La institucionalización como medida de exclusión

We can say that the campaign of the Jouissant Father is visible in the increasing abhorrence of pleasure as found in the Other. The intolerable Other provides

a source of sadistic pleasure in today’s society (Zizek 1993). This is especially true of racism, homophobia, ethnicity, and body size where the Other’s enjoyment is continually ruined by striking at the core of self-esteem for not living up to a taken-for-granted social Ego Ideal as defined by wealth, het-eronormativity, whiteness, a Barbie body for a woman, and a Ken body for a man. In Anatomy of Prejudices, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (1996) discusses this encroachment of the Other by three prejudiced ideal personality types (Idealtypen in Max Weber’s sense—obsessional, hysterical, and narcissistic).

In designer capitalism, wherever the subject turns s/he cannot escape the Other’s enjoyment. In nascent seventeenth-century modernism the dead primal Father presided over an emerging capitalist society relatively devoid of enjoyment, especially later in its Puritanical and Protestant formulations of the “spirit of capitalist accumulation” as articulated by Weber’s “Protestant ethic” thesis.¹This was still an Oedipal Father who drew his authority and power from God. The Jouissant Father of postmodern consumerism presides over a society where enjoyment has been magnified. The old primal Father ruled as a “present absence” or “living/dead father.” The “new” Father’s presence is felt everywhere, suffocating and insistent in its repetitive gesture to hammer at us as consumers. We can never get away from sensing his enjoyment even when he is physically absent. But his enjoyment doesn’t bar us from enjoying. The presence of this enjoyment actually calls upon us to enjoy ourselves even more so that it turns into its paradoxical opposite—

jouissance as the desublimated pleasure of our symptoms. We never feel as though we are doing this adequately enough, nor feel that we have enough.

Duty no longer lies in going to work and working hard—the boundaries between leisure and work become blurred for those who are “fully” enjoy-ing. Money is earned so it can be spent on more pleasure. With the system of credit, most middle-class Americans are only one paycheck away from becoming broke. This was humorously explored by Percy Aldon’s Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989). Rosalie (Marianne Sägebrecht) uses one credit card to pay off another credit card in an unending game of circularity, until the game catches up to her. Not so humorously, after 9/11 many Americans it was reported, went shopping to make themselves “feel” better, as if their days had become numbered. Bankruptcies in the United States have increased 400 percent over the last 25 years and occur at an astounding rate of one per minute. Six million U.S. families will be in danger of bankruptcy by the year 2010 (Warren and Warren 2003).

The hyper-narcissistic excesses of the drives dominate lives today: the

“surface” aesthetic of the “look,” pornography, plastic surgery, steroid abuse, dieting, body piercing, tattooing, s/m, gambling (especially VLT’s, Video Lottery Terminals), designer drugs, “escape” vacations, themeparks, extreme sports, and workouts. The eventual legalization of marijuana, perhaps, will be a benchmark indicator that this libidinal pleasure has been

“normalized.” With the demand to “enjoy” come addiction and a loss of feeling, an anesthetization so well explored by the David Rincher’s Fight Club (1999). The narrator (Edward Norton) has become an addict looking for affection, trying to find a way to feel and touch people, moving from one

self-help group to another without much success. He is a walking vampire living off the way addicts find pleasure in struggling with their addictions.

In his schizophrenic state, the only way he can feel again is through brutal beatings that leaves his skin-ego physically battered and mentally toughed to withstand pain, which has now turned to pleasure. The “fight club” becomes a perverse sadomasochistic ritual, a desperate attempt to reinstate the Law.

But, this fails as well. His inner disembodied voice of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) wins out. What is left is total anarchistic destruction, an eerie adum-bration of the 9/11 event, but this time committed by one of America’s own, like Timothy McVeigh’s bombing the Oklahoma City federal building in June 1997 that left 168 people dead.

This enjoyment makes its presence felt by installing a new kind of superego, a superego that develops from the Jouissant Father who psychically attacks us for failing to enjoy, rather than for enjoyment itself as the old superego of the Name-of-the-Father once did. This new superego keeps the Jouissant Father’s standard of enjoyment constant at the forefront of our thoughts. It remains constant and credible for it appears ubiquitous through all institutions of soci-ety. We are constantly reminded what success is through the media, and what such successful youthful bodies look like. Failure to enjoy leads to depression and nonrecognition. This unbearable presence of the symbolic Ego Ideal cre-ates in every subject a sense that they are not enjoying themselves enough; that they are failing in their responsibility to live up to these ideals. Whereas the dead primal Father prohibited enjoyment, and thus tended to spawn subjects relatively content to forget, repress, and “live” with their castration, as subjects who lack, the “living” Jouissant Father constantly alerts everyone to the fact of their castration and insists that they escape it. The Ego Ideal is to become like David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross (film, James Foley 1992), the ONE (mythical) figure who grounded the company and then left on a permanent vacation where everything he possibly imagined was available to him because of his wealth. Here we need only mention the escalation of multimillion dol-lar contracts in professional sports, the brunt of the costs are borne by the fans through increased price of tickets and season passes. Players demand to be paid more; to be paid less is a sign of castration—undervalued and out of the lime-light. The phallus has to be spectacularized, vanity exploited to make profit dollars. This obscenity of this practice was perceptively explored in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996).

The juxtaposition of enjoyment to the subject’s castration acts as a nag-ging underlying reminder: “Just look at what you gave up to get to where you did. Look at all that hard work and hours you put in to reach the top.

