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CHAPTER THREE

The “Dream-Work” of Political Representation

In his analyses of the French Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath (in The Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in France), Marx “complicated” in a properly dialectical way the logic of social representation (political agents representing economic classes and forces), going much further than the usual conception of these “complications,” according to which political representation never directly mirrors social structure. (A single political agent can represent different social groups; a class can renounce its direct representation and leave to another class the task of securing the politico-juridical conditions of its rule, as the English capitalist class did by leaving the exercise of political power to the aristocracy, and so on.) Marx’s analyses point towards what, more than a century later, Lacan articulated as the “logic of the signifier.” There are four principal versions of Marx’s “complication”—let us begin with his analysis of the Party of Order, which took power when the 1848 revolutionary élan in France had dwindled. The secret of its existence was

the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists into one party, disclosed. The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions which alternately—the big landed proprietors under the restored monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy—had maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction, Orléans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class interest without giving up their mutual rivalry.¹

This, then, is the first complication: when we are dealing with two or more socio-economic groups, their common interest can only be represented in the guise of the negation of their shared premise—the common denominator of the two royalist factions is not royalism, but republicanism. And, in the same way today, the only political agent that consequently represents the collective interests of Capital as such, in its universality, above its particular factions, is “Third Way” Social Democracy (which is why Wall Street supports Obama), and, in contemporary China, it is the Communist Party. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx goes on to extend this logic to the whole of society, as is clear from his acerbic description of the “Society of December 10,” Napoleon III’s private army of thugs:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohême; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10 … This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpen proletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase.²

The logic of the Party of Order is here brought to its radical conclusion: the only common denominator of all classes is the excremental excess, the refuse/remainder of all classes. In other words, insofar as Napoleon III perceived himself as standing above class interests, for the reconciliation of all classes, his immediate class base can only be the excremental remainder of all classes, the rejected non-class of each class. So, in a properly Hegelian dialectical reversal, it is precisely the non-representable excess of society, the scum, the plebs, which is by definition left out in any organic system of social representation, which becomes the medium of universal representation. And it is this support in the “socially abject” that enables Napoleon to run around, constantly shifting his position, representing in turn each class against all others:

The people are to be given employment: initiation of public works. But the public works increase the people’s tax obligations: hence reduction of taxes by an attack on the rentiers, by conversion of the 5 percent bonds into 4½ percent. But the middle class must again receive a sweetening: hence a doubling of the wine tax for the people, who buy wine retail, and a halving of the wine tax for the middle class, which drinks it wholesale; dissolution of the actual workers’ associations, but promises of miraculous future associations. The peasants are to be helped: mortgage banks which hasten their indebtedness and accelerate the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to make money out of the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans; no capitalist wants to agree to this condition, which is not in the decree, and the mortgage bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.

Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another. Just as it was said of the Duke de Guise in the time of the Fronde that he was the most obliging man in France because he gave all his estates to his followers, with feudal obligations to him, so Bonaparte would like to be the most obliging man in France and turn all the property and all the labor of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal all of France in order to make a present of it to France.³

We encounter here the deadlock of the All: if all (classes) are to be represented, then the structure has to be like that of le jeu du furet (“ferret game”), in which players form a circle around one person and quickly pass the “ferret” behind their backs; the player in the center then has to guess who holds the ferret—if he guesses right, he changes places with the one who had the ferret. (In the English version, the players shout, “Button, button, who’s got the button?”) However, this is not all. In order for the system to function, that is, in order for Napoleon to stand above all classes and not to act as a direct representative of any class, it is not enough for him to locate the direct base of his regime in the refuse or remainder of all classes. He also has to act as the representative of one particular class, of that class which, precisely, is not constituted to act as a united agent demanding active representation. This class of people who cannot represent themselves and can thus only be represented is, of course, the class of small-holding peasants:

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse … They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.⁴

Only these features together form the paradoxical structure of populist-Bonapartist representation: standing above all classes; shifting between them; direct reliance on the abject remainder of all classes; plus the ultimate reference to the class of those who are unable to act as a collective agent demanding political representation.⁵ What these paradoxes point towards is the impossibility of pure representation (recall the stupidity of Rick Santorum who in early 2012 said that, in contrast to Occupy Wall Street, which claims to stand for the 99 percent, he represents the entire 100 percent). As Lacan would have put it, the class antagonism renders such a total representation materially impossible: class antagonism means that there is no neutral All of a society—every “All” secretly privileges a certain class.

