Chapter Seven
THE REVOLT AGAINST REVOLT
The turn to a society of enjoyment is a mixed bag in terms of political activity. On the one hand, subjects in this society are much less willing to accept the pronouncements of authority figures on face value, and questioning becomes a fundamental fact of life. However, this questioning does not often manifest itself in political activity. One of the most counterintuitive features of the society of enjoyment is its paucity of radical political activity. The turn away from prohibition would seem to open the possibility for political engagement that prohibition had stifled. However, when we look closer at the political effects of prohibition, it becomes apparent that the sacrifice of enjoyment that it demands has the inadvertent side effect of politicization. That is, a society structured around prohibition produces dissatisfied subjects, even if these subjects agree to accept this dissatisfaction as the price for social living. Despite the fact that it most often remains politically unrealized, this dissatisfaction has an inherent radicality to it; dissatisfaction carries the seeds of political dissent and of a desire to change the structure of the social order. Most subjects, of course, do not act on this desire, and many never become conscious of it. In these cases, the prohibition of enjoyment works effectively. Nonetheless, the society of prohibition, in its fundamental structure (of enforced dissatisfaction), creates the inherent possibility of—and an incentive to—political action. If subjects remain apathetic in this society, they at least have political engagement as a tangible possibility that they have avoided. In short, the dissatisfaction resulting from prohibition creates an incipiently political subject.
The emergence of the society of enjoyment marks a clear contrast. In this society, subjects become increasingly incapable of experiencing dissatisfaction as constitutive for social existence. Clearly, we continue to experience dissatisfaction today, but we tend to see this dissatisfaction as the result of a mistake, something that might be remedied, rather than as that which constitutes us as subjects. What is absent, then, is a more general sense of dissatisfaction. This is significant because dissatisfaction is the engine behind desire for something else, something more than the existing social order has to offer. Desire, in other words, energizes radical political activity, insofar as it cannot find satisfaction in the status quo. Traditionally, desire is what we receive in exchange for our sacrifice of jouissance on entering the symbolic order. Though we don’t have the Thing (the source of our enjoyment), at least we’re not satisfied with the sacrifice of it. As the product of this sacrifice, desire is essentially hysterical, continually questioning the symbolic order, questioning why things are the way symbolic authority says they are. Because it consists of a constant questioning of the master and of mastery, desire has an incipient radicality. It is the threat of revolutionary change, a threat lying dormant within society. This radicality disappears, however, when the dissatisfaction of desire becomes the self-satisfaction of imaginary enjoyment—the mode of subjectivity in the society of enjoyment. Immersed in imaginary enjoyment, subjects become satisfied with their situation and with the social order at large, regardless of the degree to which they discover any enjoyment in the Real—an enjoyment that would represent a challenge to the status quo.1
Throughout his career as a social critic, the primary target of Christopher Lasch’s critique has been the social costs of imaginary enjoyment. In The Culture of Narcissism, his most well-known work, Lasch points out the contemporary predominance of the imaginary order and its effect on social relations. His final book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, moves in a new direction, examining the widespread apathy that works hand-in-hand with this turn to the imaginary. In this work, Lasch is not concerned with the disappearance of radical political activity per se but with the disappearance of political engagement among the privileged classes. Though the elites have never been the bastions of radicality, their retreat from politics, as Lasch accounts for it, echoes the same retreat among lower- and middle-class subjects whose political activity would potentially be of a more radical stripe. Both the elites and the rest of society become apathetic for similar reasons, and Lasch’s book chronicles the triumph of this apathy over politics, a triumph symptomatic of the transformation from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. In a society of enjoyment, no one wants to leave the realm of imaginary, private enjoyment and enter into political contestation.
Lasch sees this growing apathy as the fundamental threat to democratic society today. As he puts it, “Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.”2 Though social critics on the Left tend to focus on instances of intolerance as the primary danger, Lasch contends that intolerance—hate speech, hate crimes, and so on—is not nearly as widespread in contemporary society as apathy. Apathy—or a resistance to political engagement—infects all subjects all the time in the society of enjoyment. In The Revolt of the Elites, Lasch describes the turn away from politics not just in the realms we ordinarily think of as political but in everyday activity as well. For instance, he claims that our very ability to converse—what he calls an “essentially political art”—disappears in the midst of contemporary apathy. Our lack of interest in political questions renders us boring and uninspired conversationalists. Without any political engagement, we have nothing to talk about except “shoptalk or personal gossip.” Though this decline in our ability to converse troubles Lasch, his primary focus is on the withdrawal of society’s privileged classes from social concerns and duties.
