The salient feature of contemporary American society is the premium that it places on enjoyment. Ours is what Michael Wolf calls an “entertainment economy,” in which, as Neil Postman puts it, we risk “amusing ourselves to death.” This enjoyment explosion seems to represent a marked change from just forty years ago—as if we have entered into a new epoch of social relations. This change inevitably gives rise to the question of the degree of its radicality: Is this “proliferation of enjoyment” an indication of a fundamental change in the social order as such—or is it simply a part of the normal evolution of capitalist society? Whereas most historians view the emergence of modernity from traditional societies as the most dramatic rupture in the history of the West, it is the contention of this project that the increasing proliferation of inducements (and commandments) to enjoy represents a transformation in the social order as drastic as the emergence of modernity. It marks a shift in the very logic of social organization.
Though the Marxist view of history has largely fallen out of favor among theorists and historians today, the importance that it places on the birth of capitalism in human history continues to enjoy widespread acceptance. Marxism views the transition to a capitalist economy—the emergence of modernity—as the decisive transition in the history of the West. The shift from traditional society to capitalist society entails a massive rupture, evident in all aspects of the social order. Most importantly, it appears as a revolution in the relationship between the authority of the social order and money. As Marx himself points out in the first volume of Capital, whereas ancient societies “denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things,” modern society “greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.”1 Greed is not, of course, an invention of modernity, but the onset of modernity allows for a change in its ethical status. Only within the modern world would it be possible to proclaim, with Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, that “greed is good”; to ancient societies, greed is always sinful (that is to say, always dangerous to the stability of the social order). In other words, the very thing that threatens to destroy ancient societies becomes the very lifeblood of the modern one. Because it involves such a complete upheaval, no other change in Western history, for the Marxist, approaches this one in importance.2 This type of valuation of the historical shift to capitalism, however, is not confined to doctrinaire Marxists. Even avowedly non-Marxist historians, though they might not emphasize the changing status of money, nonetheless tend to see the onset of modernity—the nascent moments of capitalism—as a time of epochal change, as a shift from a static society to a progressive one.3 This is what leads Fredric Jameson to claim that “the emergence of the modern world or capitalism, the miraculous birth of modernity or of a secular market system, the end of ‘traditional’ society in all its forms [. . .] remains for us (in the collective unconscious) the only true Event of history.”4 In whatever language we discuss the changes in society occasioned by modernity, few would dispute Jameson’s claim that it marks the historical shift in the West, leaving, as it does, a gulf between the structure of traditional society (a closed world) and modern capitalist society (an open universe).
I contend, however, that the importance of this shift is now being rivaled by another kind of historical change. This is the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction).5 Whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible. The fundamental social duty in contemporary American society lies in committing oneself to enjoyment. Advertisements, friends, movies, parents, television shows, internet sites, and even authority figures all call on us to maximize our enjoyment. This marks a dramatic change in the way the social order is constituted: rather than being tied together through a shared sacrifice, subjects exist side by side in their isolated enclaves of enjoyment. Whereas Marxism has shed the most light on the turn from traditional society to modernity, Marxism needs the insights of psychoanalysis—and specifically the thought of Jacques Lacan—in order to best illuminate this transformation from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Though Lacan has no explicit theory of history, his thought, because it privileges and explicates the subject’s relationship to enjoyment, paves the way for grasping the importance of this radical transformation.6
A society of prohibition requires all its members to sacrifice their individual, private ways of obtaining enjoyment for the sake of the social order as a whole. That is to say, one receives an identity from society in exchange for one’s immediate access to enjoyment, which one must give up. This is, traditionally, the way in which society as such functions. This type of society operates in the manner of a sports team: the team demands individual sacrifices in order to ensure the team’s success. In order for the team to win, the individual must give up her or his dreams of wholly individual achievement and fit her or his abilities into the structure of the team.7 In a society of commanded enjoyment, this dynamic changes dramatically. Rather than demanding that its members give up their individual enjoyment for the sake of the whole, the society of enjoyment commands their enjoyment—private enjoyment becomes of paramount importance—and the importance of the social order as a whole seems to recede. Contemporary complaints about sports stars who are more concerned about individual statistics and money than about their team’s fortunes are indicative of this transformation. These sports stars are not simply anomalous narcissists. In the society of enjoyment, individual, private accomplishments and rewards are more important than the success of the team. In such a society, it is no longer requisite that subjects accept a constant dissatisfaction as the price for existing within a social order. To return to the example of the sports team, one can remain a member of the team without having to subordinate one’s own individual agenda to the larger plans of the team. Dissatisfaction now appears as something that one need not experience, in contrast to life in the society of prohibition, where dissatisfaction inheres in the very fabric of social existence itself.8 In the society of enjoyment, the private enjoyment that threatened the stability of the society of prohibition becomes a stabilizing force and even acquires the status of a duty.