Recall the axiom followed by the great majority of contemporary “specialists” and politicians: we are told again and again that we live in critical times of deficit and debt and will all have to share the burden and accept a lower standard of living—all, that is, with the exception of the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is an absolute taboo: if we do this, so we are told, the rich will lose any incentive to invest and thereby create new jobs, and we will all suffer the consequences. The only way out of these hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. And if the rich look to be in danger of losing some of their wealth, society must help them out. The predominant view of the financial crisis (that it was caused by excessive state borrowing and spending) is blatantly in conflict with the fact that, from Iceland to the US, the ultimate responsibility for it lies with the big private banks—in order to prevent their collapse, the state had to intervene with enormous sums of taxpayers’ money.

The standard way of disavowing an antagonism and presenting one’s own position as the representation of the All is to project the cause of the antagonism onto a foreign intruder who stands for the threat to society as such, for the anti-social element, for its excremental excess. This is why anti-Semitism is not just one among many ideologies; it is ideology as such, kat’exohen. It embodies the zero-level (or the pure form) of ideology, establishing its elementary coordinates: the social antagonism (“class struggle”) is mystified or displaced so that its cause can be projected onto the external intruder. Lacan’s formula “1 + 1 + a” is best exemplified by the class struggle: the two classes plus the excess of the “Jew,” the objet a, the supplement to the antagonistic couple. The function of this supplementary element is double. It involves a fetishistic disavowal of class antagonism, and yet, precisely as such, it stands for this antagonism, forever preventing “class peace.” In other words, were there only the two classes, 1 + 1, without the supplement, then we would not have “pure” class antagonism but, on the contrary, class peace: the two classes complementing each other in a harmonious Whole. The paradox is thus that the very element that blurs or displaces the “purity” of the class struggle also serves as its motivating force. Critics of Marxism who insist that there are never just two classes opposed in social life thus miss the point: it is precisely because there are never only two opposed classes that there is class struggle.

This brings us to the changes in the “Napoleon III dispositif” that occurred in the twentieth century. First, the specific role of the “Jew” (or its structural equivalent) as the foreign intruder who poses a threat to the social body was not yet fully developed, and one can easily show that foreign immigrants are today’s Jews, the main target of the new populism.

Second, today’s small farmers are the notorious middle class. The ambiguity of the middle class, this contradiction embodied (as Marx put it apropos Proudhon), is best exemplified by the way it relates to politics: On the one hand, the middle class is against politicization—it just wants to maintain its way of life, to be left to work and live in peace, which is why it tends to support authoritarian coups that promise to put an end to the crazy political mobilization of society, so that everybody can return to his or her rightful place. On the other hand, members of the middle class—now in the guise of a threatened patriotic hard-working moral majority—are the main instigators of grassroots right-wing populist movements, from Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to the Tea Party movement in the US.

Finally, as part of the global shift from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of the University, a new figure has emerged—that of the (technocratic, financial) expert who is allegedly able to rule (or rather, “administer”) in a neutral post-ideological way, without representing any specific interests.

But where in all this is the usual suspect identified by the orthodox Marxist analysis of fascism—the big capital (corporations like Krupp, etcetera) that “really stood behind Hitler”? (The orthodox Marxist doxa violently rejected the theory of middle-class support for Hitler.) Orthodox Marxism is correct here, but for the wrong reasons: big capital is the ultimate reference, the “absent cause,” but it exerts its causality precisely through a series of displacements—or, to quote Kojin Karatani’s precise homology with the Freudian logic of dreams: “What Marx emphasizes [in his Eighteenth Brumaire] is not the ‘dream-thoughts’—in other words, the actual relationships of class interest—but rather the ‘dream-work,’ in other words, the ways in which class unconsciousness is condensed and displaced.”⁶

