Imagining Capital as Real (part I)

A couple of months ago I started working on a paper on the fantasy of neoliberalism. So, of course I turned to Alphonse for insight. Below, some of my initial reflections and Alphonse's insights. A longer, but still quite rough version of the paper is here:  Download enjoying_neoliberalism.doc .

Zizek argues that Capital is Real in several senses: it is the ‘positive condition of hegemonic struggle’ (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 319), it ‘sets a limit to resignification,’ and it determines “the structure of the material social processes themselves’ (Ticklish Subject 276).  But, to assert that Capital is Real is to embrace neoliberal ideology, to accept its premises without a struggle, without inquiry into how neoliberal faith in the market has come to produce a sense of its own inevitability. What is necessary, then, is an account of the neoliberal imaginary allied with the Real.

One might want to claim that Zizek’s elaboration of the Real in terms of an imaginary Real, a symbolic Real, and a real Real and his specification of capital as a symbolic Real (one that operates in terms of basic formulae or persists as an underlying structure) contributes to thinking about capitalism insofar as it points to a logic determining and distorting, that is, forming, the basic matrix of contemporary socio-political life. I disagree.  The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions. Such an investment occludes and naturalizes the roles of governments, both as national states and as international organizations, in creating property rights, establishing corporations, producing a functioning tax system, and sustaining and militarily defending the very infrastructure necessary for business.

A more promising way of thinking about capital would be as a real Real, that is, as the traumatic Real threatening loss, rupture, and disintegration, as the Real that must be avoided yet always seeps through. The UN Report on Human Settlements provides a glimpse of this Real of capital: it estimates that in 2001 924 million people lived in slums.   In the words of the report, “The urban poor are trapped in an informal and ‘illegal’ world—in slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid and where public services are not provided. Officially, they do not exist” (6). The global urban people, who do not exist within capital’s dominant frame, are thus Real in the sense that they insist, making their presence felt (if not acknowledged) as that which produces and contests capitalism on a global scale. The impossibility of their conditions—how can one quarter of the world’s people live on less than one dollar a day? What does it mean to consider sanitation in ratios of one toilet per 500 inhabitants of a district?—ruptures claims about the logic of capital with that which cannot be thought.   If such a reading of capital as Real is plausible, then thinking about neoliberalism as the imaginary that stages and prevents confrontation with the Real of capital is indispensable.

How is that we have been taken in by capital? That we find ourselves so entrenched in it that escape seems impossible, a step into oblivion?

Alphonse has some insight into these questions:

Consider a particular moment - say from the creation of the bank of England to Waterloo - when Euro-culture is grappling with Capital specifically as Real, and newly determining “the structure of the material social processes themselves" but utterly without explanation or representation, thus provoking the fantasms. The story of capital's appearance and conquest is being told as it happens as a tale of terror in many instances, the tale of an occult threat to the Symbolic, whose nature is mysterious, compelling, irresistble, terrifying, and disgusting. And the attempts to represent Capital culturally, in popular and literary writing, are frenzied and rely on the revival of antique narratives and the fantastic and the fabulous, while the 'science' of capital and classical liberalism develops as a certain kind of neo-platonic fable whose message is at once 'there are no monsters (and there is no Real), and fear and anxiety is a sign of mental and social inferiority (its for women and workers)'. The Imaginary manages this confrontation which is requiring an unprecedently rapid and bloody adjustment of the social order.

So in the early period, Capital is experienced as the Real before it is established otherwise, before it appears deformed in 'certain guises' - that is, it is a force very much felt by everyone, as incomprehensible, inimical, amoral, disorderly pressure, an atmosphere, a plague, a miasma - somewhat before it is accounted for discursively and ideologically. And the seeds of neo-liberalism, found in Steuart more than Smith, are in fact arising in response to the initial tale of terror of capital, which is not a little obssessed with the first physical form of pure capitalist capital, which are not financial instruments but kidnapped Africans transported to the Carribean, whose usage as capital was deregulated some fifty years prior to the appearance of a truly freely moving capital form of money.

And looking back to the initial stages, the confrontation with the Real of Capital was very difficult at first to avoid-negotiate-choreograph: Its a head-exploding irony that the modern concept of 'freedom' upon which the idea of 'free trade' is built and which is the fairy in its shell was first embodied in sugar industry slaves, who were physically the 'freedom' of their proprietors. There had never in the history of man been a form of property right that was truly 'free and unfettered' before it was invested in these unfree fettered people, whose property-condition served as the model for all future forms of 'free and unfettered' property including banknotes. All the financial mechanisms of debt were built up for the triangle trade.

Comments

[edge]

jodi,

I don't think you addressed my questions or my criticism. don't you honestly think you fudged on your essay a little?

I've been off the net for a few days, so have not been around for your response.You did not directly answer any of my questions.

One thing that I still remember is your use of Zizek as a placeholder for psychoanalysis, which is quite odd really, because Zizek is the death of psychoanalysis, a time-bomb in the dead heart of the Lacanian legacy. Zizek says as much in his last utterings.

Perhaps you rely too much on his Contingency book which he now disavows? He is also currently making fun of all of his earlier real real riffs, the whole scary monster irrupting onto the scene schtick, which is quite tiresome.

Many of Ziz's references to capital have more to do with Jameson's cultural logic of late capital than with what economists can or cannot measure.