{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","uuid":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/search"},"page":{"printed_page":61,"pdf_page":71,"physical_index":71,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c1f0e9eb0fc1d8fa2f3f180a8a3b83dd61c932fb0b9acf5e155e134f1a66da76"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"\"What does \"it al\" actually mean? How much is necessary and for what? The fantasy of a free market defers answering insofar as buying and seling, investing, and even bequeathing never stops. The market continues, ever expanding and intensifying, without end. The entrepreneur can't have it al because there is no limit. :His problem thus seems to be that he doesn't know this. He doesn't realize that capitalism necessarily generates a surplus and so he can't realize, make real in his own life, a limit to his desire.\n\nAccordingly, the free-marketeer, the phantasmic businessman, corporation, or investment banker, has to be careful and not be too absorbed, too captivated, by the delights of the free market. The sacrifice is too much when it involves the marketeer's friends, family, and soul. Charles Dickens's character Ebenezer Scrooge is perhaps the most familiar reminder of what happens to those who fail to enjoy precisely because of their excessive investment in the market. Inverting Dickens's story of a miser who turns moderation into excess, the film The Game ( 1997, directed by David Fincher) ofers a character for a neoliberal age, Nicholas Van Orten (played by Michael Douglas). More than a story of the cold investment banker, fabulously wealthy and successful yet nonetheless incapable of connecting with his wife, his brother, or a childhood trauma (he witnesses his father's suicide), the film treats Van Orten's financial and material success as profoundly boring and repetitive (in stark contrast to another Douglas character, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's film Wall Street [1987 ]j in the earlier film, Gekko's success, even his coldness-as in the famous line \"Greed is good\" -appear as the ultimate objects of desire). In The Game, other white men at the top, the real players, are shown expressing their sense of boredom and entrapment. Persisting in a stultifyng environment of pervasive enjoyment, they need desperately to install the gap necessary for desire. The solution is \"the game;' an unpredictable, high-risk game in which the players don't know the rules, the other players, the conditions, the limits, or even what determines a win or a loss. The game repeats in another space the brutality of the neoliberal market, returning to its players the possibility of desire that their successes had foreclosed.\n\nThe mistake involved in excessively sacrifcing for the sake of success is one of overidentifcation, of identifying too much with neoliberal ideology. As Zizek argues, '�n ideological. identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it:'34 The free-marketeer who sels himself, who sells out, who sells it al, overidentifies with neoliberal ideology, eliminating the place of the warm, interesting person that the system is supposed to serve, whose needs the system is supposed to meet. \"When he sacrifices everything to the system, the player, the investment banker or entrepreneur, acts as if such a sacrifice is necessary for success. He exposes the truth of the system-it really does demand all sorts of horrible, incalculable sacrifces; it really does brutally disregard real human needs and relationships. The overzealous executive thus fails to keep open the gap between the fantasy and the reality of the free market and thereby subverts the fantasy that we are al winers. The Game, incidentally, does not subvert this fantasy. In the end, Van Orten, having been, like Job, stripped of everything, confronts his trauma, becomes a full person, and reconciles with his family.\n\nFREE TRADE\n\n61","previous_page":null,"next_page":62}