According to Lasch, the elites no longer feel any connection or obligation to the larger social order. This is—though Lasch doesn’t put it this way—a direct ramification of the turn away from prohibition. The prohibition of enjoyment has the effect of turning subjects toward the social order where they seek recognition as recompense for their “lost” enjoyment. Without an explicit prohibition, however, subjects do not look to the social order for this recompense. Instead, they retreat further and further into their private enjoyment, hoping to secure that enjoyment from the encroaching Other. Lasch details this transformation in the activity of the elites. He says:
Instead of supporting public services, the new elites put their money into the improvement of their own self-enclosed enclaves. They gladly pay for private and suburban schools, private police, and private systems of garbage collection; but they have managed to relieve themselves, to a remarkable extent, of the obligation to contribute to the national treasury. Their acknowledgment of civic obligations does not extend beyond their own immediate neighborhoods.3
In response to the imperative to enjoy, the elites focus their energies not on building the social order as a whole but on the “improvement of their own self-enclosed enclaves.” Such enclaves are repositories of private enjoyment, enjoyment stolen away from the Other. When private enjoyment is one’s chief focus in this way, one has no inducement to political engagement. Private provides a sense of imaginary completeness, while political activity and interaction with the big Other constantly reminds one of one’s lack. This is why the retreat into privacy and apathy are so appealing in the society of enjoyment: to be apolitical is to be free of reminders that one is subjected to lack; that is, that one is not fully enjoying.
While Lasch laments the absence of contemporary political engagement on the part of the elites, the effect of this lacuna is not as far-reaching as the parallel absence among the lower classes. If the elites abstain from politics and civic activity, the class structure of society still remains the same. But when the lower classes become politically apathetic, society loses the possibility of substantive transformation. In the society of enjoyment, the compulsion to enjoy entrances even the lower classes with the lure of imaginary enjoyment, thereby dulling the possibilities for radical political activity. As Lasch sees in the case of the elites, subjects have few incentives to leave their private enclaves of enjoyment for political activity, even if that activity might promise a better alternative. In the midst of this retreat from politics, it seems that our only alternative is looking back on past radical political activity with nostalgia.
THE POLITICS OF THE APOLITICAL
From the standpoint of the society of commanded enjoyment, we can look back longingly at the radicalism that was once palpable in the society of prohibition. More than any other contemporary novelist, E. L. Doctorow attends to this widespread loss of political activity and responds with novels that register and attempt to account for it. He produces novels of nostalgia for a forsaken radicality. These novels reveal a past alive with engaged political struggle and challenges to the hegemony of American capitalism. In fact, Fredric Jameson claims,
E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American radical tradition: no one with left sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present.4
For Jameson, Doctorow illuminates the political vacuum of the present by showing the radical possibilities of the past. Doctorow not only depicts the radical political activity of the past, but he shows this radicality as it evanesces, as we see especially in Ragtime and The Book of Daniel.
In both of these novels, Doctorow presents radicalism as a viable political position, but also as a political position that people are abandoning. The former novel shows this transformation primarily through the character of Tateh, who begins the novel as an ardent socialist and ends it as a Hollywood filmmaker providing manipulation for the masses. The Book of Daniel reveals even more dramatically the shift from political activity to apathy. It depicts the authentic political commitment of the Isaacsons (the novel’s standins for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg) in the 1940s and 1950s, and then contrasts this commitment with the political activity of the 1960s. Unlike the Isaacsons, the radicals from the 1960s in the novel focus not on working for socialism, or even for social justice, but on producing cataclysmic images. As Artie Sternlicht, the chief representative of this position, puts it, “We’re gonna overthrow the United States with images.”5 Sternlicht believes himself to be far more revolutionary than the Isaacsons. But Sterlicht’s radicality, as the above statement suggests, exists solely on the level of the image. It is an imaginary revolution (in both senses of the word) that he furthers. He is concerned foremost with his own image as a radical rather than with a genuine radical politics. His investment in the image—like that of contemporary subjects in the society of enjoyment—militates against the transformative political activity practiced by the Isaacsons.
Not only does Doctorow chronicle the turn from the committed radical politics of the Isaacsons to the imaginary radicality of figures such as Artie Sterlicht, but in addition, he concludes the novel in Disneyland, where Daniel, the narrator and son of the Isaacsons, meets Selig Mindish, whose confession sealed the fate of Daniel’s parents. Disneyland provides the perfect setting for the novel’s conclusion because it represents the direction in which radical political activity has devolved. In order to stress this, Doctorow emphasizes the imaginary enjoyment that Disneyland provides. In his narration, Daniel notes that Disneyland gives subjects a sense of completion on a wholly imaginary level—without any actual completion. He says, “What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient’s rich psychic relation to his country’s history and language and literature.”6 That is, Disneyland provides an image of engagement in lieu of an actual engagement with the larger social order.
