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# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics
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Accordingly, in the United States, materialistic varieties of evangelical Christianity play a vital role in supplementing neoliberalism. A ful account of this supplementary work is more than I can provide here.30 I want to flag, though, the reliance of some U.S. churches, particularly the megachurches throughout the exurbs and edge cities, on market and public relations approaches to growth. The pastors and leaders of these churches recognize that many of their potential congregants are recent transplants who have followed jobs and housing into areas of new development. These transplants are likely to have few friends and limited support networks. Out among exurbia's sprawl of big box stores and fast food restau-; rants, people have relatively few opportunities to meet others. There are few, if any, public parks and nearly everyone drives wherever they need to go. "In such locales," Michelle Goldberg writes, "megachurches fil the spiritual and social void, providing atomized residents instant community. Besides worship services, they ofer dinners and parties, family counseling and sumer camp, even sports leagues, gyms, and weight-loss programs. There's a McDonald's inside the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston, and a Starbucks in the Covenant Celebration Church in Tacoma, Washington:'31 The churches respond to and reiterate the basic components of contemporary consumerism. They attempt both to fil gaps produced through neoliberal capitalism (the financial insecurities brought about by job loss and the social insecurities occasioned by the absence of community) and to respond by repurposing the lessons of advertising, marketing, and public relations. An element . of the reassurance provided by many megachurches and popular evangelists is the promise of material abundance in!egrated into the spiritual message. Dr. Sam Storms created En" joying God Ministries to help Christians experience the power of the Spirit. Revolution Church in Manitou Spring, Colorado, similarly aims to make it easier for people to enjoy God. 32 Each repeats the injunction to enjoy that is characteristic of communicative capitalism. 33
Another way neoliberal ideology's free market fantasy accounts for winners' failures to enjoy combines the division between material and spiritual values with the problem of excess. Consider the figure of the entrepreneur or executive who seems to have it al, but actually doesn't.
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"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.
Accordingly, 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.
The 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.
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Another version of the overidentifed, overinvested free-marketeer is the one who clearly delights in the game, in the risk, the hunt, the thrill of the market. A key motif in market-porn, that is, in memoirs of life in business, the fascinating-repulsive market predator exposes the obscene supplement of the free market fantasy, the violence or violation that underpins the system.35 His enjoyment depends on the other's losing. He only wins when others lose. According to business memoir conventionsj the predator ultimately has to lose in some domain-his business is takeri over or collapses, he loses his family, or he loses p.is sense of self. This loss is thus accompanied by lessons, lessons Iiow made available to everyone so we can avoid his mistakes and be ourselves winners in the free market.
I've been describing free trade as a fantasy that occludes and sustains the brutality of neoliberal capitalism. Free trade establishes possibilities through which we narrate our relation to enjoyment. Zizek argues that what m�es desire possible ir contemporary conditions is the "despotic figure which stands for the primary jouisseur;' the one who appropriates al enjoyment. 36 My reading of the fantasy of free trade suggests otherwise. This fantasy provides a more complex organization of enjoyment, one that promises that everyone wins, uses losses to reconfirm the necessity of strengthening the system so everyone wins, and perpetually displaces the thieves of enjoyment throughout the system as warnings, exceptions, and contingencies.
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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.
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Zizek' s notion of a decline in symbolic eficiency continues the theorization of this idea of a symbolic space permeated by enjoyment. He highlights our perpetual uncertainty, our sense that we never really know whether what we say registers with the other as what we mean as well as our sense that we are never quite sure what "everybody knows:' There is no ultimate guarantor of meaning, no recognized authority that stops our questioning or assuages our doubts. For example, if we receive distressing medical news, we can-and are encouraged to-seek a second, third, and fourth opinion. Many of us wil search for information on the Internet and explore alternative remedies. But we rarely find firm, reassuring answers, answers in which we are completely confident. There are myriad experts al ofering their own specific advice-how can we choose among them? To take another example, how can we know the truth about global warming? Some scientists, politicians, and journalists have caled it a hoax and a conspiracy to undermine capitalism.41 Other scientists, politicians, and journalists tell us that the first group constitutes . !1 minorityj there is clear evidence for global warming and a scientifc consensus that humans are causing it. Then we might worry aren't minorities sometimes· right? Hasn't mainstream scientifc opinion been dead wrong in the past? In the face of fundamental disagreement, how can one determine whom to believe-· especially if we are already skeptical about the media, which some remind us is o ed by corporations even as others emphasize its pervasive left bias? I return to these problems of credibilty and certainty in chapter 6. For now, I simply want to tag this fundamental uncertainty, this fact that we cannot count on something like reality; as the decline of symbolic eficiency.