You don’t have to be put up with that!” You need not give up your tax dol-lars. Use your tax shelters! Demand more money! Sport stars like Boris Becker and Steffi Graf’s father have been caught for tax evasion. But they are the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous other “stars” and multinational executives who use the tax loopholes to shelter their money. It’s an expecta-tion that comes with wealth. Yet, subjects existing in the world of the “living”

Anal Father have a constant sense that they are still not enjoying enough.

In Nietzschean terms, there is a growing “resentment” against anyone who has accumulated the status this Jouissant Father demands, namely the hyper-specularization of the Self with Vanity (the name of an upscale maga-zine) and 15 Minutes of fame (the name of John Herzfeld’s 1992 movie) seem to be the defining features of such a narcissistic quest. Such resentment is par-ticularly evident in the “culture of complaint” (Hughes 1993). The more nar-cissistic the subject is expected to become, the more likely is the blame placed on the Symbolic Order for failing in its duty to live up to its democratic ideals of human rights. Fear and the anxiety that comes with the potential “theft of enjoyment,” the sense that the Other has stolen enjoyment away from me is the unspoken assumption of “fair” competition (Zizek 1993, 203; 1997a, 32).

When fairness breaks down litigation is soon to follow. This is a hysterical position, which demands that the Law immediately “show itself” if justice and trust in it is to be restored. The pervasiveness of this struggle for enjoyment makes civil relationships between people seems impossible; community is extremely difficult to maintain. Each postindustrial country has its televised

“reality” shows, which show this struggle in the courts (e.g., Judge Judy et al.

in the United States; Jugendgericht, Das Strafgericht, Das Familiengericht et al. in Germany). Fictionalized courtroom dramas and police shows, docu-dramas as well have become a staple on primetime television (Law and Order, Boomtown, The District, The New Detectives: Case Studies in Forensic Science, To Serve and Protect, Cold Squad, The FBI Files, and so on). The neighbor has become abhorrent and difficult to live with unless distance is maintained.² There is constant betrayal amongst friends. This is the only relationship possible in the world of the Jouissant Father. In this world friendships seem precarious; where every potential friend is at the same time a potential thief who will steal enjoyment away—get the better grade so as to move on to grad-uate school, get the raise, be promoted, be recognized by peers. The Survivor series of “reality” television illustrate this perfectly. The game rules are to outwit, outlast, and outplay fellow castaways. On the surface everyone appears to be friendly and helping each other out, underneath there is the strategy of the game and schemes to get rid of particular players to get the prize. What we see is an inverted community, which exposes to the viewing audience the

“rawness” of the drive—what must be done in order to survive. In the end, it is those who have been betrayed who have a say in choosing the winning contestant. They have the satisfaction of revenge, or at the very least, a chance to lash out for what they perceived as wrongful dismissal off the island.

In such a world of capitalist consumerism an impossible “enjoyment” is posited in the Other that the Other doesn’t have, and it is this positing—not the actual enjoyment—which leads to a rise in aggressivity. Showing that neither character has the enjoyment that the Other believes the Other has explains Lacan’s maxim: enjoyment is always the enjoyment of the Other.

Enjoyment exists only insofar that it is posited in the Other, as the Other’s enjoyment. So when a subject responds to enjoyment with aggressivity s/he is really recoiling from her or his own enjoyment and repudiating it. In this view, the contemporary rise in violence and aggressivity is not the result of

too much “enjoyment,” but too little of it (McGowan 1998). The living world of the Jouissant Father of proliferating enjoyment is also a world of enjoy-ment refused. Aggressivity is a refusal of one’s own enjoyenjoy-ment in so far as it manifests itself in the Other. Aggressivity is, in short, a complete rejection of one’s enjoyment because it is only in the Other that enjoyment can manifest itself. It points to the strange inversion of enjoyment into jouissance—into forms of envy and jealousy that characterize resentment, symptoms that have increased in consumerist societies.

This logic of the “theft of enjoyment” helps further explain the attacks on Clinton given that enjoyment also determines the relationship of the people to the country’s leader. Clinton’s concentration and consumption of wealth (the White Water Affair, for instance; his and Hillary’s assets) is considered a

“theft” only when he loses the perception of being a representative of the people who is “more” than they themselves are (its citizens). “A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure those practices” (Zizek 1993, 202). As long as that relationship is transferential then the president’s wealth, prestige, and enjoyment is “ours.” Such trans-ference is over when the leader loses his charisma and is perceived by the majority of citizens as a parasite on the nation’s body. This is precisely why conservative political forces tried to discredit Clinton’s relationship to his enjoyment. The case of the Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (con-temporary of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) is another primary example of failed charisma. Mulroney left office being perceived as one of the most disliked and unpopular prime ministers Canada ever had. The fact that his Conservative Party was almost decimated in the elections that followed confirmed the nation’s feeling of disgust for his expenditures. This is a polit-ical party that has never recovered since. Both Mulroney and his wife Milla were perceived as spending tax dollars on themselves for their own enjoy-ment (new house furniture, vacations, cars, gala parties with the Reagans) rather than “for” the nation’s enjoyment. The notorious case of the author-itarian Marcos’s regime in the Philippines where Amelda Marcos’s shoe collection exemplifies the vanity of enjoyment to its fetishistic heights at the expense of the nation’s poor is another dramatic example.

Tony Soprano as Everyman? The Conflict