Though Ragtime and Book of Daniel depict the disappearance of radical politics, they do not explicitly probe the reasons for it. But according to Jameson, the reasons for this demise are nonetheless evident. He claims, “the proposition that the depoliticization of the worker’s movement is attributable to the media or culture generally [. . .] is [. . .], in my opinion, something like the elegiac backdrop, if not the meaning, of Ragtime, and perhaps of Doctorow’s work in general.”7 Here, Jameson attributes to Doctorow the contemporary version of Marxism’s traditional “false consciousness” thesis: the American working class lost its radical potential with the emergence and hegemony of the culture industry. In Ragtime and Book of Daniel, certainly, there is little to suggest otherwise. But the case is altogether different with another of Doctorow’s novels, World’s Fair. This novel reveals the link between the turn away from politics and the transformation from prohibition to enjoyment. Because it emphasizes this link, World’s Fair occupies the pivotal position within Doctorow’s larger novelistic project.
If Doctorow’s novelistic project is in fact a political one, the claim for the centrality of World’s Fair would appear to be entirely spurious. By any measure, it seems to be one of his least political novels. It tells the story of the maturation of Edgar Altschuler, a boy growing up in New York in the 1930s. The novel culminates with two trips that Edgar makes to the 1939 World’s Fair, the object of his desire throughout the novel. Gone are the radical figures and the political engagement that are central to Doctorow’s project in novels such as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake. World’s Fair even seems to be an exception to conservative reviewer Carol Iannone’s charge that Doctorow’s novels have “the ideological attitudes of the Left, attitudes that pervade and, finally, compromise everything he has written.”8 In fact, Carol Harter and James Thompson claim, with good cause, that “only the most determined social critic will wrench this novel into political statement.”9 World’s Fair seems to abandon the political concerns of Doctorow’s earlier novels for what is alternately seen as an autobiographical Bildungsroman or as a new portrait of the artist as a young man.10 World’s Fair is, in other words, an exception in Doctorow’s oeuvre, a piece that doesn’t seem to fit in. But it is this status as exception that holds the key to the novel’s importance.
Though it shares a general sense of nostalgia with the rest of Doctorow’s work, it is nostalgic in a far different way. As with the other major novels, this novel is about loss—the loss of the father’s music store, the loss of the family apartment, Edgar’s loss of sexual innocence, and so on. But in contrast to the more political novels, we do not see in World’s Fair an indication of a lost radical past, a radicality unrealizable today, but instead a lost past of entrepreneurial capitalism (perhaps the clearest example: Edgar’s fond recollection of Joe the “swarthy steadfast” Sweet Potato Man, who doesn’t stand a chance, we know, against the “motorized corporations” Edgar sees him competing against).11 World’s Fair, in other words, apparently belies Fredric Jameson’s fundamental thesis about Doctorow as the “epic poet” of a vanished radicality. If the majority of Doctorow’s other fiction is an extended lament about the “disappearance of the American radical past,” then World’s Fair, with its account of a boy’s journey into maturity and knowledge, is Doctorow’s one attempt to explain why this radical tradition has disappeared. As such, the novel reveals to us the importance of augmenting the purely political reading of Doctorow’s fiction with psychoanalysis, because it is psychoanalysis which allows us to see that it is, in fact, precisely the apolitical dimension of the novel which permits Doctorow to solve the thoroughly political mystery of the “disappearance of the American radical past.” The key to the mystery lies not in larger political questions, but in the shift that the individual subject undergoes with the emergence of the society of enjoyment.
World’s Fair, to put it another way, through its rather apolitical account of Edgar Altschuler, offers an insight—found nowhere else in Doctorow’s novels—into the connection between the loss of a radical tradition and the transformation of subjectivity apropos a shift in the structure of society, a shift in emphasis from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy. We see this transformation first-hand in the individual change that Edgar undergoes during the novel. It is as if Edgar represents American radicalism both before and after, and through him we glimpse the source of its demise. In World’s Fair, we see a young boy—always on the other side of knowledge, always on the outside looking in—come into knowledge at the 1939 World’s Fair. At the end of the novel, Edgar occupies a wholly new position: he acquires knowledge and thus penetrates the enigmatic mystery of adulthood. It is in this transformation that we can find the reason for the disappearance of American radicalism and for the contemporary emergence of a generalized political apathy.
