Zizek, passing through Lacan, make the point that the contemporary push toward permissiveness actually becomes a new form of moral dictum: You must enjoy! You must have pleasure! Pleasure becomes a demand. It takes on the form and function of a superego—the new superego of modernity based on an incessant, demanding, banal, remorseless allegiance to the positive. You become worthless and unworthy if you do not submit to pleasure. You become subject to psychiatric treatment if you do not submit to pleasure. You become the exemplar of a moral lesson that decries repression if you do not submit to pleasure.
This seems an apt description of the 1970’s in America—that decade which follows the last original moment of liberation, the exhilarating 1960s, and seems by comparison forced or stiff and no longer original. Pleasure and liberation become a style rather than an original moment, and style in America is the elemental form of demand. You must be stylish! You must have style!
The 1970s are already, in the sense of Baudrillard, after the orgy. The ideology of liberation continues but it becomes hollow. Liberation suffers the inevitable reversal of a symbolic value pushed beyond its own shadow. And that reversal had already begun by the time of the Reagan administration. The 1980s begin a peculiar retrograde movement toward the values of hard work, wealth, patriotism, and the search for original moments found not in the new but in the past.
All this, of course, makes pleasure impossible. And ushers in a new age of anhedonia: pleasure without pleasure, pleasure that pursue the memory of pleasure, anhedonic nostalgia.
But perhaps in the present moment, it becomes important to think about the surrender of positivity, and the return to a brutal servility that resembles medievalism: then end of democracy, the end of liberation, and the assent of a new, singular, and unassailable power.
The strategy of this power is to remain nameless, to be as invisible as possible, to be internal rather than external and in so doing provide no object agains which to rebel. Foucault, of course, has already described this movement of power as implicit to modernity and to the development of the modern technocracy. But what is in evidence now is more virulent. It is a doubling down of this trope, under the auspices of a peculiarly hollow ideology called globalism. But the term is more of a veil than a name because it signifies what we may not know, what must remain hidden: a network that approaches the status of an artificial life form that accelerates beyond our capacity to know it and which integrates us as its wetware extension.
Power assumes the mantle of an integrated unyielding reality. This reality programs out multiplicity and pleasure in favor of singular modes of representation. It is the tentacled monster from outer space hiding behind the screen. If we see it for even a second, we are told it is only an hallucination. Capital becomes an expression of an absolute reality. Capital no longer within its set of possibilities the expression of critique. Yes we resemble the Borg, those villains of Star Trek. Reaganism’s search for an effective symbology led to retrograde movement. We are now in the same dilemma. What best expresses our situation can be found in pulp science fiction and comic books. Beyond these, we are progressively resourceless in envisioning the new servitude.
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