Steagal Act in 1999 so as to enable the formation of financial superpowers composed of commercial banking, investment banking, and stock brokerage) . Neoliberalism's supporters and adherents have to rely on political alliances and in so doing compromise some of the values and ideals they champion. At the same time, to retain its dominant position neoliberalism as an ideological formation has to ofer something to the people whose lives it shapes. It has to structure their expectations and desires so that it feels right, like the way things just are. It can't say directlJ "Hey, you guys go work really hard so that rich people can get even richer:
Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly as reworked by Slavoj Zizek, helps explain the way ideological formations link together a set of often conflicting and contradictory promises for enjoyment and explanations for its lack (for people's failure to enjoy despite al the promises that they would). Enjoyment (jouissance) is the Lacanian term for an overwhelming, even agonizing, afective intensity.2 It designates something we desire but can never fully get, and something we want to avoid but can never fuly shake. It's that "something extra" for the sake of which we do what might otherwise seem irrational, counterproductive, or even wrong. And it's that "something extra" we can't help but suspect accompanies even those actions that we hope are rational, productive, and right. Ideological formations, then, work as economies of enjoyment to forbid, permit, direct, and command enjoyment.3
The category ofenjoyment is an important a�dition to the theory of Ideology insofar as it accentuates the way an ideological formation is more than a set of meanings, images, and the accumulated efects ·of dispersed practices. Rather, ideology "takes hold" of the subject at the point of the nugget of enjoyment outside the meaning or significance the ideological formation provides. This excess enjoyment marks the incompleteness of a formation the limits of what it can explain, and the extra "kick" it promises. Fantasies organize these remainders, accounting for societies' failures, ruptures, and inconsistencies in ways that promise and produce enjoy;. ment. In so doing, they bind subjects to certain sets of relations, structuring and config their thinking and acting so as to attach them to seemingly inescapable patterns of domination, patterns they may well recognize as domination but keep following, nevertheless.
Chapter 1 takes up the fantastic investments in technology informing and attaching some leftists to democraCYJ the fantasies of abundance, participation, and wholeness. This chapter considers neoliberalism's underlying fantasy of free trade and the kinds of enjoyment this fantasy promises and provides. It highlights a specific problem neoliberalism creates for left politics, namely, the change in the subject positions available for political deployment. Whereas the Keynesian welfare state interpellated subj ects into specific symbolic identities ( such as the worker, the housewife, the student, or the citizen), neoliberalism relies on imaginary identities. Not only do the multiplicity and variability of such identities prevent them from serving as loci of political action but their inseparability from the injunctions of consumerism reinforces capitalism's grip.
50
TWO