The change in the status of reality, of the symbolic order of language and meaning, has been noted by others besides Zizek -most directl}Jj by the adminstration of George W Bush. In an oft-cited article from the New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind relates a discussion he had with a 'White House aide. The aide dismissed journalists as being part of the "reality-based community:' He continued, "That's not the way the world really works anymore . . . . We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality-judiciously, as you wil--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too:'42
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The decline of symbolic eficiency links to Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's account of the shift from disciplinary society to the society of control.43 As Hardt and Negri explain, disciplinary logics worked primarily within the institutions of civil society to produce subjects. These institutions-the nuclear family, union, school, neighborhood-are now in crisis. According to the 2000 census, for example, less than a quarter of Americans live in families comprised of a married couple and children.4 Union membership has likewise declined such that in 2006 only 12 percent of workers were unionized and public sector employees were five times more likely than private to belong to a union.45 Hardt's and Negri's point is that the old political subject, the citizen-subject of an autonomous political sphere, the disciplined subject of civil society, can no longer be said to exist.
The implications of this point are broad. For just as the disciplined subject of civil society can no longer be said to exist, so is there a fragmentation among the identities mobilized politically in and as civil society. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the categories of social inclusion and exclusion were politicized and mobilzed.46 Social movements organized along lines of race, sex, ethnicity, and sexuality .radically transformed everyday life as they sought to eliminate entrenched hierarchies. As a result of the critical. work of these movements, as well as the accompanying decline of the welfare state and empowering of neeliberalism, racial, sexual, and ethnic identities are less fixed, less stable, less available as determinate subject positions. The category "we" seems permanently to have been called into question and in its place are fluid, hybrid, and mobile imaginary identities (Hardt and Negri use the term singularities) .
Emerging in the context of the breakdown of determining social norms, the subjects inhabiting these identities are generally undisciplined, although subject to ever more controls. We might think here of changes in public schools away from practices of discipline and normalization and toward searching, surveilling, and policing. Contemporary subjects increasingly lack self-control, in part because they lack a strong sense of self that arises through discipline, and, as I detail below, look outside themselves for some authority to impose control. External control-through the direct or indirect use of force, through threats and fears, and through the mobilization and intensification of afects and desires-takes on more of the work previously done by internalized control.47 In psychoanalytic terms, we can say that symbolic identity is increasingly fragile, uncertain, and meaningless in the society of control. Imaginary identities sustained by the promise and provision of enjoyment replace symbolic identities. And the multiplicity and adaptability of these identities does not mean that subjects are somehow freer or more liberated than they were under the discipline of the welfare state. Rather, they come under diferent sets of controls, diferent organizations of enjoyment.
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Read together with Hardt and Negri, Zizek's notion of the decline of symbolic eficiency clarifies an efect of the shift from a keynesian to a neoliberal ideological formation. The latter does not provide symbolic identities, sites from which we can see ourselves. Rather, it ofers in their place new ways for me to imagine myself, an immense variety of lifestyles with which I can experiment. The variety of available identities and the mutability which characterizes contemporary subjects' relations to their identities, moreover, renders imaginary identity extremely vulnerable. The frames of reference that give it meaning and value\_ shift and morph. Others who might chalenge it can appear at any moment. Their successes, their achievements, their capacities to enjoy can al too easily cill mine into question--! could have had morej I could have been beten I could have really enjoyed.