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
At the end of the novel, Edgar, who has always felt the humiliation of not knowing, acquires a knowledge of the sexual mysteries of life. This coming into knowledge altogether changes Edgar, finally allowing him the satisfaction that has heretofore eluded him. After gaining sexual knowledge, Edgar escapes the chronic dissatisfaction of his childhood, the dissatisfaction of being on the outside of knowledge. He leaves the chronic dissatisfaction of desire for the self-satisfaction of his own imaginary enjoyment. Edgar’s acquisition of the knowledge he had always longed for is correlative to his entry into an imaginary self-satisfaction. And in this way, Edgar’s transformation provides a parallel for that of the American radical past—Tateh’s in Ragtime, for instance—and accounts for its “pastness.”12
Maturity—and the knowledge that accompanies it—is Edgar’s goal throughout World’s Fair. Edgar desperately wants to become a knowing adult, because, from the beginning of the novel until he attends the World’s Fair, Edgar constantly experiences the humiliation of being a child. This first becomes evident when Edgar turns four years old, at his birthday party. He recognizes the underside to the celebration:
And we all had sit at the table with ridiculous pointed paper hats, and paper plates and noisemakers and popping balloons and pretend to a joyful delirium. In fact a birthday party was a satire on children directed by their mothers, who hovered about, distributing Dixie cups and glasses of milk while cooing in appreciation for the aesthetics of the event, the way each child was dressed for it and so on; and who set us upon one another in games of the most acute competition, so that we either cried in humiliation or punched each other to inflict pain. (35-36)
At the birthday party, the child plays out a part assigned by the parent and plays that part for a parental look. It is this look, as Edgar well understands, which humiliates. The look sees and enjoys a lack of knowledge in the children. This is why Edgar refuses to change out of his swimming suit on the beach while holding a towel over himself. He knows that this common practice makes a mockery of children: “I was not persuaded. I saw other children changing this way and I knew their shame when they saw me watching” (61). This is the humiliation of being exposed to a gaze which looks on with amused contempt. As Edgar puts it, “To be undressed was to seem to be a child, a degrading state” (61). Such a state is “degrading” because in it Edgar is thought not to know.
The look that looks on the children celebrating at the birthday party or changing clothes on the beach is a look that sees in its subject a lack of knowledge. Children at a birthday party are “cute” because of their innocent enjoyment; children can change clothes in public because of their sexual innocence. In both cases, the look looks upon someone who is not supposed to know. In other words, it desupposes them of knowledge. As such, the intersubjective relationship here is precisely the opposite of what occurs in the transference. The transference produces a feeling of love because it involves a “subject supposed to know.” The idea that the other really knows something that we do not produces a feeling of love. To suppose someone to know, in short, is to love them, and, conversely, to desuppose someone of knowledge is to hate them. The look of the mothers at their innocent children is thus not a loving look, but one which enjoys at the expense of the children’s “innocence,” as Edgar senses when he characterizes the birthday party as a “satire.” All of Edgar’s sense of the humiliation accompanying childhood stems from the lack of knowledge that childhood seems to imply. He also realizes that adults, rather than rectifying this lack of knowledge, often do whatever they can to perpetuate it.
Despite the extreme dissatisfaction that it creates in Edgar, being desupposed of knowledge—being left in the dark about the nature of things—does have its benefits. Not least of which is that it has the effect of producing desire. Thus, it is important that Edgar’s parents desuppose Edgar of knowledge primarily when it concerns sex and death. Whenever sex or death comes up, they immediately dissimulate. Even though Edgar is the first to discover that his grandmother has died, his father refuses to discuss it forthrightly with him. The refusal to grant Edgar any knowledge about death is also evident when his parents resort to subterfuge in order to get rid of their dog Pinky (who must be put to sleep as a result of Edgar’s allergic reaction to him), an act which leaves Edgar convinced of “the adult’s crass disregard for the feelings of children” (84). Because his parents keep him always on the outside of a knowledge of death, Edgar’s desire to know about it burgeons. This same dynamic is also at work in his relationship to sexual knowledge.
Earlier, when Pinky has puppies, Edgar is confused. He confesses, “I had not quite worked out the concept of procreation. It was not a matter in which anyone in my family thought I needed instruction” (81). Prohibited from knowing about sex, Edgar develops a seemingly insatiable desire to know. Sex remains a mystery to him, and as a mystery, it sustains him as a desiring subject. As Edgar puts it:
I secretly grieved for the dark mysterious things my parents did in the privacy of their relationship. I didn’t know quite what these things were, but I knew they were shameful, requiring darkness. They were never referred to or acknowledged in the light of day. This aspect of my parents’ life lay like a shadow in my mind. My mother and father, rulers of the universe, were taken by something over which they had no control. How problematical that was, how unsettling. (78)
Even though the idea of a strange force controlling his parents troubles Edgar, it also intrigues him. He wants to know, to discover the secret of the Other. This desire, like all desire, leads Edgar to inquiry and searching, to all kinds of efforts to unlock the mystery that confronts him. Earlier, an equally revelatory example of this occurs. Shopping with his mother, Edgar insistently inquires about a box she is purchasing; finally, she responds: “Oh stop it, they’re sanitary napkins. Are you satisfied?” (43). Edgar, of course, is not, because this description doesn’t reveal anything to him. It’s only function is to silence him—“I knew from her tone that I had used up my allotment of questions and so pursued the matter no further” (43)—and to sustain his lack of knowledge. This scene does, however, make perfectly clear Edgar’s status as a desiring subject. Like the subject in the society of prohibition, until the end of the novel Edgar experiences his subjectivity as dissatisfying. This dissatisfaction produces a subject with the potential for existential and political engagement in the world.