Perhaps, however, we should invert Karatani’s formula: are not “dream-thoughts” rather the contents/interests represented in multiple ways through the mechanisms described by Marx (small farmers, lumpenproletariat, etcetera), and is not the “unconscious wish,” the Real of the “absent Cause” overdetermining this game of multiple representations, the interest of big Capital? The Real is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the Thing that eludes our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint: the Lacanian Real is not only distorted, but the very principle of the distortion of reality. This dispositif is strictly homologous to Freud’s interpretation of dreams: for Freud too, the unconscious desire in a dream is not simply its core, which never appears directly, distorted by its translation into the manifest dream-text, but is the very principle of this distortion. This is also how, for Deleuze, in a strict conceptual homology, the economic plays its role of determining the social structure “in the last instance”. Here the economic is never directly present as an actual causal agent, its presence is purely virtual, it is the social “pseudo-cause,” but, precisely as such, absolute, non-relational, the absent cause, something that is never “at its own place”: “that is why ‘the economic’ is never given properly speaking, but rather designates a differential virtuality to be interpreted, always covered over by its forms of actualization.”⁷ It is the absent X that circulates between the multiple series of the social field (economic, political, ideological, legal …), distributing them in their specific articulations. We should thus insist on the radical difference between the economic as this virtual X, the absolute point of reference of the social field, and the economic in its actuality, as one element (“sub-system”) of the actual social totality: when they encounter each other—or, to put it in Hegelese, when the virtual economic encounters itself in its “oppositional determination,” in the guise of its actual counterpart—this identity coincides with absolute (self-)contradiction.

As Lacan put it in his Seminar XI, “il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche”—there is no cause but a cause of something that stumbles/slips/falters⁸—a thesis whose clearly paradoxical character is explained when one takes into account the opposition between cause and causality. For Lacan, they are in no sense the same thing, since a “cause,” in the strict sense of the term, is precisely something that intervenes at those points where the network of causality (the chain of cause and effect) falters, when there is a break, a gap, in the causal chain. In this sense, a cause is for Lacan by definition a distant cause (an “absent cause,” as the jargon of the happy “structuralism” of the 1960s and 1970s used to have it)—it acts in the interstices of the direct causal network. What Lacan has in mind here specifically is the working of the unconscious. Imagine an ordinary slip of the tongue: at a chemistry conference, for example, someone gives a speech about, say, the exchange of fluids; all of a sudden, he stumbles and makes a slip, blurting out something about the passage of sperm in sexual intercourse—an “attractor” from what Freud called “an Other Scene” has intervened like a force of gravity, exerting its invisible influence from a distance, curving the space of the speech-flow, introducing a gap into it. And perhaps this is also how we should understand the infamous Marxist formula of “determination in the last instance”: the overdetermining instance of “economy” is also a distant cause, never direct, it intervenes in the gaps of direct social causality.

How, then, does the “determining role of economy” function, if it is not the ultimate referent of the social field? Imagine a political struggle fought out in the terms of popular musical culture, as was the case in some post-socialist Eastern European countries in which the tension between pseudo-folk and rock functioned as a displacement of the tension between the nationalist-conservative right and the liberal left. To put it in old-fashioned terms: a popular-cultural struggle “expressed” (provided the terms in which) a political struggle (was fought out). (As today in the US, with country music predominantly conservative and rock predominantly left-liberal.) Following Freud, it is not enough to say that the struggle taking place in popular music was here only a secondary expression, a symptom, an encoded translation, of the political struggle, which was what the whole thing “was really about.” Both struggles have a substance of their own: the cultural is not just a secondary phenomenon, a battlefield of shadows to be “deciphered” for its political connotations (which, as a rule, are obvious enough).

The “determining role of economy” thus does not mean that, in this case, what all the fuss “was really about” was the economic struggle, with the economic functioning as a hidden meta-Essence “expressing” itself at a distance twice removed in cultural struggle (the economy determines politics which in turn determines culture …). On the contrary, the economic inscribes itself in the course of the very translation or transposition of the political struggle into the popular-cultural struggle, a transposition that is never direct, but always displaced, asymmetrical. The “class” connotation, as it is encoded in cultural “ways of life,” can often invert the explicit political connotation. Recall how, in the famous presidential TV debate in 1959, generally held to be responsible for Nixon’s defeat, it was the progressive Kennedy who was perceived as an upper-class patrician, while the rightist Nixon appeared as his lower-class opponent. This, of course, does not mean that the second opposition simply belies the first, that the second stands for the “truth” obfuscated by the first—that is, that Kennedy who, in his public statements, presented himself as Nixon’s progressive, liberal opponent, signaled by his lifestyle that he was really an upper-class patrician. But it does mean that the displacement bears witness to the limitations of Kennedy’s progressivism, since it does point towards the contradictory nature of his ideologico-political position.⁹ And it is here that the determining instance of the “economy” operates: the economy is the absent cause that accounts for the displacement in representation, for the asymmetry (reversal, in this case) between the two series, the couple “progressive/conservative politics” and the couple “upper/middle class.”