To stress the transition from the society of prohibition to the society of enjoyment at the expense of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is implicitly to challenge the Marxist prioritizing of economic relations in the understanding of history (and historical change). According to the psychoanalytic understanding of history that I will take up, enjoyment and our relationship to it has primacy in determining historical movement. In the last instance, we act as we do in order to sustain or advance our particular relationship to enjoyment, rather than on behalf of economic motivation. The Marxist thesis that places economic motivation at the fore posits that we will always act according to our interests: if revolution is in our interests, we will revolt, and if the status quo is in our interests, we will fight to preserve it. Questions about enjoyment are necessarily secondary to questions about survival. That is to say, for the Marxists, before considering the enjoyment I may derive from my dinner, I will first ensure that I have a dinner to eat (whether or not I will enjoy it).9
Though Marxism has certainly fallen on hard times today, this fundamental thesis of Marxism has not. Cuba Gooding’s mantra in the film Jerry Maguire—“Show me the money!”—has become the automatic explanation of all varieties of behavior. Why does Alex Rodriguez decide to play baseball for the Texas Rangers? Why does Monica Lewinsky appear in an interview with Barbara Walters to tell her story? If Alex Rodriguez mentions the passion for the game he found in the Ranger franchise or Lewinsky mentions her need to tell her side of things, we respond with a wink or a cynical aside. In the spirit of Marx, we know that self-interest (i.e., money) is always the chief motivation. But if Marx errs, his error does not lie, as his critics often allege, in underestimating “innate human selfishness.” Instead, his error—and, again, it is the common error today—lies in the other direction, in underestimating the capacity of subjects to act against their self-interest.
Psychoanalysis, however, calls into question the idea that we primarily act on behalf of our own interest. It allows us to see another power operating beneath the apparent predominance of self-interest. Of course, the common-sensical understanding of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite of this, contending that psychoanalysis reduces everything to self-interest. This is often the basis for the most scathing criticisms leveled at Freud himself and at psychoanalysis as a whole. For instance, John Farrell claims that under the spell of psychoanalysis “every appearance of good must be exposed as unconscious hypocrisy, every commitment to public interests and to social institutions must be recognized for what it is—a disguise for narcissistic gratification or a painful instinctual concession.”10 Farrell, like so many critics of psychoanalysis, sees Freud as a prophet of human selfishness. But this attack on psychoanalysis—perhaps the most popular of all attacks—completely misunderstands what is at stake in psychoanalytic interpretation. Rather than uncovering narcissistic self-interest behind a benevolent act, Freud uncovers the abandonment of self-interest that is at stake behind a seemingly self-interested act. In Seminar V, Lacan points out that Freud discovers the self-destructiveness of desire, that “what we find at the foundation of the analytic exploration of desire is masochism.”11 Anyone can point out why human subjects act self-interestedly—and many thinkers before Freud (Hobbes, Machiavelli, etc.) did so—but it is the province of psychoanalysis to explain why they are able to act against their self-interest, to transcend their narcissism. Because of this ability to act against our interest, Freud claims that “the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows.”12 It is on this point that Freud directly questions Marx: for Marx, there is only self-interest; for Freud, there is something more, and this something more is enjoyment—the jouissance factor.13
Ironically, it was Freud’s belief that human subjects were prone to act against their self-interest that led him to doubt the possibility of a socialist utopia. If we always acted in our self-interest, Marx would be right, and the contradictions of capitalist society would lead to a socialist utopia. However, our ability—and our tendency—to act against our self-interest makes such a utopia inconceivable for Freud. As Joan Copjec notes, “The psychoanalytic subject, in short, being subject to a principle beyond pleasure, is not driven to seek his own good.”14 When Freud formulated the concept of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he did so in order to account for the fact that we often act in complete disregard of our self-interest and instead act out of a compulsion that we do not understand. The concept of the death drive means that we will sacrifice anything and everything (even life itself) for our particular Thing—which is to say, for our enjoyment. Oftentimes this Thing is a national Thing, the bond that constitutes national identity. Marxism has consistently underestimated the importance of the enjoyment of the national Thing, but, as Slavoj Žižek points out, at no time as dramatically as at the beginning of the First World War. The working class of Europe, well-informed by the Communist International, seemed to know that the war would not advance their interests, that it was an imperialist struggle. And yet, when the moment of decision came, the working class in Europe supported the war almost unanimously, much to the surprise of Lenin. Why? What did Lenin fail to take into account? He failed to consider enjoyment—specifically the degree to which the working class shared in nationalistic jouissance. What drove them was not their self-interest—the war didn’t speak to interest—but their relationship to enjoyment. This is one indication why it is through its consideration of enjoyment that a psychoanalytic understanding of history can supplement the Marxian version.15 Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.