EDGAR CONTRA OEDIPUS
In order to understand this scene fully, we must look to one of the fundamental texts of psychoanalysis. We can see a clear parallel to the behavior of Edgar and his mother in the relation between Oedipus and Jocasta. Once opened to the possibility that he might be the murderer of his father and the bedmate of his mother, Oedipus insists—and it is this insistence that brings about his demise—on knowing the truth. According to Lacan in his Ethics seminar, “Sophocles represents him as driven to bring about his own ruin through his obstinacy in wanting to solve an enigma, to know the truth.”13 In other words, Oedipus exhibits desire. Jocasta, like Edgar’s mother Rose, can’t do enough to discourage Oedipus from this path toward truth. She says to Oedipus: “Have no more fear of sleeping with your mother: How many men, in dreams, have lain with their mothers! No reasonable man is troubled by such things.”14 Both Jocasta and Rose, against the insistence of their sons’ desire, take refuge in the reality principle—“don’t ask so many questions”—because they know where the insistence on truth leads, and are not all that eager to proceed in that direction.
Despite his mother’s resistance, Edgar, like Oedipus, does eventually come to sexual knowledge. He attends the World’s Fair with his friend Meg, and at the end of the day, they return to the show in which Meg’s mother Norma is performing. She plays a part in the underwater drama of “Oscar the Amorous Octopus,” an act that consists of her (and other women) being chased around underwater by an “octopus” who rips off their clothing. Edgar, who sneaks in to witness this, recognizes that something “important” is happening. He understands that the octopus is a man in disguise (who nonetheless becomes a “monster” in Edgar’s description) and that he is being introduced to sexual knowledge.15 As Michael Robertson puts it, “the peep show [. . .] gives Edgar a glimpse into his own anxiously awaited future as a sexually mature man.”16 Like Oedipus, Edgar gets the feeling that knowledge—especially this kind—isn’t exactly happiness: “I again saw her body in its underwater ballet. I didn’t want to think about it. I felt queasy thinking about it, the picture of it produced the faintest illness from somewhere under my stomach, something between nausea and an ache” (270). We might imagine that Oedipus endures something like this feeling “between nausea and an ache” as he discovers the truth he seeks. Knowledge, however, has far different ramifications for Oedipus and Edgar: Oedipus ends up blinded, exiled, thoroughly alienated; Edgar wins a free trip to the World’s Fair.
Whereas Oedipus, by blinding himself, sustains himself in the truth even though it means the acceptance of a fundamental dissatisfaction, Edgar finds a way to avoid the deadlock of desire. His method is masturbatory: “I found now if I held myself the nauseating ache was bearable” (270). Edgar retreats from the symbolic world of desire—with its requisite unhappiness—into the realm of the imaginary, with its satisfaction that spares him his nausea. This satisfaction, however, is the indication that Edgar has “given ground relative to his desire”—refusing the dissatisfaction of desire for satisfaction of self-stimulation. Unlike Oedipus, Edgar believes he can have both truth and satisfaction, that truth can be seamlessly integrated into one’s existence:
I knew everything now, the careful secret, so carelessly vouchsafed. After all, I had not intended this, it had come to me without my bidding, without any planning or calculation on my part, presented, in fact, as an accident of the adventure. It was not my fault. I had worried before, all the time in this enormous effort to catch up to life, to find it, to feel it, comprehend it; but all I had to do was be in it and it would instruct me and give me everything I needed. As I fell asleep the fireworks went off over and over again like me pounding my own chest and sending my voice to the heavens that I was here. (270-71)
What Edgar fails to realize is that, as he has become integrated into the world, he has sacrificed the insistence on truth that so characterized his childhood. The final “I was here” indicates that this is the moment of Edgar’s ideological interpellation: he has now taken up the subject position assigned to him within the symbolic order, taken up a coherent symbolic identity and abandoned the questions that were the sign of his former resistance. Robertson points out that “the World’s Fair becomes for Edgar a stimulus to his growth to maturity, enabling him to resolve the issues of autonomy, ethnicity and sexuality that are at the core of Doctorow’s novel.”17 This resolution, however, far from marking Edgar’s triumph, indicates his defeat; it is a sign of his smooth—and satisfied—integration into the ideological order of the society of enjoyment.
