s basis for his theory of PTSD, that what we consider trauma is not the traumatic event itself (the real), but the story we tell ourselves to retroactively explain it after the event.

Whenever we experience the real, it shatters the stability of our experience, it destructs all the stories we tell ourselves and we enter the realm of instability, of the new, and of the vulnerable. Meaning is deconstructed, things stop “making sense” and there is no order of things, and there is no system of how to make sense of things in the first place. One only needs to speak to a war veteran or a rape victim suffering from PTSD in order to understand the unexplainable and unspeakable horror of the traumatic event that most often leaves the subject in silence as their only possible reaction.

There is a good side to this as well, however. There is no new without the real. Whenever we encounter the real, we encounter the chaos of the destruction of our previous reality and the creation of a new one. The feeling that we get whenever we have such an encounter with the real of the new is what Lacan calls jouissance. Jouissance is the feeling of “is this the first thing you feel when you are born?”. And the baby actually feels this: the first breath of air in the lungs, the first sip of milk from the breasts, the first ray of light that touches the eyes – all of these are felt like a traumatic, violent intrusion upon the body, something the body never experienced before, something that causes confusion and disorientation. The body does not know whether it’s a good thing or not, it has not gotten used to it, it does not know what to classify it as since it has not yet developed a rule for how to classify such stimuli in the first place. That feeling of not being able to “classify” (imagine, symbolize, etc.) an entirely new and foreign stimulus is called jouissance and it’s the surplus that we end up with after any traumatic encounter with the real. Through this encounter, an entirely new reality is created with its own order and rules. For another example, think of a person who has never worn contact lenses and who tries them for the first time.

What is important to remember is the encounter with the real is not only the feeling of “I have never experienced this before”, but it is actually the feeling of “I have never experienced something like this before”. Because the former is actually every stimulus, since you can never experience the exact same thing twice, with absolutely no changes. However, that does not mean that such a thing would be an encounter with the real, since even though you’ve never experienced it before, you experienced something similar, so you still have a frame of comparison. The real is when there is no frame of comparison.

Since love is one such encounter with the real, each economic system (capitalism, feudalism, slave economies, etc.) has developed its own collective phantasy in order to justify whatever happens in the unexplainable singularity of love. I will argue that dating is the phantasy of capitalism.

 

III: DATING AS THE PHANTASY OF CAPTALISM

 

One aspect of love that is “traumatically real” is our own lack of control in that situation. The unconscious is at play the most here in the sense that our own unconscious decides for ourselves who we love, and not us. We are not at the steering wheel, and this lack of control itself is traumatizing (“what do you mean I cannot decide who I love?”). Each economic system had a different ‘scapegoat’ to justify who decides for you (in feudalism it was arranged marriages by parents, etc.), but in capitalism, the master and the slave are overlaid on top of each other. I will quote Byung-Chul Han because he explains this aspect better than me:

“Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement- subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves. The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault’s analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society. Nor does the commonly employed concept of “control society” do justice to this change. It still contains too much negativity. Disciplinary society is a society of negativity. It is defined by the negativity of prohibition. The negative modal verb that governs it is “May Not”. By the same token, the negativity of compulsion adheres to “Should”. Achievement society, more and more, is in the process of discarding negativity. Increasing deregulation is abolishing it. Unlimited Can is the positive modal verb of achievement society. Its plural form—the affirmation, “Yes, we can”—epitomizes achievement society’s positive orientation. Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.”

(Byung Chul-Han, “The Burnout Society”, Chapter 2: Beyond Disciplinary Society)

 

He conceives of depression as a symptom of the failure of the subject to keep up with society’s high expectations of achievement and “success”:

“Depression eludes all immunological schemes. It erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able. First and foremost, depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability. The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”

(ibid.)

            Thus, we have our final thesis of the master and the slave being the same person:

“The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. It is lord and master of itself. Thus, it is subject to no one—or, as the case may be, only to itself. It differs from the obedience- subject on this score. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished. Such self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that abruptly switches over into violence because of the compulsive structures dwelling within it. The psychic indispositions of achievement society are pathological manifestations of such a paradoxical freedom.”

(ibid.)

            I am on the same page as Byung-Chul Han in that modern capitalistic society perpetuates itself through the lie that we are free when we are not (“the prisoners cannot see the cage”). How does this connect to love? It would only make sense that such a society would create a collective fundamental phantasy to support this idea in this domain as well – if the traumatic reality of not being able to choose who you love is so hard to deal with, then we must make them believe that they are choosing.

            This is what is known as “dating” in capitalism. I define it in this essay as the idea of “browsing through multiple options” and rationally and consciously choosing which option you think is the most compatible for you. However, it is only a phantasy, since you cannot choose. What often ends up happening is you end up falling in love with the most incompatible one anyway "for no reason" - society tells you they're a bad influence, your parents disagree with them, you know yourself that they have the least "compatibility points" too, but you don't care because in spite of all this you love them for no explainable reason. Hence, dating is the phantasy that we use in order to be able to interact with the real of love “from a distance” – it is fundamentally a lie, since all that compatibility-checking that you did was in vain, since you did not take it into account anyway, or if you happened to love/marry the person who you consciously thought was the most compatible, then it was a coincidence. In reality, the only “real thing” that we can say is that you meet up, some unexplainable magic happens, and you wake up in love with each other. That unexplainable magic is so traumatic because we can neither think nor talk about it: on one hand, we want things to ‘make sense’, but on the other hand, there is nothing to make sense of, so we can only experience it as “skip cutscene”. The gap between the initial meeting and the final-end result is so traumatic due to its status as a gap that we feel the need to “fill it in” with some story we tell ourselves as to what had happened in those unexplainable moments, and the lie/fantasy that you took matters into your own hands and decided who is the most compatible/fitting person for you is the lie we tell ourselves in capitalism (dating).

