hidden injuries of class

ken kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Fri Jul 23 18:51:29 PDT 1999


Through our love/hate relationship with our enjoyment we insist on the ideology which enslaves us.

Take Judith Butler for instance. Butler argues that there is a subversive potential to perversions. The pervert is an "inherent transgressor" par excellence, who brings to light, stages, and practises the secret fantasies that sustain the predominant public discourse. In other words, the pervert precludes the unconscious because she or he knows the answer. The pervert assumes the position of the object-instrument of the Other's desire (to generate enjoyment in an Other). For Butler, as for Foucault, resistance to power is generated by the very matrix they seem to oppose. In effect, the perversion itself becomes eroticized - the result of which actually proliferates the object one tries to combat. Resistance conceived in this way is a zero sum game. For example, Zizek notes that the anti-colonialist movement conceives itself as a return to precolonial roots (in the same way that Foucault returns to myth 'before the Fall') which then asserts independence from the colonizer. But the very form of this assertion is already taken over from the colonizer: "If we ground our resistance to imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference to some kernel of previous ethnic identity, we automatically adopt the position of a victim resisting modernization, of a passive object on which imperalist procedures work. If, however, we conceive our resistance as an excess that results from the way brutal imperialist intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed identity, our position becomes much stronger, since we can claim that our resistance is grounded in the inherent dynamics of the imperialist system - that the imperialist system itself, through its inherent antagonsism, activates the forces that will bring about its demise." In other words, the colonial system itself is not transparent (an equal amount of resistance for an equal amount of repression), it contains a fundamental antagonsim, a kernel of which it systematically denies within itself - and in order to do this - an obscene suplement is used to sustain its own operation (ideology always relies on a phantasmic background). Ideology relies on desire. In effect, resistance is only possible if the effect can outdo its cause. It is our passionate attachments that sustain an ideological system (Freud's notion of fixation). It is social criticism then which attempts to undo these passions. What holds a community together, in this sense, is not directly a shared mode of identification with the same object, rather, its exact opposite: the shared mode of disidentification, another object whom the communities loves to hate. The claim that class struggle, for instance, is Real is equivalent to the claim that it is impossible, impossible to symbolize, to formulate as a symbolic form. What this means is that it is in the unconscious that we encounter the inconsistency of the Other's discourse and it is through the exploration of this inconsistency that permits a cynical distance, in the paradoxical form of critical self-reflection *and* conformity, that permits the effect to undo the cause - to change, modify and alter our enjoyment of racist, classist, colonial, or sexist ideological systems.

ken



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