When Edgar gives up his questions in exchange for imaginary, masturbatory satisfaction, he becomes the quintessential subject of the society of enjoyment. The fundamental experience of this subject is imaginary enjoyment rather than the dissatisfaction of desire. World’s Fair thus answers the great political question that all of Doctorow’s work confronts—What accounts for the loss of the radical past in America?—by showing the sacrifice of desire that makes up the pathological narcissist, a subject incapable of radicality. Edgar’s “maturation” does not exist in isolation but as part of a larger historical shift. He is a part of the increasing power of the imaginary, which offers the tantalizing prospect of uninterrupted private enjoyment. This “increasing power” not only works to shatter the symbolic bond of the community, breaking the social world into smaller and smaller pockets of enjoyment, but it also eliminates the dissatisfaction of the society of prohibition which made revolt possible. What World’s Fair tells us is not that popular culture has duped the working class and thus spelled the obsolescence of radicalism, but that radicalism died when the society—and each of us—chose privacy and its enjoyment over the chronic dissatisfaction of the political activity.
When Edgar returns to the World’s Fair with his family, “Oscar the Amorous Octopus” has been torn down. So instead of taking his brother Donald there, Edgar decides to ride the bumper cars with Donald. The bumper cars are, in effect, the sequel to the octopus show. Edgar’s description of the bumper cars reveals what kind of world the retreat from desire has wrought:
So we rode a Dodgem electric car with rubber bumpers, in a great mad crackling horde of similarly equipped drivers, all murderously intent. We bumped them and they bumped us, and we laughed hysterically. Donald let me drive, his arm over my shoulders, as we spun about crashing and banging into people and being bashed in return, everyone’s head threatening to fly off. Donald yelled over the din: “This is the Futurama! (286, Doctorow’s emphasis)
Donald recognizes that the future is a world of isolated imaginary satisfaction, where any encounter with the other has the character of a collision. Edgar’s choice of satisfaction over persisting in dissatisfaction—his decision for isolation—was not one, as Doctorow reveals in Donald’s exclamation, made alone. The self-satisfaction of imaginary isolation shows itself to be not all that isolated, to be part of a larger historical transformation. Slavoj Žižek explains that what we see here is a “shift towards a ‘pathological Narcissus’ to whom the Other (desiring subject) as such appears as a violent intruder: whatever he or she does (if he or she smokes, laughs too loudly or not loudly enough, casts a covetous glance at me . . .), amounts to a disturbance of my precarious imaginary balance.”18 This is the world that Doctorow envisions on the last pages of World’s Fair, and he reveals, through Edgar’s transformation, precisely how such a world originates. In this world, politics rarely makes an appearance, and when it does, it appears in a wholly new form. The politics of the subject in the society of enjoyment consists primarily of one sentiment: leave me alone to my private enjoyment.
IMAGINARY REPUBLICANS
The fate of the Republicans in the elections of 1994 and 1998 was clearly tied to this contemporary political imperative. In 1994, the “Contract for America” that propelled the “Republican Revolution” of that year centered around the idea of cutting back on government’s intrusions into the private sector. This primarily took the form of cutting taxes, minimizing regulations, and downsizing spending programs. Republicans swept into control of Congress based largely on the popularity of this agenda, which placed a premium on, to put it in the vernacular of talk radio, “getting government off our backs.” This agenda found such a receptive audience because it spoke to subjects isolated in the imaginary and it promised them that nothing would disturb their enjoyment. The state’s intrusions into our lives—what the Republicans vowed to curtail—remind us of our castration, that we don’t have the unmediated relationship to our enjoyment that we might imagine we have. A vote in 1994 for the Republicans was a vote to eliminate this unpleasant reminder.
In 1998, however, the fortunes of the Republicans transformed dramatically. Armed with Clinton’s incipient impeachment trial and other favorable political factors, they nonetheless lost seats in Congress. Rather than indicating a change in the national mood (as one might, in the first instance, imagine), this startling turnaround suggests that things remained just as they were in 1994. Voters turned on Republicans, the erstwhile defenders of private enjoyment, precisely because they now seemed to represent a threat to that enjoyment. Republican support of impeachment proceedings against the president indicated a transformation of their position vis-à-vis private enjoyment. In the act of rallying for impeachment, Republicans aligned themselves with the forces of government, using taxpayer’s money to prosecute the president for his private activity. This establishes them as a threat to private enjoyment and Clinton as a defender of it—a radical reversal of the 1994 dynamic. Even the president, so the subject of imaginary enjoyment sees it, has a right to enjoy himself in private without facing investigation and prosecution. In attacking the president, the Republicans attacked this right and put themselves in the position of threatening it—thereby alienating the same voters that led them to their 1994 victory.