            In my very recently-released book, “Love, Politics, Social Norms and Sex”, I give two main arguments to support the connection between dating and capitalism:

1. Historical dates match (no pun intended). Google the history of capitalism and the history of dating and you will see they both started around the same time. Dating per se as we know it started after the French revolution, but 100 years before that, there was a period of transition between arranged marriages and dating which I like to nickname "arranged dating" where a woman would have free choice between like 10 men that would be chosen by her parents as candidates. Arranged dating matches the historical dates of mercantilism, the transition between feudalism and capitalism, so again the time checks out.

2. The more economically right-wing a country is, the more they speak in this "phantasmatic paradigm of dating". In America, where the economic axis is shifted to the right-wing and capitalism is on steroids, dating is taken as a fact and a master signifier that structures reality almost, it is the premise everyone starts out with, and it's very explicit and formalized. American dating culture is stereotyped to be robotic, algorithmic, following a set structure and akin to job interviews. Then, at the opposite extreme you have Nordic countries like Finland and Norway which are economically left-wing and where their dating culture is often described as "sleeping with multiple people until you ‘wake up’ in a relationship eventually". We can deduce from this correlation that the further away a country is from capitalist/right-wing economics, the further away it is from its fantasies as well, and the closer it is to economic leftism, the closer it is to the traumatic real.

To add to these two arguments, it only ‘makes sense’ on a logical level as well why capitalism and dating are two sides of the same coin, since both involve a free market. In other words, when the means of production were liberalized (the French Revolution), the means of reproduction were liberalized as well (pun intended). The ability to choose your employer was only an apparent freedom (yet still better than no freedom), giving you the illusion of ultimate free choice, when in reality you could only choose your employer as long as they chose you back (consent), hence often times being indirectly pressured into certain workplaces you do not want to work into. Similarly enough, the ability to choose your life-partner was given, and the idea of consent was created at the same time.

Thus, there was established a “free market” of potential employers and employees alongside a free market of potential life-partners. A certain set of rituals and rules had to be established in the latter-case to create the illusion of freedom and control over our choices in our life-partners (to structure our phantasy), the sum of which we tend to call (dating) “culture”: social norms, etc.

In such a free market, humans become commodities to be bought and sold. Just like in job interviews and in dating, you have to “market yourself” to potential employers and to convince them to “buy” you and they have to convince you to buy them as well. The subject becomes the object, and subjectivity and objectification are overlaid on top of each other just like the master and the slave is – being a human now just means that you are a product to be bought and sold. Unlike feudalism however, you are not bought and sold by someone else, you have to “sell yourself”.

We can view the consequences of the sexual “revolution” in the same way – the transition from a society in which women were objects to be bought and sold by others, to a society in which women were encouraged to become objects to be bought and sold by themselves – the seller and the sold object now being indistinguishable. Hence, the exploitation of women (or anyone else, for that matter) switched from allo-exploitation to auto-exploitation.

 

IV: OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

 

The final point to add is that the fantasy of dating is the collective version of the fantasy of the obsessional personality. This makes sense since both capitalism and obsessional neurosis are defined by auto-exploitation. The obsessional neurotic's fantasy is that they have control and power when they actually don't. The obsessional will look at an event in reality that was caused by someone/something else and will claim that it's their fault anyway. Similarly enough, dating is the lie we tell ourselves to make us feel like we are in control of a process we are not aware of.

Obsessional neurotics will often have quasi-permanent feelings of guilt in order to hide their unconscious need for power and control over others (somewhat similar to Adler's "inferiority complex"). The obsessional will claim responsibility for events that were not caused by them and will say: "look, this is my fault, so it's my responsibility to repair it, let me take care of it, you do not need to move a finger, it's not your job". Other people will look at the obsessional and say "wow, what a nice guy for taking care of all the work" but in reality, they do this out of their unconscious need for power, because if everything is your fault, then everything is also your responsibility, and I'm gonna invert the famous Spiderman quote now and say that "with great responsibility comes great power". If the obsessional says "it's my responsibility to repair it", then now they have control over the entire task/project/whatever and they can do it "the proper way". The extreme/accentuated version of this is what psychology now calls "obsessive-compulsive personality disorder" (OCPD).

Obsessional neurosis is exactly like Zizek's joke with the 3 rabbi priests:

 

“A group of Jews in a synagogue are publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!”

 

We can understand the obsessional’s symptom in a similar way, their version of “I am nothing” is “I am guilty” – the obsessional’s discourse is: “Oh God, I am guilty, this is all my fault, let me repair my mistakes”. After you let them repair whatever they claimed to have broken, they now have the control. For example, obsessionals are the kind of people to want to do everything in a school team project. If you do anything, they complain that you didn’t do it “the right way”.

The less control they feel they have over a situation, the more the obsessional seeks to control it: “I need to take care of everything at this party – the lights, the music, the decorations, the food! I do not trust any of you to do them ‘properly’ so I have to do everything myself!”. Of course, this is actually a trap, since the obsessional’s desire is in actuality an unconscious desire for failure. The obsessional will keep taking up on themselves more and more tasks until they have a workload that is impossible for a human to handle. They will make promises to many people that they are going to work on this and that, only to inevitably disappoint everyone (“I tried to do everything and did not finish anything in time”). Hence, when an obsessional asks you for control, it needs to be translated or “decrypted” into this: “If you do the project, we will fail because you are incompetent. But if I do the project alone, we will also fail because there are too many tasks for one single person to do. So you must let me do it, because if we fail anyway, we must fail it the ‘proper’ way!”.

What is this if not the structure of modern dating as well, where you attempt to control the uncontrollable, traumatic kernel of love; leading to an inevitable failure and disappointment after your own high expectations?