THE FAILURE OF FULL ENJOYMENT
The society of enjoyment is a society that appears to be breaking apart, to be losing its cohesion. Its symptoms (disconnection, incivility, etc.) seem to indicate that, with the turn away from prohibition and toward enjoyment, the social bond is imperiled. Widespread hostility to authority and unrestrained enjoyment appear to threaten the very continued existence of the social world as such. We seem to be reaching the dangerous point that Freud warns about in Civilization and Its Discontents, a point at which our primary hostility threatens to overrun the social order. According to Freud, “In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts.”1 As if in response to the threat of social disintegration that Freud envisions here, there have arisen numerous calls for a return to an emphasis on prohibition and away from enjoyment. In order to save the social order, according to this line of thought, we must reestablish a prohibition that will protect us from the horrible enjoyment proliferating everywhere today. Without such a return, society will not survive; civilization will descend into anarchy. This logic informs, for instance, the recent popularity of school uniforms. Without uniforms, there has been no barrier to stop students from parading through school halls while flaunting their private enjoyment—by wearing revealing clothing, gang colors, expensive jewelry, and the like. As the proponents of school uniforms see it, this flaunting of private enjoyment produces rivalry between students, aggressivity, envy, a generalized sense of indulgence, and a contempt for any authority that would place limits on enjoyment. Hence, school uniforms would serve to restore prohibition and the idea that authority must be obeyed. They would, in short, reestablish the school as an enjoyment-free zone.
The problem with the school uniform movement, as well as all of the other calls for a return to prohibition, is that, as the previous chapters have sought to demonstrate, widespread disobedience is not the problem. The problem with the society of commanded enjoyment—what constitutes its danger for us—is not the enjoyment that it unleashes, but the barrier that it proves to enjoyment. Rather than being beset by disobedience and transgressive enjoyment, our society has become replete with obedience, with subjects who are wholly committed to sustaining their symbolic identity, their status within the prevailing social order. This obedience predominates precisely because it successfully disguises itself as its opposite—as rebellion, radicality, and difference. The most difficult obstacle to overcome today is the sense that one is radical or subversive, precisely because this sensibility is so pervasive, even among—or especially among—the most conservative subjects. In fact, convincing subjects that they are radical has become the primary function of ideology today. If I believe that I am already radical while I am following the dictates of the social order, I am not likely to challenge those dictates. Already in the nineteenth century Marx and Engels saw that life under capitalism tended to offer subjects a sense of their own freedom (i.e., their own radicality and distance from the big Other) combined with an increase in actual unfreedom. They say, “in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces.”2 The situation that Marx and Engels describe here has grown exponentially today. Existing in the isolation of her/his imaginary enclave, the contemporary subject tends to feel certain of her/his freedom and distance from the social order. Phenomenologically, today’s subject is a radical and independent subject, but this experience of radicality is the fundamental manifestation of contemporary ideology.3 It is in this way that global capitalism—the hegemonic power of our time—secures its domination throughout the world.
Ironically, despite all of the claims of radicality being made today, very few call into question the functioning of global capitalism. We can see an illuminating example of the tacit acceptance of global capitalism in the documentary Trekkies (1999), which chronicles the fanatical devotion that Star Trek has inspired. The film shows the extreme lengths to which people go out of love for Star Trek and all that it represents. One woman wears her Star Fleet uniform to work every day; a dentist transforms his office into a simulation of the Enterprise; and a man considers having his ears surgically altered in order to resemble those of Mr. Spock. According to these fans and the many others interviewed, there is something special about the Star Trek universe that inspires this kind of devotion. When pressed for details, they mention its fairness, its equality, its diversity, its tolerance, and its ethic of nonviolence. However, not a single fan depicted in the film, out of hundreds that are interviewed, mentions the fact that the Star Trek economy is a wholly socialist one, that this universe is so far from our prevailing capitalist one that its subjects don’t even have money. Trekkies find themselves drawn to Star Trek’s radicality—or so they claim—and yet, they completely miss the aspect of the show that most challenges our contemporary existence—its blatant rejection of capitalism as the sine qua non of modern life. Though Star Trek doesn’t hide its rejection of capitalism, Trekkies don’t see it because global capitalism has become a fundamental horizon of our thought.
Though we are skeptical about the functioning of almost everything else, we trust fully in the staying power of global capitalism. The alternatives, which once seemed to be just around the corner, have become unimaginable today. The universe of global capitalism is, or so we think, here to stay, and we best not do anything to risk our status within it. Hence, we pledge our allegiance to it, and we put our trust in it. This is the fundamental mode of contemporary obedience to authority. Only by coming to understand this obedience to the dictates of global capitalism as obedience can we hope to break out of it. Global capitalism seems an unsurpassable horizon simply because we have not properly recognized our own investment in sustaining it. We see it as unsurpassable because we don’t want to lose it—and the imaginary satisfaction that it provides.