This politics of safeguarding private enjoyment seemed to undergo a dramatic shift in the aftermath of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. But the very way that George W. Bush characterized the attack and the American military response to it evinced continuity with this kind of politics. According to Bush, the attack threatened “the American way of life”—which is to say, the undisturbed safety of our private enjoyment—and this became the justification for the war that followed. Neither Bush nor any other American political figure discussed the war in political terms (as a struggle against Islamic fascism, against fundamentalism, etc.), except those of protecting American jouissance. In the society of commanded enjoyment, the politics of private enjoyment (and safeguarding it) becomes politics as such.
The influence of imaginary enjoyment on politics extends beyond just the election-day choices of voters and the political decisions of elected leaders. Even more importantly, it changes our relationship to all types of political activity. The field of politics and political action seems like foreign territory to most contemporary subjects, and in this way the society of enjoyment tends to produce a generalized apathy about political questions. I’m apathetic about politics because I can’t conceive of political questions as in any way related to my private life—and a private life is the only one that I feel I have. Even when someone manages to avoid the lure of apathy today, the ramifications of the imaginary dimensions of our contemporary situation determine the nature of the political action we embark on, which means that we tend not to take up those political questions that would engage us with the social order as a whole. Instead, political action itself has taken on an increasingly imaginary character, becoming the vehicle for advancing one’s own imaginary enjoyment. Thus, when political questions do manage to penetrate the state of generalized apathy, they are usually questions that deal with potential threats to this enjoyment.
We can see evidence for this in the new brand of political action emerging on American campuses in the late 1990s. Student political action has, of course, a vibrant history, though the current action is remarkable for its divergence from this history. Whereas student rebellions in the 1960s focused on the injustice of the Vietnam War or civil rights or the very structure of the university, the recent rebirth of student action has a new focus: the right to enjoy, or, more specifically, the right to drink. On campuses across the country, students have assembled to protest administration efforts to legislate and police student drinking. In one prominent instance, students were faced with a new university policy banning alcohol on a certain part of campus before football games—in effect, an effort to eliminate the practice of “tailgating.” In response to this policy, on May 1, 1998, three thousand Michigan State University students participated in a well-orchestrated uprising, an uprising with but one demand: restore our right to tailgate. Though this is the largest of this new brand of political action, it is merely one instance in a national trend, a trend toward a politics focusing not on altering the social order but on facilitating access to imaginary enjoyment. One might say that we are witnessing a perversion of the old feminist slogan “the personal is the political”; today, we have come to the point where “the political is the personal.” That is, the only political issue worth taking up is one in which my personal, private enjoyment is at stake. The trend toward political action over the right to drink—or whatever “personal” issue—is important insofar as it illustrates so clearly political consequences of the new command to enjoy.
POLITICIANS AND THEIR CONSTITUTIVE LIES
Despite the fact that their turn to political action stems only from a perceived threat to their imaginary enjoyment, the Michigan State students are at least able to conceive themselves as political beings and enter into a political arena (however isolated that arena might be). To most people, the very words “politics” and “politician” are the equivalent of obscenities, and conceiving of oneself in political terms is anathema. This increasingly popular attitude indicates the ease with which one can conceive oneself as detached from the political sphere, as an apolitical being.19 We avoid politics because we think we can—and because we see it as both an alien and an alienating process. But the attempt to avoid alienation is really just an attempt to avoid the social order: any emergence of the subject in the social order is necessarily alienating, a process in which the subject gains a symbolic identity at the price of his or her being. According to Lacan’s formulation in Seminar XI, “when the subject appears somewhere as meaning [i.e., as a symbolic identity], he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance.”20 It is this experience of alienation that the word “politics” evokes today, and, in this sense, animus toward “politics” or “politicians” is implicitly animus toward the very idea of a social order. To involve oneself in politics would be to tacitly accept the necessity of one’s alienation—a prospect the contemporary subject would like to avoid at all costs, precisely because this alienation makes evident the failure of one’s private, imaginary enjoyment.21 A sense of alienation indicates that the imaginary realm is symbolically mediated, and “politics,” insofar as it is alienating, constantly reminds us of this mediation.
