>So where, precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to surplus-value?
>One is tempted to search for an answer in the key Lacanian
>distinction between the object of desire and surplusenjoyment as its
>cause, Henry Krips evokes the lovely example of the chaperone in
>seduction: the chaperone is an ugly elderly lady who is officially
>the obstacle to the direct goal-object (the woman the suitor is
>courting); but precisely as such, she is the key intermediary moment
>that effectively makes the beloved woman desirable - without her,
>the whole economy of seduction would collapse. Or, take another
>example from a different level: the lock of curly blonde hair, that
>fatal detail of Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo. When, in the love
>scene in the barn towards the end of the Film, Scottie passionately
>embraces Judy refashioned into the dead Madeleine, during their
>famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws just long
>enough to steal a look at her newly blonde hair, as if to reassure
>himself that the particular feature which transforms her into the
>object of desire is still there.... Crucial here is the opposition
>between the vortex that threatens to engulf Scottie (the 'vertigo'
>of the film's title, the deadly Thing) and the blonde curl that
>imitates the vertigo of the Thing, but in a miniaturized, gentrified
>form.
>
>This curl is the objet petit a which condenses the impossible-deadly
>Thing, serving as its stand-in and thus enabling us to entertain a
>livable relationship with it, without being swallowed up by it. As
>Jewish children put it when they play gently aggressive games:
>'Please, bite me, but not too hard . . .' This is the difference
>between 'normal' sexual repression and fetishism: in 'normal'
>sexuality, we think that the detail-feature that serves as the cause
>of desire is just a secondary obstacle that prevents our direct
>access to the Thing - that is, we overlook its key role; while in
>fetishism we simply make the cause of desire directly into our
>object of desire: a fetishist in Vertigo would not care about
>Madeleine, but simply focus his desire directly on the lock of hair;
>a fetishist suitor would engage directly with the chaperone and
>forget about the lady herself, the official goal of his endeavours.
>
>So there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its
>cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object
>desirable. What happens in melancholy is that we get the object of
>desire deprived of its cause. For the melancholic, the object is
>there, but what is missing is the specific intermediary feature that
>makes it desirable. For that reason, there is always at least a
>trace of melancholy in every true love: in love, the object is not
>deprived of its cause; it is, rather, that the very distance between
>object and cause collapses. This, precisely, is what distinguishes
>love from desire: in desire, as we have just seen, cause is distinct
>from object; while in love, the two inexplicably coincide - I
>magically love the beloved one for itself, finding in it the very
>point from which I find it worthy of love. And - back to Marx - what
>if his mistake was also to assume that the object of desire
>(unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when it was
>deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus-value)?
Why should an example of how men tend to behave under the capitalist regime of sexism ("'normal' sexual repression and fetishism" illustrated by Scottie's obsession in _Vertigo_) serve to prove that "there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause"? Why eternalize sexism in this fashion? It's Lacan & Zizek who are trapped in the prevailing conception of desire as abstraction, an autonomous force independent of ensembles of social relations. Perhaps that is the reason why Zizek reads Marx as if he were Jim Heartfield avant la lettre, a "productivist" par excellence. For Marx, however, production meant something other than the race to raise the rate of productivity. Marx writes:
***** In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou labour! was Jehovah's curse on Adam. And this is labour for Smith, a curse. 'Tranquility' appears as the adequate state, as identical with 'freedom' and 'happiness'. It seems quite far from Smith's mind that the individual, 'in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility', also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquility. Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity -- and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits -- hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. (Marx, _Grundrisse_) *****
I'm afraid, however, that, for Zizek (as well as for Andre Gorz, for instance), labor = external forced labor = Jehovah's curse on Adam. Self-realization in a free association -- in which we, not capital, posit aims of labor (as well as _how_ & _how little_ we labor) -- is an impossible utopia for Zizek, and any attempt to create such a free association a step toward a dystopia of Taylorized work.
Anyhow, Marx's object of desire cannot be "unconstrained expanding productivity," in that, unlike for Zizek, labor always appears in a dialactical relation with nature for Marx: "Labour is...a process in which both man and nature participate....By...acting on the external world and changing it, [man] at the same time changes his own nature" (_Capital_, Vol. 1). That is to say, we labor and in this process change the nature of ensembles of social relations, of which desire is a part. Marx's criticism of constraints on freedom is specific. For instance, under capitalism, we are compelled to produce for the sake of production (in other words, capital accumulates for the sake of accumulation), not to satisfy our concrete needs & desires. Freedom from the compulsive dynamic of M-C-M' is a rational & attainable goal, not a utopian yearning for freedom from all constraints on "productivity."
Yoshie