On Process-Worship and Knowledge: How to Struggle Without Spectacle
I picked up Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: An Introduction at a Waterstones somewhere in South West London with the conviction that it would serve as a handbook for the horrifying attempt at reading Žižek’s Sublime Object of Ideology. Naturally, this ambition was followed by weeks of studious highlighting, then weeks of guilt, and then, inevitably, the plunge into that affective sinkhole known as the Valley of Despair. At first, I felt sorry for myself. However, something even more perverse began to take root: I started to suspect that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Not just that I didn’t understand—but that I wasn’t the kind of person who could.
How am I to interpret this? Naturally, as a Žižekian-Lacanian-Hegelian fanatic, I decidedly grasped at the only straw I could find: ideology. First, we should remember Han’s Psychopolitics, and find some bitter consolation that “failure” is not a moral lapse, but a structural inevitability: in the neo-liberal regime of achievement-subjectivity, reading theory is transformed into a perverse act of symbolic labour. The Other no longer says “Work hard!” but something much worse: “No, you idiot—enjoy your thinking!”
Where Han’s theories break down, at least in my interpretation, is what happens next: the greatest failure of the modern age lies not so much in how we choose to live our lives (even inadvertently through the materialisation of a self-inflicted subjugation, a subconscious process) but in how we perceive it instead. In my obscene fantasy, Slavoj is beside me—sweating profusely, shirt slightly untucked, slurping some “fucking fruit juice,” and agreeing that Han has not taken it far enough.
Maybe then, he turns on some seductive music, the fruit juice suddenly becomes wine, (maybe he even wears some lingerie) and tells me that my own interpretation, that of the projection-subject, would be a better place to start.
Under the reign of internet-mediated culture, we no longer live our lives—we project them (below is a short condensation of a theoretically heavy argument, but you can read more about it here.)
We are not merely subjects to achievement (or the socialised idea of it), but to the idealisation of the self, for whom these imperatives to project an idealisation intensifies competition on the level of identity itself, and, lastly, to conform to the persistent demand to sustain the ever-watching social gaze (whether internal or external). As I have claimed in my previous thesis, it is of utmost importance not to take the ideal in its common form (the pursuit of perfection) and to treat it as an ideal-ism: 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 projected outward as a commodified demand. The subject does not pursue the ideal; the subject is pursued by the ideal.
What counts now is not experience, but its transmissibility. We are caught in the line of the highlight reel and desire to exist within the infinite montage. In the digitalisation of perpetual enjoyment, the idea of an unremarkable, normal life has been radically debased: failure and repetition have become obscenely reabsorbed into a fetish in-and-of-themselves. Social media doesn’t just tolerate struggle—it demands that we enjoy it. We are expected to aestheticise our burnout, to glorify our breakdowns, to curate our late-night study sessions and training rituals into mini-montages of noble self-destruction. This is the logic of the grind-set: the subject is not humiliated by their failure, but eroticised by it—because it proves they are still “becoming.” This aligns all too neatly with the logic of the project-ion subject: one who chases the fantasy of their own idealised self, performing symbolic labour not toward some concrete goal, but to maintain the illusion that they are still in the running, still “on the grind,” still worthy of the gaze of the Other—even if that Other is now just an algorithm.
We are taught to enjoy the process, but at what level does the word enjoy disintegrate from a verb to an imperative: Enjoy!
Stravinsky wrote: “the uninitiated imagine that one must await inspiration in order to create. [...] Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. But it is not simply inspiration that counts.”
In our so-called Age of Information, we are easily illusioned that knowing is acquired through a glorification in the process of knowledge-acquisition (e.g., #studygram, “booktok.”) It is as if we are expected to sit and EXPERIENCE the montage as contingent to studying, and, of course, if you get it wrong, what are you doing? When Plato assigned knowledge the means of achieving the highest Form of the Good, he unintentionally predicted its fate. Knowledge has most certainly become a good, in the sense that it exhibits the characteristics of a commodity in the “traditional” sense (if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, …). Maybe this is best illustrated by a reversal in the classic Socratic line (that “I know that I know nothing”) [conscious], which has become “I know nothing about knowing” [unconscious reality/critique] Information is everywhere, but understanding is nowhere. We consume the symbol of critical thinking without doing the work of thought.
“I know that I know nothing” becomes “I know nothing about knowing.”
Here’s the obscene truth: if you’re not enjoying the process, if it feels like friction, boredom, even despair—then congratulations. You’re probably thinking. If you are not enjoying the process of knowledge acquisition, it likely means you're finally doing the work of thought.
This is not to deny that there’s a certain proprietary enjoyment in completing a difficult task or wrestling with dense theory—basic psychology would attribute this to dopamine reward loops and cognitive closure, and so on. But there’s a crucial difference between reaping the rewards of the process and glorifying the process itself. Though the cult of process-worship might help me “sit my ass down and grind!” (picture here Goggins half-naked, muscles bulging, the alarm clock somewhere between 4:30 and 5:30 AM) the very motivational structure it provides comes at a cost: what is gained in discipline is lost in depth.
So, comrades, I’ll leave you with this: take on the arduous task—but take it on fully. Don’t aestheticise it, don’t perform it. Don’t experience yourself experiencing the task. Just experience the task itself. And if it’s difficult, if you’re struggling—good. That means you’re finally doing the work.