We thus encounter under neoliberalism a situation wherein ":symbolic prohibitive norms are increasfugly replaced by imaginary ideals (of social success, �f bodily fitness . . . ) :'48 These imaginary ideals combine with ferocious superego figures who command subjects to enjoy (thereby efectively ensuring that we cannot) .49 So neoliberal ideology does not produce its subjects by interpellating them into symbolically anchored identities (structured according to conventions of gender, race, work, and national citizenship ) .50 Instead, it enjoins subjects to develop our creative potential and cultivate our individuality. Communicative capitalism's circuits of entertainment and consumption supply the ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning-! must be .fiti I must be stylishi I must realize my dreams. I must because I can-- everyone wins. If I don't, not only am J a loser but I am not a person at $a l l ;$ I am not part of everyone. Neoliberal subjects are expected $^ { \mathrm { t o , } }$ enjoined $^ { \mathrm { t o , } }$ have a good time, have it all, be happy, fit, and fulfilled.
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The end of the welfare state and decline of symbolic eficiency may appear to usher in a new era of freedom from rigid norms and expectations. But the fluidity and adaptability of imaginary identities is accompanied by a certain fragility and insecurity. Imaginary identities are incapable of establishing a firm place to stand, a position from which one can make sense of one's world. Moreover, their very mutability and normative indeterminacy ·configure imaginary identities as key loci for operations of control (rather than internalized discipline), particularly those operations afiliated with desire and fear as they promise and provide enjoyment. The flip side of the multiplicity of imaginary identities, then, is a reduction and congealing of identity into massive sites or strange attractors of afective investment.
S T RAN G E AT T RA C T O RS
The idea of the decline of symbolic eficiency enables us to read Passavant's "consumer/ criminal doublet" as a specific figuring of enjoyment, as a site of phantasmic investment specific to neoliberalism as an ideological formation. Whereas the Keynesian welfare state produced the symbolic identities of consumers, workers, citizens, and prisoners (among others), neoliberal governmentality relies on the convergence of imaginary identities around the strange attractors of the consumer and the criminal. The consumer figures the possibility of enjoyment promised by neoliberalism. Consumption provides the terrain within which my identity, my lifestyle, can be constructed, purchased, and made over. Yet consumption is more than a terrain-the consumer is commanded to enjoy, compelled by the impossible demand to do more, be more, have more, change more . . . not in step with the latest fashion but in advance of it not looking at what's new but at what's coming up next. 51 The consumer today is imagined as excessive, extreme, and unregulated. She is imagined, in other words, as a composite of the neoliberal market itself. Correspondingly, the criminal figures the ever present threat of loss, the losing that the fantasy of free trade disavows. Insofar as the criminal serves as the site of displaced anxiety over such loss and losing, he is the intolerable monster, the one who stands for the Real of violence and whose expulsion and eradication mobilize neoliberal governmentality.52 The obverse of the frenzied, out of control consumer, the monstrous criminal must be controlled completely, for life, or better, to death.
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In A Consumer's Republic, Lizbeth Cohen describes three waves of consumerism in the United States. Crucial to each wave is the symbolic role of the consumer, that is, of the consumer as a recognized identity in a democratic polity. In each time period, Cohen's consumers provide symbolic locations from which one might gaze at American society, positions from which citizens might see themselves and thus from which they might be efectively mobilzed. Among her examples are the loyal female citizens of World War II whose consumer choices were central to the domestic front; the African Americans demanding equal treatment in restaurants, stores, theaters, parks, pools, and busesj the grassroots participants in mass campaigns for safe products, fair labels, and equitable credit. These consumers serve as ego ideals, points of symbolic identification, gazes in front of �horn people might imagine themselves in their activities as consumers and thus view themselves and these activities as likeable, admirable. 53
Cohen's active consumer-citizens difer signifcantly from neoliberalism's consumers. "Whereas the activities and political engagements of consumers under Keynesianism centered on the consumption of necessitiesfood, transportation, housing-to day's consume:t;". is primarily a consumer of excess, armed with credit cards and perpetualy revising her identity: Juliet B. Schor construes the "new consumerism" in terms of a compulsion to purchase luxry goods so as to keep up with televised images of afluence. 54 Other commentators similarly describe consumerism in terris of relentless marketing, obsessive purchasing, and luxry fever. 55 Crucial to their acc unts is the image of the consumer as compelled to buy, as a manik with a credit card driven to create a lifestyle for herself. Still others address the efects of neoliberalism's intensifcation of consumerism. Ronalda Munck writes, "The whole consumer process-from conception to sale, through advertising, marketing and fashion building-has fragmented identities and made them mar� fluid as consumption is continuously revolutionized:' 56
Emerging from these descriptions is the consumer as a kind of strange attractor quite unlike the stable symbolic identities the welfare state endeavored to preserve and disciplinary society worked to provide. The excessive consumer is as dynamic, volatile, and free as the neoliberal market itself.