“Politics” is thus a name for the distance of the economy from itself. Its space is opened up by the gap that separates the economy as the absent Cause from the economy in its “oppositional determination,” as one of the elements of the social totality: there is politics because the economy is “non-All,” because the economy is an “impotent,” impassive, pseudo-cause. The economic is thus here doubly inscribed in the precise sense that defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core “expressed” in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very structuring principle of these distortions.

In its long and twisted history, the Marxist social hermeneutic relied on two logics that, although often confounded under the ambiguous shared title of “economic class struggle,” are quite distinct from each other. On the one hand, there is the (in)famous “economic interpretation of history”: all struggles—artistic, ideological, political—are ultimately conditioned by the economic (“class”) struggle, wherein lies their secret meaning waiting to be deciphered. On the other hand, “everything is political”; in other words, the Marxist view of history is thoroughly politicized, there are no social, ideological, cultural, or other phenomena that are not “contaminated” by the essential political struggle, and this goes even for the economy: the illusion of “trade-unionism” is precisely that the workers’ struggle can be depoliticized, reduced to a purely economic negotiation for better working conditions, wages and so on. However, these two “contaminations”—the economic determines everything “in the last instance” and “everything is political”—do not obey the same logic. The economic without the ex-timate political core (“class struggle”) would be a positive social matrix of development, as it is in the (pseudo-)Marxist evolutionaryhistoricist notion of development. On the other hand, “pure” politics, “decontaminated” from the economic, is no less ideological: vulgar economism and ideologico-political idealism are two sides of the same coin. The structure is here that of an inward loop: “class struggle” is politics in the very heart of the economic. Or, to put it paradoxically: one can reduce all political, juridical, cultural content to an “economic base,” “deciphering” it as its “expression”—all, that is, except class struggle, which is politics in the economy itself.¹⁰ Class struggle is thus a unique mediating term that, while mooring politics in the economy (all politics is “ultimately” an expression of class struggle), simultaneously stands for the irreducible political moment at the very heart of the economic.

What lies at the root of these paradoxes is the constitutive excess of representation over the represented that seems to escape Marx. In other words, in spite of his many perspicuous analyses (like those in The Eighteenth Brumaire), Marx ultimately reduced the state to an epiphenomenon of the “economic base”; as such, the state is determined by the logic of representation: which class does the state represent? The paradox here is that it was this neglect of the proper weight of the state machinery that gave birth to the Stalinist state, to what one is quite justified in calling “state socialism.” Lenin, after the end of the civil war, which left Russia devastated and practically without a working class (most workers having been wiped out fighting the counter-revolution), was already bothered by the problem of state representation: what now was the “class base” of the Soviet state? Whom did it represent insofar as it clamed to be a working-class state, when the working class had been reduced to a tiny minority? What Lenin forgot to include in the series of possible candidates for this role was the state (apparatus) itself, a mighty machine of millions that held all the economico-political power. As in the joke quoted by Lacan—“I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest and myself”—the Soviet state represented three classes: poor farmers, workers, and itself. Or, to put it in István Mészáros’s terms, Lenin forgot to take into account the role of the state within the “economic base,” as its key factor. Far from preventing the growth of a tyrannical state free from any mechanism of social control, this neglect opened up the space for the state’s untrammeled power: only if we admit that the state represents not only social classes external to itself but also itself are we led to raise the question of who will contain the power of the state.

Thomas Frank has aptly described the paradox of populist conservatism in the US today, the basic premise of which is the gap between economic interests and “moral” questions.¹¹ In other words, the economic class opposition (poor farmers and blue-collar workers versus lawyers, bankers, large companies) is transposed or coded into the opposition between honest hard-working Christian Americans and the decadent liberals who drink lattes and drive foreign cars, advocate abortion and homosexuality, mock patriotic sacrifice and the simple provincial way of life, and so on. The enemy is thus perceived as the “liberal” who, through federal state intervention (from school-busing to prescribing that Darwinian evolution and perverse sexual practices be taught in class), wants to undermine the authentic American way of life. The populist conservatives’ central economic proposition is therefore to get rid of the strong state that taxes the hard-working population in order to finance its regulatory interventions—their minimal program is thus “fewer taxes, less regulation.”