The society of enjoyment works to convince subjects that they exist outside this society, in independent isolation. It thus becomes increasingly difficult to grasp oneself within the universal. One feels and lives like an outsider. But this in no way hampers the functioning of the universal. It works through us all the more effectively insofar as we fail to recognize it. In the society of enjoyment, the most difficult task becomes recognizing our own role as an integral part of this society—what keeps it going. The great temptation today lies in proclamations of one’s radicality, expressions of a refusal to conform to the social order. But any subversive display today plays in the prevailing demand for enjoyment. The key to transcending the society of enjoyment—and the global capitalism with which it works hand-in-hand—lies in reconciling ourselves to this society, in grasping our fundamental investment in it. When we recognize ourselves as the subjects of the society of enjoyment and the subjects of global capitalism rather than as subjects existing in marginality or in isolation, we take a leap beyond this society. The limits of the society of enjoyment are daunting limits precisely because we cannot recognize them as such. In recognizing these limits—in recognizing the extent of our obedience—we find a way out of this obedience. As Hegel puts it in the Encyclopedic Logic, “No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it.”4 The act of recognition is, at the same time, the act of transcendence. To recognize one’s failure to enjoy is already to begin to enjoy.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF PARTIAL ENJOYMENT
Just as the society of commanded enjoyment makes it increasingly difficult to recognize the limits that it places on our enjoyment, it also opens up the possibility of embracing enjoyment in a way that was impossible in the society of prohibition. Under the constraints of prohibition, symbolic authority did not encourage subjects to seek enjoyment but to flee from it. One could not openly embrace one’s enjoyment without running afoul of the social Law. Today, however, when the Law actively encourages such an embrace, things become somewhat different. There are now possibilities for enjoyment that were formerly unthinkable. In the society of enjoyment, enjoyment emerges for the first time as a practical possibility.
The primary barrier to such an embrace of enjoyment is the image of an ultimate or complete form of enjoyment. Both the society of prohibition and the society of enjoyment utilize this image—the former to illustrate what the subject must sacrifice and the latter to illustrate what the subject must pursue. In each case, the image of an ultimate enjoyment functions as a lure that seduces the subject into investing itself in the social Law. As long as subjects remain in thrall to the image of an enjoyment not haunted by any lack, they cannot escape from the subjection that makes enjoyment impossible. Complete enjoyment, as an impossible ideal, confines subjects within the constraints of the Law that poses it as an ideal. It is this ideal itself that must be rejected—and it is the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy that offers us the possibility of rejecting it.
Today, after enjoyment has become a social duty, the embrace of partial enjoyment—rather than the pursuit of an illusory total enjoyment—emerges as a unique political possibility. Partial enjoyment is uncertain and insecure. One never knows whether one has it or not, and at the moment one seems to secure it, this form of enjoyment slips away. It is, first and foremost, the enjoyment of the other—an enjoyment that the subject can never wholly possess for itself. But partial enjoyment has a political content to it precisely because of its connection to the other. The subject of partial enjoyment is a subject committed not only to its own enjoyment, but also to the enjoyment of the other. Such a subject recognizes that one cannot differentiate between the two; one cannot choose enjoyment for oneself while refusing the enjoyment of the other. To embrace the partiality of one’s own enjoyment is at the same time to embrace the enjoyment of the other.
Each of the symptoms that the previous chapters have explored represents a form of retreat from the partiality of enjoyment. In chapter 2, we saw how the anal father commands us to enjoy ourselves fully, without any lack. Chapter 3 showed the increasing power of the image and the illusion of total enjoyment that it provides. Chapter 4 revealed the contemporary elimination of distance as a strategy for filling in all the gaps in our enjoyment. Chapter 5 linked the failure of interpretation to the reluctance to accept the enjoyment of the Other. In chapter 6, we saw the cynic’s refusal to allow for any pocket of unknown enjoyment. Chapter 7 explored the apathy that results from a monolithic concern with total enjoyment. Chapter 8 detailed the retreat into private enjoyment and its effect on the public world. And in chapter 9, we saw how incivility and aggressivity result from the contemporary subject’s commitment to an enjoyment without any lack. The ideal of total enjoyment represents the fundamental barrier that the subject in the society of enjoyment must navigate.
This ideal haunts the contemporary subject because partial enjoyment is such a precarious endeavor, whereas total enjoyment holds out the promise of a sense of security and wholeness. The subject of partial enjoyment remains constantly aware of her/his own tortured relationship to this enjoyment. Such a subject does not feel secure in the possession of this enjoyment. Partial enjoyment involves enjoying one’s lack—what one doesn’t have, not what one does have. In fact, the enjoyment possesses the subject; the subject does not possess the enjoyment. Partial enjoyment thus involves the subject’s acceptance that it cannot escape some originary damage that constitutes it as a subject. To be a subject is to be incomplete and lacking, but one can, through taking up the very partiality of enjoyment, come to view this incompletion as originary rather than as a state of loss.
The advantage of partial enjoyment lies in its connection to the Real. Unlike total enjoyment, which is always imaginary, partial enjoyment is Real. It involves an experience of the Real, specifically the way in which the Real throws the symbolic order out of balance. In the experience of partial enjoyment, the subject enjoys its own lack without feeling this lack as a deprivation. This experience frees the subject by breaking its link to the symbolic Law: the Law no longer seems to hold within itself the secret that eludes the subject; the secret exists in the subject itself. Such a transformation offers the subject the freedom that has continued to elude it within the society of prohibition. Thus, partial enjoyment eludes the limits of the symbolic order. Even though it is partial, it is also an unlimited, infinite enjoyment.
The turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy has fundamentally transformed the experience of the subject while leaving the subject in an unchanged situation. In both structures, the subject remains deprived of—and haunted by—the idea of complete enjoyment. In this sense, nothing substantive changes for the contemporary subject despite all of the phenomenological transformations we have explored. However, the emergence of the society of enjoyment produces a window of opportunity: we might obey the command to enjoy in a way that frees us from its superegoic compulsion and opens enjoyment as such. We can only do so if we reject the image of completion—and of complete enjoyment—that this command proffers. As long as we pursue and defend an image of total enjoyment, we remain within the domain of the superego. Accepting the partiality of enjoyment is the path to freedom that the contemporary world offers us.