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Not al accounts of consumption begin from excess or luxury-Daniel Miller in particular has done important work on consumption as provisioning.57 Nonetheless, images of excessive consumers abound and in fact determined debate in the U.S. Congress over the (typicaly misnamed) Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. In an argument characteristic of those ofered in support of the legislation, Tim Kane, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, rejected "the liberal line that some fity percent of modern bankruptcies are driven by healthcare emergencies" and lauded the bill for "making it harder for people to abuse the system and feign povertY:' 58 For him, as well as for the majority of senators and representatives who approved the hill, overhauling bankruptcy law was "essential" to helping "bankrupt Americans break the bad habits of over consumption:' These voices, along with those of economists and sociologists considering consumerism strictly in terms of excess and luxury] have little to say about provisioning, or about the rising costs of healthcare, housing, education, and transportation, on the one hand, and the collapse of pension funds and increases in layofs and unemployment, on the other. How they conceptualize consumption, in other words, has less to do with actual practices than it does with the image of the insatiable consumer, the strange attractor orienting or structuring their analyses. Moreover, even as they criticize the consumption of "experiences;' that is, of travel, leisure, culture, and spirituality, they too . often neglect the fact of the broader commodification and marketization of ever more aspects of daily life such tpat people have little opportunity to do anything other than consume.
The image of the excessive consumer saturates popular media. Magazines, newspapers, and television shows employ a vocabulary of abundance. Women are said to pickup "armloads" of sweaters ar t-shirts-one in every color! Consumers scoop up or snatch up "must haves:' In the United States, the market for min storage facilties as well as for closet organizing systems is rapidly expanding as consumers run out of places to store their extra stuf. Mainstream media coverage of "Black Friday" -the Friday after Thanksgiving when shoppers eager to cash in on Christmas bargains send retailers into the black as they post their first profits of the year-features images of mobs and mayhem. A television news report from an AB c - afiliated station in the San Francisco area describes a common scene: "Stores created a shopping frenzy on the day after Thanksgiving that turned ugly and even violent. Here and across the country] shoppers fought over merchandise, and in one case, trampled others. The rush to get into a Michigan Wal-Mart store when the doors opened turned into a stampede. Shoppers fel and tripped over each other. A lady lost her wig and quickly put it back on as the melee continued. At the Best Buy store in San Carlos, early morning shoppers created a mob scene just to get bargain-priced laptops and other electronics."59 The British novelist Sophie Kinsella has written a popular series featuring an excessive conumer-Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Shopaholic and Sister, and Shopaholic Has a Baby. The novels' protagonist is Rebecca Bloomwood, a compulsive shopper who spends in order to save and who, in the initial book of the series, works as a financial journalist, dispensing the advice she doesn't follow. Her purchases always make a kind of immediate sense, thereby reformatting the ostensibly responsible chqices presupposed in descriptions of neoliberal markets as a kind of nonsense. Enjoined by the superego to shop, buy, and enjoy, she fails when she does and she fails when she doesn't. She fails when she does by overspendi:p.g, overconsuming, running up debt, and risking bankruptcy. She fails when she doesn't because by not shopping she will lose her already fragile identity; she will have no way to signify w.ho and that she is, where and how she belongs. The first book, Confessions of a Shopaholic, ends with Bloomwood-her credit cards maxed out-successfully avoiding bankruptcy in two quite predictable ways: she sels her belongings, thus confirming the importance of free trade, and marries a wealthy businessman.
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