The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Slavoj Žižek
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in a dream is not simply its core, which never appears directly, distorted by its translation into the manifest dream-text, but is the very principle of this distortion. This is also how, for Deleuze, in a strict conceptual homology, the economic plays its role of determining the social structure “in the last instance”. Here the economic is never directly present as an actual causal agent, its presence is purely virtual, it is the social “pseudo-cause,” but, precisely as such, absolute, non-relational, the absent cause, something that is never “at its own place”: “that is why ‘the economic’ is never given properly speaking, but rather designates a differential virtuality to be interpreted, always covered over by its forms of actualization.”7 It is the absent X that circulates between the multiple series of the social field (economic, political, ideological, legal …), distributing them in their specific articulations. We should thus insist on the radical difference between the economic as this virtual X, the absolute point of reference of the social field, and the economic in its actuality, as one element (“sub-system”) of the actual social totality: when they encounter each other—or, to put it in Hegelese, when the virtual economic encounters itself in its “oppositional determination,” in the guise of its actual counterpart—this identity coincides with absolute (self-)contradiction.
As Lacan put it in his Seminar XI, “il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche”—there is no cause but a cause of something that stumbles/slips/falters8—a thesis whose clearly paradoxical character is explained when one takes into account the opposition between cause and causality. For Lacan, they are in no sense the same thing, since a “cause,” in the strict sense of the term, is precisely something that intervenes at those points where the network of causality (the chain of cause and effect) falters, when there is a break, a gap, in the causal chain. In this sense, a cause is for Lacan by definition a distant cause (an “absent cause,” as the jargon of the happy “structuralism” of the 1960s and 1970s used to have it)—it acts in the interstices of the direct causal network. What Lacan has in mind here specifically is the working of the unconscious. Imagine an ordinary slip of the tongue: at a chemistry conference, for example, someone gives a speech about, say, the exchange of fluids; all of a sudden, he stumbles and makes a slip, blurting out something about the passage of sperm in sexual intercourse—an “attractor” from what Freud called “an Other Scene” has intervened like a force of gravity, exerting its invisible influence from a distance, curving the space of the speech-flow, introducing a gap into it. And perhaps this is also how we should understand the infamous Marxist formula of “determination in the last instance”: the overdetermining instance of “economy” is also a distant cause, never direct, it intervenes in the gaps of direct social causality.
How, then, does the “determining role of economy” function, if it is not the ultimate referent of the social field? Imagine a political struggle fought out in the terms of popular musical culture, as was the case in some post-socialist Eastern European countries in which the tension between pseudo-folk and rock functioned as a displacement of the tension between the nationalist-conservative right and the liberal left. To put it in old-fashioned terms: a popular-cultural struggle “expressed” (provided the terms in which) a political struggle (was fought out). (As today in the US, with country music predominantly conservative and rock predominantly left-liberal.) Following Freud, it is not enough to say that the struggle taking place in popular music was here only a secondary expression, a symptom, an encoded translation, of the political struggle, which was what the whole thing “was really about.” Both struggles have a substance of their own: the cultural is not just a secondary phenomenon, a battlefield of shadows to be “deciphered” for its political connotations (which, as a rule, are obvious enough).
The “determining role of economy” thus does not mean that, in this case, what all the fuss “was really about” was the economic struggle, with the economic functioning as a hidden meta-Essence “expressing” itself at a distance twice removed in cultural struggle (the economy determines politics which in turn determines culture …). On the contrary, the economic inscribes itself in the course of the very translation or transposition of the political struggle into the popular-cultural struggle, a transposition that is never direct, but always displaced, asymmetrical. The “class” connotation, as it is encoded in cultural “ways of life,” can often invert the explicit political connotation. Recall how, in the famous presidential TV debate in 1959, generally held to be responsible for Nixon’s defeat, it was the progressive Kennedy who was perceived as an upper-class patrician, while the rightist Nixon appeared as his lower-class opponent. This, of course, does not mean that the second opposition simply belies the first, that the second stands for the “truth” obfuscated by the first—that is, that Kennedy who, in his public statements, presented himself as Nixon’s progressive, liberal opponent, signaled by his lifestyle that he was really an upper-class patrician. But it does mean that the displacement bears witness to the limitations of Kennedy’s progressivism, since it does point towards the contradictory nature of his ideologico-political position.9 And it is here that the determining instance of the “economy” operates: the economy is the absent cause that accounts for the displacement in representation, for the asymmetry (reversal, in this case) between the two series, the couple “progressive/conservative politics” and the couple “upper/middle class.”
“Politics” is thus a name for the distance of the economy from itself. Its space is opened up by the gap that separates the economy as the absent Cause from the economy in its “oppositional determination,” as one of the elements of the social totality: there is politics because the economy is “non-All,” because the economy is an “impotent,” impassive, pseudo-cause. The economic is thus here doubly inscribed in the precise sense that defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core “expressed” in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very structuring principle of these distortions.
In its long and twisted history, the Marxist social hermeneutic relied on two logics that, although often confounded under the ambiguous shared title of “economic class struggle,” are quite distinct from each other. On the one hand, there is the (in)famous “economic interpretation of history”: all struggles—artistic, ideological, political—are ultimately conditioned by the economic (“class”) struggle, wherein lies their secret meaning waiting to be deciphered. On the other hand, “everything is political”; in other words, the Marxist view of history is thoroughly politicized, there are no social, ideological, cultural, or other phenomena that are not “contaminated” by the essential political struggle, and this goes even for the economy: the illusion of “trade-unionism” is precisely that the workers’ struggle can be depoliticized, reduced to a purely economic negotiation for better working conditions, wages and so on. However, these two “contaminations”—the economic determines everything “in the last instance” and “everything is political”—do not obey the same logic. The economic without the ex-timate political core (“class struggle”) would be a positive social matrix of development, as it is in the (pseudo-)Marxist evolutionaryhistoricist notion of development. On the other hand, “pure” politics, “decontaminated” from the economic, is no less ideological: vulgar economism and ideologico-political idealism are two sides of the same coin. The structure is here that of an inward loop: “class struggle” is politics in the very heart of the economic. Or, to put it paradoxically: one can reduce all political, juridical, cultural content to an “economic base,” “deciphering” it as its “expression”—all, that is, except class struggle, which is politics in the economy itself.10 Class struggle is thus a unique mediating term that, while mooring politics in the economy (all politics is “ultimately” an expression of class struggle), simultaneously stands for the irreducible political moment at the very heart of the economic.
What lies at the root of these paradoxes is the constitutive excess of representation over the represented that seems to escape Marx. In other words, in spite of his many perspicuous analyses (like those in The Eighteenth Brumaire), Marx ultimately reduced the state to an epiphenomenon of the “economic base”; as such, the state is determined by the logic of representation: which class does the state represent? The paradox here is that it was this neglect of the proper weight of the state machinery that gave birth to the Stalinist state, to what one is quite justified in calling “state socialism.” Lenin,