It seems the closest this country is going to get to a conversation about ethics and morality is in the finer points of the apparently bottomless “debate about political correctness”. The arguments on both sides of the “debate” have been subject to undue bastardization at the hands of some recently emergent “public intellectuals”. These characters, who fancy themselves thinkers at the vanguard of the so-called culture wars (and have made entire careers out of branding themselves as such) have chosen political correctness as the hill on which they shall die. Perhaps this is because it’s a catchy topic--it’s rather easy to have an opinion on the matter, likewise to feel justified in holding said opinion.
Before I develop anything resembling an argument for or against political correctness (which is not what I intend to do) it should be said that on both ends of the political spectrum I’ve found people for whom political correctness is either (1), an inarguable set of transcendental principles in accordance with which they lead their lives, principles so pure and fixed that they often can’t even define them as such (as is sometimes the case on the left) or, (as would be the case on the right), (2), an abstraction against which they passionately counter-define themselves; the thing they’ve chosen as their raison d’etre as political subjects; the “world-issue” contrary to which they espouse “alternative” approaches which rarely amount to much more than vaguely xenophobic fear-mongering, buttressed by a frantic re-hashing of the status-quo.
Many who fall into this second category espouse not-so-subtly anti-semitic conspiracy theories about the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, whom they believe unleashed a tide of “cultural Marxism” in the mid-20th century intellectual circles of America which has slowly been corroding this country’s core values (Breitbart, Peterson, et. al.). Neither of these camps have my sympathies, as both are prone to the kind of dogmatism and inanity that has brought us to the current rather pathetic state of the discourse.
My refusal to identify with either a right or left-wing approach to political correctness should in no way suggest that I wish to advance a “centrist” reading of this conversation, or that I intend to offer a “moderate” way out of the morass. What I want to do is the following: Outline and advance a post-Marxist critique of the ideological factors which have allowed for the emergence of the kinds of attitudes, aesthetics, and positionalities that we today lump under the buzzy umbrella of “political correctness”. I wish to present an aspect of the phenomeno-spectacle that is postmodern political correctness that I feel accounts for some of the more startling aspects of the trend, yet is tragically absent from all of the hubbub surrounding the matter.
I hold late-stage hyper-accelerated capitalism and the socio-existential and aesthetic conditions it thrives on to blame for what I’m writing about. I believe that the prevailing mode of subjectivity ushered in by the economic and cultural conditions characteristic of late capitalist postmodernity is perfectly primed to adopt the particular brand of desperation and dogmatism about which I am deeply concerned.
Many are those who have attempted to critique, or just understand, a rather recent resurgence of a peculiar brand of (neo)liberalism, one that has struck a chord with young people in particular. This confluence of political sensibilities, aesthetic dispositions, and ideological platforms is called political correctness or identity politics, two catchphrases which signify altogether different things but appear, at this point, to be interchangeable. More often, the people who embody this way of being-in-the-world are the subjects of criticism, as opposed to the ideology itself.
Over-sensitivity is the leading reproach leveled against these types. The aspect of their peculiar positionality that gets the most attention is their perceived vulnerability--they're called “snowflakes”, a nickname that gestures both toward their obsession with individuality and uniqueness, and their childlike fragility, their porcelain emotions which are subject to shatter (or,melt) at a moment’s notice. All of this fails to account for a simple fact: namely, that
sensitivity isn’t the thing that these people are operating under. Rather, their mindset is comprised of a constellation of a few factors, at the nexus of which we find the emotional drive behind their admittedly bizarre behavior.
(I) The first of these factors is intense boredom, boredom of a type that is entirely unique to the 21st century, a melding of hyper-saturation and emptiness that only brains which have gelled around the overwhelming pleasure and stimulation overload of the internet can manifest. The dopamine receptors of young people who were raised on the internet adjusted themselves to a constant stream of input, thus the absence of stimulation and the uneasiness of stillness is felt acutely. Though it may be difficult to prove empirically, I would argue that the type and the degree of boredom that results from this is historically unprecedented.