On one level, it is easy to see mass enmity toward politicians in populist terms, as the healthy expression of hatred on behalf of those ruled toward those who rule them. And perhaps, even as recently as twenty years ago, this was the case. Today, however, such a position is no longer tenable. Today, we hate politicians not because they are the representatives of the ruling class, but because they compromise—or, to put it more clearly, because they lie. The lie of the politician is not, as we often see it, an indication of moral failure, but an act that inheres in the very idea of social relations. In order to interact with each other socially, we must agree to keep up appearances; we must, in short, both accept and proffer widespread deceit. Social existence demands, for instance, that we inquire politely after the health of people we don’t really care about, that we refrain from telling colleagues what we really think of their work, and that we listen to friends with an attentive expression even when we are bored to tears. The continued existence of the social bond depends on such deceits, and without them, the bond would shatter. In fact, the social bond is itself deceit par excellence. The social bond exists only because we collectively believe that it does, and yet it exists with the pretense of being substantive. This lie at the heart of the social bond is the fundamental constitutive lie, the basis for all of the polite, social lies that follow from it.
Politicians must engage in this kind of lying all the time—speaking so as not to offend the Other—or else they would never get elected to any office. The politician’s lie as such is not a manipulative lie, but a constitutive one, an indication that she/he respects—and is trying to answer—the desire of the Other.22 Though we might fantasize about a politician who actually tells the truth, such a phenomenon is nonetheless structurally impossible: once someone is in the position of running for office, she/he is necessarily wholly invested in the desire of the Other, so that even telling the truth from this position would be a form of the constitutive lie. Even the film Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998), which is the embodiment of the fantasy of a truth-telling politician, only depicts Senator Bulworth (Warren Beatty) telling the truth when he knows that he’s going to die, that is, when he has no interest in the upcoming election. When this certainty of imminent death is lifted, Bulworth once again becomes a normal politician and takes up the constitutive lie, which demonstrates the necessary connection between the politician and the lie. What makes this even clearer, however, is that when Bulworth does actually tell the truth, the truth functions like a lie. That is, Bulworth’s truth-telling has the effect of ingratiating him to the Other, which is precisely the effect that the politician’s lie is supposed to have. In this sense, Bulworth demonstrates not only that politicians don’t tell the truth, but also that, on the basis of their structural position, they cannot do so. The lie is not something that politicians can avoid; even when they are honest (as is the case with Senator Bulworth), the paradoxical effect of this honesty is that they deceive us all the more. No matter how ethical he or she is, the politician cannot escape the lie.
To refuse to accept the constitutive lie and to despise politicians for it is to disavow the power of the Other, insofar as the constitutive lie explicitly acknowledges the Other’s hold over us. But this disavowal, like all disavowals, doesn’t make that power go away. Historically, subjects have taken up these lies as a part of their social duty. Today, however, they occasion resentment in subjects, because in being forced to lie, we feel explicitly the demands of the Other—and we feel that we are betraying our private, imaginary enjoyment and thus betraying the imperative to enjoy. Which is not to say that we are experiencing an outbreak of mass truth-telling among contemporary subjects. Enmity for the constitutive, necessary lie is not enmity for all types of deceit, just for the deceit demanded by the social order. Many types of nonconstitutive lies proliferate today and don’t occasion the same kind of hostility as the politician’s lie. Fabricating a background on a resume, cheating on an exam, making up sources for a research project—none of these lies are forced on us by the Other, and hence they do not make apparent the Other’s hold over us. When we lie in this way, we are, in a sense, being “true” to ourselves, insofar as we are advancing our own private interests, our private enjoyment. In contrast, the politician’s lie represents a threat to this enjoyment, as it forcefully reminds us of our own castration—what we are unaccustomed to feeling and against which we recoil. When we recoil from the politician’s constitutive lie and disavow it, we enact a disavowal of castration, and this disavowal becomes almost de rigueur in the society of commanded enjoyment.
This recoil from the constitutive lie is simply the manifestation of hostility toward the social order and its constitutive hold over us.23 Such hostility develops because we perceive the social order as a continued threat to our ability to sustain our private enjoyment, not because we are actually revolting against symbolic authority. What we fail to see—and what psychoanalysis takes pains to point out—is that no matter how private we feel this enjoyment to be, it is always located within the symbolic order. The social order is not the enemy of this imaginary enjoyment—nor is it threatened by it. What we imagine as our radicality is actually that which locates us firmly under the sway of symbolic authority. Our experience as subjects today is dramatically misleading: it prompts us to feel, almost inevitably, as if we are radical beings. The society of commanded enjoyment does offer us the opportunity to realize this feeling of radicality in action, though few of us actually do. Instead, we remain content with our isolated, private enjoyment and the image of radicality. But the isolation of private enjoyment and its seeming radicality are never as isolated or as radical as all that. Recognizing this is the incipience of a politics with more at stake than my private enjoyment, because politics as such can only begin when we grasp just how radical we aren’t. The command to enjoy does open up this political possibility. However, we don’t engage in radical political activity as long as we remain confident that we are already radical. Instead, we retreat into apathy, and as we do, the public world erodes.