From Symbolic to Imaginary Identity
The fantasy of free trade is but one of the fantasies animating neoliberalism as an ideological formation. The previous chapter considers fantasies linked to communication technologies, and there are still others remaining to be analyzed.37 But important as the level of fantasy is for understanding how neoliberalism organizes enjoyment, the category of fantasy alone cannot explain the hold of neoliberalism. Thus, in this chapter, I've also mentioned neoliberalism's reliance on a religious supplement ( specificaly, some practices of evangelical Christianity) as well as its investment in its diferences from and opposition to competing ideologies. Neoliberalism has to employ a variety of means to secure its dominance, as its understanding of the role of the state explicitly acknowledges.
Analyzing the changed functioning of the state under neoliberalism, Paul A. Passavant develops a compelling account of neoliberal governmentality. 38 A crucial element of this mode of governmentality is the consumer I criminal doublet. In what follows, I link Passavant's consumer I criminal doublet to Zizek' s idea of the decline of symbolic eficiency in order to explain an additional aspect of neoliberalism as an ideological formation, namely:, how it produces the subjects it needs. Under neoliberalism, the disciplined worker and consumer-citizen of the social welfare state fragment into myriad, shifting, imaginary identities that converge around the strange attractors of the insatiable shopper ( shopaholic) and incorrigible criminal.
T H E D E C L I NE O F S YM B O LI C E F F I C I E N C Y
In his critique of risk society theory, Zizek.introduces the idea of the decline of symbolic eficiency. 39 He draws from the later work of Lacan to describe a change in the functioning of the symbolic order. During the middle years of his teaching, Lac an understood the symbolic order as the order of language and meaning. The symbolic is what counts as our everyday experience, our understanding of the role of names and ofices, our expectations regarding references. We might say that the symbolic here refers to what everybody lmows. In his later work, Lacan introduces diferent modes in the operation of the symbolic. Hence, his four discourses-those of the master, hysteric, university; and analyst-are different forms of the social link established through language. By Seminar X, rather than presuming a symbolic order held in place by a master signifier, Lacan theorizes a symbolic space held together by fragile and contingent knots of enjoyment (symptoms, quilting points) .40 In this later version, Lacan emphasizes the ways the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real are entangled in one another, rupturing, filg in, and covering over their own excesses and lacks.
FREE TRADE
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