(II) The second factor follows naturally from the first: a kind of brutally abstract suffering, suffering which is by nature incapable of grounding itself in any objective reality schema and is thus considerably more difficult to bear. This itself is the result of a combination of the following:
A.
Existing under the sway of today’s predominate ideological injunction--the injunction to always, at all times, manifest your true, uninhibited self. Zizek refers to this as “pseudo-Buddhist hedonism”, and he takes it to be the defining quality of contemporary ideology. The idea is that we are pressured by various ideological mechanisms to always be expressing our true selves: authenticity is compulsive, all facades must be destroyed. Of course, this is an impossible goal. Not only is there no “true self” to speak of, but the idea that this kind of authentic, purely spontaneous self-expression must be enacted at all times, even at work or during brutally inhuman bureaucratic interactions, has a certain suffocating effect.
B.
An overwhelming sense of competitiveness in all spheres of life. Many have argued that the all-pervasive feeling of inter-subjective competitiveness was ushered in by neoliberal economic policies which eroded the public sphere and destroyed any and all sense of collective identity. It can certainly be asserted that these feelings of competitiveness are reinforced by the aforementioned ideological injunction, the idea being that what is at stake in all of our inter-subjective interactions is our true, core selves, and thus that any impingements on any aspect of our identities are threats to our very being. This naturally gives rise to a defensiveness and a feeling of competition that compromises the potential for intimacy, and makes even the most basic human relationships unnecessarily fraught.
C.
Finally, the sense of an inability to sink into any objective reality schema. The ability to feel real is contingent upon a certain degree of continuity and reliability in one’s own objective world. However, the breakneck rate of change at which the cultural-aesthetic landscape of late-stage capitalism operates makes the feeling of reality itself fragile, and renders any kind of objectivity so tenuous, that an overall feeling of unreality--in culture and in intersubjective relations--becomes pervasive. Some of the more naive liberals among us believe that one need only point out contradictions and antinomies in a given political campaign or cultural movement in order to undermine their legitimacy when the opposite is in fact true: the very strength of late stage consumer capitalism can be found in this ability to self-contradict, negate that which it once affirmed in the same breath and visa-versa, deterritorialize and reterritorialize endlessly. All of this is done seemingly at will, but not will of a human kind--the horrifying truth is that there is no one driving the ship. The inhuman agency of capital is self-propelling, and no human intervention can alter the course of its blind, striving will.
(III) The third and final factor is an inevitable consequence of the first two: namely, a deeply felt longing for some objective reality to which one can cling, a reality that is both consistent and morally and aesthetically justified. In other words, an overwhelming thirst for the real. Of course here I betray my Lacanian roots and use “real” as it is commonly used, not to signify the Real of Lacan’s Gordian knot, but rather to signify the experience of reality as such. It seems peculiar that human beings, for whom everyday life is typically experienced as cohesive enough to be considered sufficiently real, should be subject to such a deep longing for reality as such. However, these are peculiar times, wherein unprecedented events and innovations are everyday experiences. Donald W. Winnicott, a preeminent British psychoanalyst, stressed the fundamental importance of continuity of being for a human subject’s ability to feel real, and it precisely this which we today feel as lacking. Again it must be stressed here that discontinuity of cultural and subjective life is not the result of some failure of the culture or some shortcoming of the subject. Rather, it is constitutive of the cultural apparatus of capitalism, which (like psychosis) adheres to no logic but its own and thus thrives on discontinuity and fragmentation.
For Badiou, the defining feature of the 20th century was la passion du réel--the passion for the real. If the 19th century was a time for Utopian scientific projects and lofty revolutionary dreams, the 20th century had as its aim a brutally realist uncovering of the thing-in-itself, the reality behind appearances. Modernity carried with it the promise of unfettered access to the direct, unmediated experience of the real, as opposed to the spectacle of everyday social reality. This would be just as much an aesthetic endeavor as it would be a political enterprise. Instances of the former (passion for the real in the aesthetic dimension) can be found in the literary/art criticism of Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian formalists, as well as the philosophical contributions of Martin Heidegger.