Psychoanalysis allows us to rethink sociopolitical history around the question of enjoyment.16 This involves understanding the nature of the transition from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Recognizing what is at work in the society of enjoyment does not imply that the proper response is the nostalgic one, the one so often proffered by conservative cultural critics. These conservative critics call for a return to “family values,” to a world in which prohibition kept us safe from outbreaks of enjoyment. This desire for a return to the past, however, is rarely genuine. Which is to say, such proclamations don’t really want the return to the past that they claim to want. Instead, they want the best of both worlds—the “benefits” of modernity (computers, cars, televisions) without their effects (isolation, enjoyment, narcissism)—and fail to grasp the interdependence of the benefits and the effects. More importantly, however, what such a position fails to realize is that enjoyment is implicit not in the content of, say, the internet (that is, in the pornography, etc., that appears there), but in the very form that we experience it: hooked on to a computer, in isolation from the rest of the world. It is not what one experiences in the modern world, but that one is experiencing it in the modern way which is decisive, which produces the negative effects of modernity that the nostalgic position hopes to avoid. This is why once we have the “benefits” of modernity, we also have the painful drawbacks; one cannot have one without the other. Which means that the “family values” response, unless it is combined with a radical renunciation of all aspects of modern society, is not an authentic alternative. In fact, its promise of the spoils of modernity without its requisite disruption of tradition and traditional authority simply repeats the promise of fascism, which insists that we can have all the advantages of modern industry and technology without sacrificing our connection to “blood and soil.” Even when it avoids this fascist contradiction and does actually involve a complete rejection of modernity, such a solution is still not viable. Any return to the past, to traditional values, will necessarily be mediated by the present.
The other alternative common today is the cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment—an attitude that proclaims that things simply are as they are, that there is no changing the structure of the social order. The cynic knows well enough the problems with the way things are but acts as if she/he doesn’t know, conducting her/his daily life certain that the social order, despite its problems, cannot be changed. This attitude resigns the subject to the private realm: for the cynic, change is possible on a personal level (i.e., I can change my weight, my degree of happiness, my lover, etc.), so that’s where I should keep my focus. As Paul Gilroy puts it, “A language of revolution may persist, but these days it is more like to turn away from the complexities of wholescale societal transformation and promote an ‘inward,’ New Age turn.”17 We can see evidence of the turn from wide-scale political activity to an emphasis on personal transformation throughout contemporary popular culture, but perhaps nowhere as dramatically as in the case of the rock band U2. Whereas in the 1980s they wrote songs with an overt political significance, such as “Pride” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (both celebrations of the struggle for civil rights), in the 1990s such songs disappear completely from their oeuvre, having been replaced with songs about personal struggle and romance, such as “Mysterious Ways” and “One.” It is as if U2 felt disappointed with the ineffectiveness of their larger political project and decided to turn to a more promising avenue—the personal.18 What this increasingly widespread conclusion misses is the performative function of its own—seemingly descriptive—statement about the impossibility of large-scale change. That is, the gesture of confining oneself and one’s actions to the private realm is precisely what fuels the predominance of the society of enjoyment, which makes large-scale change seem impossible. In proclaiming the inevitability of this type of world, we help to make it inevitable, to make the status quo all the more unassailable. In this way, the strategy of cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment is every bit as flawed as the nostalgic attempt to return to a previous epoch. Both positions share a fundamental refusal to recognize their own complicity with the society of enjoyment.
Despite their ultimate bankruptcy, nostalgia and cynicism predominate today to the extent that there seems to be no other path open to us. The key to discovering an alternate path does not, as we might believe, depend on our ability to imagine a different future, but on our ability to properly recognize the present. Thus, the chapters that follow will not try to imagine alternatives to nostalgia and cynicism; instead, the focus will remain on inquiring into the prevailing society of enjoyment. This is not because alternatives do not exist, but because the wager of this book is fundamentally a Hegelian one—that thought cannot arrive at future alternatives through bypassing the present. It must instead recognize the future as having already arrived, inhering implicitly in the present. Our task, according to Hegel, is to reconcile thought to the present, to grasp the rationality of the real. Any attempt to imagine an alternative—that is, any utopian speculations about a possible future—will necessarily express that alternative in terms of the present, thereby stripping it of its alternative status a priori. Our efforts to find a political alternative to the society of commanded enjoyment—and to contemporary late capitalism—depend on our ability to recognize our status within the society of enjoyment.