From the standard perspective of the rational pursuit of selfinterest, the inconsistency of this ideological stance is obvious: the populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and deregulation means more freedom for the big companies that are driving the impoverished farmers out of business; less state intervention means less federal help for small farmers; and so on down the line. In the eyes of the American evangelical populists, the state stands for an alien power and, together with the UN, is an agent of the Antichrist. It is taking away the liberty of the Christian believer, relieving him of the moral responsibility of stewardship, and thus undermines the individualistic morality that makes each of us the architect of our own salvation. But how is this compatible with the unprecedented explosion of the state apparatuses under George W. Bush? No wonder large corporations are delighted at such evangelical attacks on the state, when the state tries to regulate media mergers, put restrictions on energy companies, strengthen air pollution regulations, protect wildlife and limit logging in the national parks, etcetera. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as an ideological justification for the unconstrained power of what the vast majority experience as an anonymous force that, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.

As to the ideological aspect of their struggle, it is glaringly obvious that the populists are fighting a war that simply cannot be won: if Republicans were to ban abortion, if they were to prohibit the teaching of evolution, if they were to impose censorship on Hollywood and mass culture, this would entail not only their immediate ideological defeat, but also a large-scale economic depression in the US. The outcome is thus a debilitating symbiosis: although the “ruling class” disagrees with the populist moral agenda, it tolerates the “moral war” as a means of keeping the lower classes in check, allowing them to articulate their fury without disturbing vested economic interests. What this means is that the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode—pace those who claim that we live in a post-class society.

This, however, makes the enigma only more impenetrable: how is this displacement possible? “Stupidity” and “ideological manipulation” are not the answer; for it is clearly inadequate to say the lower classes have been so brainwashed by ideology they are unable to identify their true interests. If nothing else, we should recall how, years ago, Kansas was a hotbed of progressive populism in the US—and people have certainly not become more stupid over the last few decades. Nor would a direct psychoanalytic explanation in the old Wilhelm Reich style (people’s libidinal investments compel them to act against their rational interests) be adequate: it confronts the libidinal economy and the economy proper too directly, failing to grasp their mediation. The solution proposed by Ernesto Laclau is also ultimately unsatisfying: there is no “natural” link between a given socio-economic position and the ideology attached to it, so that it is meaningless to speak of “deception” and “false consciousness,” as if there were a standard of “appropriate” ideological awareness inscribed into the “objective” socio-economic situation itself; every ideological edifice is the outcome of a hegemonic struggle to establish or impose a chain of equivalences, a struggle whose outcome is thoroughly contingent, not guaranteed by any external reference such as the “objective socio-economic position.” In such a general answer, the enigma simply disappears.

The first thing to note here is that it takes two to fight a culture war: culture is also the dominant ideological topic of the “enlightened” liberals whose politics is focused on the fight against sexism, racism, and fundamentalism, and for multicultural tolerance. The key question is thus: why has “culture” emerged as our central life-world category? With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe,” we simply follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of our respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition,” etcetera). “I don’t really believe in it, it’s just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed or displaced belief characteristic of our times. Perhaps, then, the “non-fundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned or impersonal beliefs—“culture” as the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.”

The second thing to note is how, while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode their culture war with an opposed class message. More often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and women’s rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes.” One way to unravel this confusion is to focus on the mediating terms whose function is to obfuscate the true lines of division. The way the term “modernization” has been used in the recent ideological offensive is exemplary here: first, an abstract opposition is constructed between “modernizers” (those who endorse global capitalism in all its aspects, from the economic to the cultural) and “traditionalists” (those who resist globalization). Into this category of those-who-resist is then thrown everyone from traditional conservatives and populists to the “Old Left” (those who continue to advocate the welfare state, trade unions, and so on). This categorization obviously does capture an aspect of social reality. Recall the coalition between the Church and trade unions in Germany in early 2003, which prevented the legalization of Sunday opening for shops. However, it is not enough to say that this “cultural difference” traverses the entire social field, cutting across different strata and classes; it is also inadequate to say that it can be combined in different ways with other oppositions (so that we get conservative “traditional values” resisting global capitalist “modernization,” or moral conservatives who fully endorse capitalist globalization). In short, it is useless to claim that this “cultural difference” is one in a series of antagonisms operative in contemporary social processes.