As for the latter, political manifestations of the passion for the real often took on brutal forms, as movements driven by passion are wont to do. One can (and absolutely, unquestionably, should) observe and passionately denounce the abject brutality of such 20th century historical moments as Hitler’s and Eichmann’s orchestration of the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags and forced starvation of the Ukrainian population, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. However, one can not (and absolutely, unquestionably, should not) deny that they were adamantly real, all too real.
Badiou would argue that the same passions that drove Shklovsky’s desire to get at the thingness of the thing, the same cultural current that drove Heidegger to ask: what is a Thing? (and, further, that led to these inquires to being considered the most significant philosophical enterprises of their time) motivated Hitler, Stalin, Pot, etc...that is, as previously stated, a desire to access direct, unmediated experience of the real. Badiou writes that, amidst the emancipatory ideals in circulation during the 20th century, “Extreme violence [was] the corollary of extreme enthusiasm, because it is in effect a question of the transvaluation of all values...the passion for the real is devoid of morality. Morality’s status, as Nietzsche observed, is merely genealogical...morality is a residue of the old world.”
Badiou’s thesis was informed by Lacan’s notion of the Real--the third in a series of orders (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) which he (Lacan) famously presented (in his Gordean knot) as the governing forces of lived reality. Briefly, the Symbolic can be summarized as all phenomena which are organized via widely accepted categories of meaning--language being the most obvious, but also social mores, ideological constellations, and religious belief systems. The Imaginary is slightly more complex--all phantasmic structures (dreams, illusions, fantasies) are accounted for within the Imaginary.
The Imaginary mediates the Symbolic (which itself mediates, or, cuts up, the Real) by providing the ‘fictions’, the collective illusions, which allow the Symbolic to function. If the collective systems of meaning human subjects ascribe to were not mediated by some kind of shared illusion, they would be seen, as it were, too ‘up close’--they would appear too real, indeed stripped of all their meaning, and would not function.
This leaves the Real, the most elusive of the three orders. It would be far beyond the scope of this post to fully explain the Real in Lacanian terms. It is enough to say that for Lacan, the most important thing to remember about the Real is that any encounter with it will be inherently traumatic. This is because the Real is precisely the domain of that which cannot be symbolized. The human subject (and the body politic writ-large) organizes lived reality into a system of symbols, and does so rather effectively. Language itself is such a systematized order of symbols, one that allows us to organize reality and thus give meaning to lived phenomena. Yet, there will always be phenomena which evade such systematizing--which, by their very nature, cannot be incorporated into the logical schemata of consensus reality.
We now return to Badiou’s notion of the 20th century’s being defined by the passion for the real. Badiou admits that this passion is liable to generate an equally fervent passion for semblances. The emergence of this second-order passion--what we might call the ‘passion for the simulation’--can be read, in a properly Lacanian fashion, as a collective response to the traumatic encounters with the Real that the 20th century ushered in. Much like how the individual subject is liable to retreat into fantasy following a traumatic encounter with the real, we might say that the industrialized West, having been exposed to the horrors of the Real, the outermost brutal utilizations of our technologies and social systems, the grisly outcome of the full realization of our desire to access unmediated reality, followed a similar pattern of retreat into the virtual.
Drawing on Borges’ fable On Exactitude in Science, Baudrillard famously declared that, following the emergence of this passion for the simulation, “[...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.” Life in this desert is characterized by a certain desperation, a thirst for something that is felt as lacking. As one would seek out water in a desert, young people seek out objectivity and moral certainty in a fragmented, morally bankrupt society. The political implications and the aesthetic consequences of this are uncharted theoretical territory.