The fundamental thing to recognize about the society of enjoyment is that in it the pursuit of enjoyment has misfired: the society of enjoyment has not provided the enjoyment that it promises. It has, instead, made enjoyment all the more inaccessible. The contemporary imperative to enjoy—the elevation of enjoyment to a social obligation—deprives enjoyment of its marginal status vis-à-vis the social order, bringing it within confines of that order, where we can experience it directly and fully. What the society of enjoyment thus makes manifest is the impossibility of any direct experience of enjoyment: if we try to experience it directly, we necessarily miss it; enjoyment can only be experienced indirectly, through the act of aiming at something else—as a by-product. This is because the barrier to enjoyment is essential to the experience of it. In fact, what we enjoy is the barrier itself. For instance, children’s enjoyment of Christmas morning derives from the barrier to enjoyment represented by the wrapping paper over their gifts and the prohibition against opening gifts prior to Christmas day. Without the wrapping paper—with direct access to the gifts—Christmas would be just another day. When we experience enjoyment directly, when we have gifts without wrapping paper and on any (or every) day of the year, enjoyment (and the gift) loses its value, a value produced by inaccessibility. Kierkegaard makes a similar observation relative to religion when he insists that our relationship with the greatness of God can never become a direct one but must occur through the mediation of the lowly figure of Christ. He suggests that God sent Christ to us because he understood the importance of what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication.” If we were to see God as he really is rather than through the humiliated image of Christ on the cross, God would be degraded in our eyes; we couldn’t properly see his greatness. The same is true for enjoyment: when we experience it directly, it loses all value and becomes commonplace, and as a result we don’t actually experience it.19 Hence, the problem with the society of enjoyment is not that we suffer from too much enjoyment, but that we don’t have enough. Far from finding new ways of restraining enjoyment, as many contemporary cultural critics suggest, we must find new ways of making it possible. This entails a move from inhabiting a society of commanded enjoyment to engaging in a politics of enjoyment.
The key to such a move involves recognizing what is occurring in the transition to a society of commanded enjoyment, a transition that the subsequent chapters will explore in the domain of contemporary American culture. After laying out the distinction between the society of prohibition and the society of enjoyment in the first chapter, I will explore the various characteristics of the society of enjoyment, the ramifications of the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the imperative to enjoy. My contention is that these characteristics function as symptoms of the underlying transformation of the social order. The symptoms include the decline of the traditional father (chapter 2), the proliferation of the image (chapter 3), the elimination of transcendence and distance (chapter 4), a loss of meaning (chapter 5), the development of widespread cynicism (chapter 6), an increasing sense of political apathy and the waning of desire (chapter 7), the disappearance of the public world (chapter 8), and a rise in incivility and aggressiveness (chapter 9). Cultural critics on both the Right and the Left—both academic and popular—have attacked each of these eight symptoms without, however, making explicit the link to the underlying social transformation from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Each chapter will take as its starting point one of these critiques of contemporary culture from one or more cultural critics. In each case, these critiques will serve as the basis for identifying a symptom of the transition to a society of enjoyment. In an effort to illustrate the breadth of the turn to enjoyment, these chapters will rely on all varieties of contemporary cultural criticism: conservative, liberal, Marxist, and feminist; academic, popular, or an amalgamation of the two. After beginning with this discussion of cultural criticism, the chapters will explore the symptoms of the society of commanded enjoyment through a variety of cultural texts: Peter Wier’s film Dead Poets Society in chapter 2, Don DeLillo’s novel Americana in chapter 3, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America in chapter 4, Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise in chapter 5, Wim Wenders’s film The End of Violence in chapter 6, E. L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair in chapter 7, David Koepp’s film Trigger Effect in chapter 8, and Spike Lee’s film Summer of Sam in chapter 9. These texts respond to the different symptoms of the turn to the command to enjoy and often explicitly link them to this imperative. Each chapter moves from a cultural critic identifying the symptom to a cultural text responding to it. In this way, the transformation from a society that prohibits enjoyment to one that commands it will become visible in all its manifestations.