Living in The After: The New Logic of Capital and Reproductive Interpassivity

On both sides of the Pond, a pertinent symptom appears on the neoliberal corpus. Beneath the reawakened logic of populist discourse, a strange yearning begins to materialise. A wave of global political nostalgia for a classical mode of exploitation has been rising in political discourse, from Trumpist appeals to the “forgotten worker,” or Le Pen’s embrace of welfare chauvinism. This yearning is not merely political or socio-economic; rather, it signals a deeper structural shift in the nature of subjugation itself. Why has the discourse of “strong leadership,” “stable work,” or—perhaps in its most perverse form—the promise to “Make the Nation Great Again” returned with such force? This question resists the tidy frameworks of poli-sci departments of prestigious universities and the Washingtonian think tanks, those peculiar institutions where ideology is scrutinised under the guise of neutral analysis. (And is there not an inherent obscenity in the term “tank” itself? As if institutions must now be armoured, weaponised, to flatten thought, much like the PLA tanks in June of ‘89). The nostalgia at play is not for a party or platform, but for a loss of symbolic order, for the visible chains of the external master, now replaced by something far more pervasive.

The subject-master relationship has presently collapsed into a subject-master singularity, wherein the dialectic permeates directly through the individual, and less so through a substantive class conflict. Clear-defined class wars have become secondary to the internal subjugation of the modern neoliberal subject. Although we deem ourselves free, and permit ourselves the liberties so-expressed by the late capitalist state, in reality we are slaves. We have become subjects in the absolute sense, when the subject willingly exploits itself without the constant supervision of a secondary, external master.

Modern theorists, such as Byung-Chul Han, identify the modern persona as an “achievement subject” [1], trapped in cycles of self-exploitation. In my view, this only represents the surface of a deeper ideological formation. We are not merely subjects to achievement (or to the socialised idea of achievement), the project, but subjects to the project-ion—subject to the [a] idealisation of the self, whether it be through political identification, moral posturing, aesthetic auto-curation, self-entrepreneurship, and so on, [b] for whom these imperatives to project an idealisation intensifies competition on the level of identity itself, where the boundaries of selfhood are eroded by a race to the bottom is labour devaluation, and [c] to conform to the persistent demand to perform and sustain this ideal in the eyes of an ever-watching social gaze—whether internalised or external.

It is of a highest degree of importance not to confuse the ideal in its common form of nomenclature (with the pursuit of perfection) and rather to take a brief moment to consider what this project-ion truly is. Ideal-isms are various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held dependent on activities of the mind. In the same manner, our neoliberal idealisation refers to symbolic fictions that stabilise the subject. The project-ion is not a reachable telos, but a phantasmic construct [2], projected outward as a commodified demand. The subject does not pursue the ideal; the subject is pursued by the ideal.

In this context, exploitation no longer relies on an alienated labour force alone, moving beyond the traditional Foucauldian bio-political argument (that the “system” exercises a force of subjugation through a physical management of a populus’ bodies and lives). It is, then, unsurprising that a return of global political nostalgia for a classical mode of exploitation has been rising in discourse. The populist platform romanticises the era of stable industrial labour and distinct hierarchies, even though no political system will be able to superpose the system to offer a structural return to the “glory days,” that of the Fordist worker, who, despite knowing that they are rewarded for less than the true value of their labour, they are satisfied with the tangible securities in return. The modern worker, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the precarious worker, cries: “No, I want to be exploited—but I want to clearly see the real value of my exploitation!”

Lacan notes that Marx’s discovery of the symptom (taking the Žižekian view) began in the analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The traditional view of commodity fetishism demonstrates how the values of commodities, which is “effectively an insignia of a network of social relations […] assumes the form of a quasi-‘natural’ property of money” [3]. This is an identical process to feudalism’s fetishism of the figure of The King, that, what is actually a purely social relationship (King-subject) “appears […] in an inverse form,” [4] as if the quality of royalty (moderated predominantly by the Catholic Church, we must add) is “naturally” possessed by the King, and is not merely a social position. Marxist critique treats the “retreat of the Master in capitalism was only a displacement: as if the defetishisation in the 'relations between men' was paid for by the emergence of fetishism in 'relations between things' – by commodity fetishism” [5]. Social relations in feudalism become transferred to relations amongst objects in a bourgeois society where exploitation becomes repressed.

Commodity fetishism is no longer the misrecognition of social relations but has become a necessary function of the subject and survival in consumer capitalism. In the current stage, commodities are no longer fetishised because we “mistakenly” believe it has value—we must to participate in the symbolic order: the fetish becomes functional. Here is the most important inversion: consumption itself has now become production. In the project-ion-subject dialectic, consumption now becomes a form of symbolic labour, one that “produces” the self in a symbolic economy. The act of purchasing a commodity is part of the affective-symbolic production, mediated primarily by the ease of display (social media). Corporations provide the symbols, but the subjects are responsible for their reproduction. Identity itself is dependent on its mediation, its reproduction within groups.

What is the most striking consequence of this neo-fetishist internalisation? The only way in which the project-ion-subject truly relieves the angst of this symptomatic internalisation is by fabricating a class distinction where none materially exists.. This, born of a conflict of self-induces struggle, places its creator in direct opposition to another form of “dominant” ideology, usually in its subordinate position (not in the literal sense, but in the sense that there is some injustice at play), wherein the opponent is responsible for the lack of social cohesion.

These symptoms—the libidinal displacement of a structural antagonism, the rise of symbolic labour—warrant deeper examination. For now, we are left with a more fundamental question: If the subject is no longer exploited by a True Master, but by a self-internalised ideal, then who, or what, can truly liberate us?

[1] Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power.

[2] Zizek, S. (2009). The sublime object of ideology. Verso Books.

[3], [4], [5] Ibid.