Escaping the Voice of the Mass/ter: Late Neoliberalism, Object-Voice, and the Prospects for a Radical Democratic Future

Abstract

This article argues that the founding logics of late neoliberalism actively mitigate against a radically democratic future. By calling attention to the invocatory drive which is responsible for effecting the Symbolic order’s interpellative address, the article makes the case that Lacan’s retheorization of desire, the drives, and/as jouissance opens the way toward an ontologically grounded conception of radical political agency and rhetorical intervention whose abiding ethical injunction is to “imagine there’s no Publics!”

Notes

The intellectual labor necessary to produce this work has been shared and, therefore, the authors wish to underscore their relation as coauthors, equal collaborators.

1. What is being suggested here, of course, is that the move from theorizing the Public to theorizing publics, etc., can be mapped cognitively as a shift from antidescriptivism to descriptivism, both of which, as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 90) has summarily pointed out, “aim at a general theory of referring function. For descriptivism, proper names themselves are merely abbreviated or disguised definite descriptions, while for anti-descriptivism the external causal chain determines reference even in the case of generic notions.” Our aim over the course of this article is not to split this (non)difference but to deconstruct it.

2. See, for example, Asen and Brouwer (2001, 1) who suggest, “For ‘public’ seems at once both a necessary and a fragile notion for democratic orders.” We are aware, of course, that a number of scholars argue that publics, by whatever name they may be given, do not “exist” as such, but these scholars continue to maintain that they “matter” in the sense of their having effect. See, for example, Michael Warner (2002, 8) who has argued that publics are a “kind of fiction that has taken on life” and indeed that “if we did not have a practical sense of what publics are … we could not conduct elections or indeed imagine ourselves as members of nations or movements.” Also, see Jodi Dean (2002, 11), who has argued that “[t]he public is symbolic, it doesn’t exist, but it still has effects.” The arguments that follow in our article do not depend on the “reality” of the public (or various versions of “publics”) but instead on the “effect” of their imagined role.

3. In designating the late neoliberal subject’s disposition as belonging or inclusion through recognition, we are wanting to account for both “the presented” or that which “is counted as one in a situation,” what Alain Badiou (2005) terms a “consistent multiple,” and “the represented” or that which “is counted as one by the metastructure” (what Badiou (2005a) terms a “part”).

4. Our analysis of the count finds its beginning in but aims to distinguish itself from the prior and competing theorizations tendered by Alain Badiou (2005b) and Jacques Rancière (1999).

5. Miller (1997, 24) writes, “Put otherwise, giving privilege to a schema of communication, giving a place to the symbolic relationship the Other, the drive is defined—I barely accentuate these terms—as an enunciation of the unconscious. As [Lacan] explains—it is not very clear if it is the location or the concept of the drive—‘it is all the further from speaking the more it speaks.’ I think I faithfully simplify the slightly entangled formula in this phrase, by saying, finally, the lesson is that the drive is speech.”

6. It is worth noting Foucault’s distaste for the polemicist as well. Where Foucault faults the polemicist for not engaging the dialogic process, or at least by not playing fair in that process, we, on the other hand, find that unwillingness to succumb to the given’s rules of the game precisely the wellspring of radical, interruptive, political possibilities. Foucault (1997) argues:

• The polemicist … proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied. (112)

7. 7. Here, we feel compelled to highlight a problematic, and symptomatic, insistence on the discourse of the demand in the recent and celebrated On Populist Reason by Ernesto Laclau (2005). While he is to be credited for attending to the role affect plays in manufacturing the universal requisite to the production of hegemony, and for being—as far as we are aware—the first major theorist to take seriously the political implications of Copjec’s work on sublimation, he seems to us to have imported a domesticated account of her theorization of sublimation, the consequences of which are disastrous for radical democracy. He seemingly ignores, for example, any mention of jouissance or of the ways in which sublimation shatters the subject’s previous sense of self and the object. As a result, “desire” in Laclau’s work is much more akin to “need,” in the sense that it has long been understood by modernist political theory. It is not surprising, then, that his understanding is “radical” about sublimation is the “contingent character” of the cathected objects rather than its effecting a fundamental break from the order of things.