Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls

Why organize through leisure?

When we talk about organization, marxists think of unions, councils, and parties, but how useful is organization through the workplace when we think about revolution? Let's imagine a person who arrives home tired from work. The last thing that person desires is to be in spaces that remind them of the exhaustion that their work causes them. When they rest, what happens is that they turn on the television or the internet and enjoy their leisure time.

Communists who fight to end the 6-1 work schedule (6 days of work and 1 day off) are right to consider that people need more leisure time, but they end up forgetting a crucial detail: capitalism breeds mistrust. For workers, it is very good to have more leisure time, but where is the assurance that this struggle will not be defeated by the State apparatus and that, instead of more leisure time, the state will take away the few leisure time workers have? Nothing ensures this, but we can fight this problem in another way.

Organization through leisure means placing leisure as the main factor for social change. Instead of fighting the 6-1 schedule to have more free time, the struggle should be to protect the free time we already have and ensure an improvement in this time frame called leisure. But it also raises the main question: Where to organize?

The mycelial organization is a set of free autonomous organizations that are spaces for people of all ages to get together. We can form groups for movies, TV series, anime, music, youtubers, etc. Entertainment groups bring together young people, adults, and seniors in their comfort zone: leisure. Gradually, study and activity groups become leisure groups, transforming study into an enjoyable activity. Finding these young people is very easy; just look at any social network and you'll see communities on any enjoyable subject, such as Naruto communities, for instance.

Capital has figured out this dynamic I'm talking about here: leisure is key. With right-wing groups adopting an anime aesthetic (using the straw hats from One Piece as their symbol) to get young people to fight against what they consider the State, but not against the root cause of the problem. The group called “liga nerdola” also takes advantage of this leisure to provoke feelings of hatred and discrimination against minorities. If they can use leisure to maintain the structures, why don’t we use leisure for revolution?

I am not saying that organizations outside of leisure should cease to exist, but rather that leisure should be the main force now, because it is what attracts more people to the revolution. The rest is secondary, but still important. The goal of a mycelial organization should be to transform study and collective activities into forms of leisure for its participants. The revolution is a celebration for the oppressed; a revolution is enjoyable for those who partake in it; it is not and cannot be exhausting.

By @Juliakrupskaya
Design by criticafairy

https://www.instagram.com/p/DP1qwAokZkG/

Everything is turned back to front. Public order is no longer maintained by hierarchy, repression and strict regulation, and therefore is no longer subverted by liberating acts of transgression (as when we laugh at a teacher behind his back). Instead, we have social relations among free and equal individuals, supplemented by ‘passionate attachment’ to an extreme form of submission, which functions as the ‘dirty secret’, the transgressive source of libidinal satisfaction. In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master/slave relationship becomes transgressive. This paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who prohibits enjoyment, but with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.

Slavoj Zizek, ‘You May!’ (1999)

The psychoanalytic response to the ‘risk-society’ theory of the reflexivisation of our lives is not to insist on a pre-reflexive substance, the unconscious, but to suggest that the theory neglects another mode of reflexivity. For psychoanalysis, the perversion of the human libidinal economy is what follows from the prohibition of some pleasurable activity: not a life led in strict obedience to the law and deprived of all pleasure but a life in which exercising the law provides a pleasure of its own, a life in which performance of the ritual destined to keep illicit temptation at bay becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction. The military life, for example, may be governed as much by an unwritten set of obscene rules and rituals (homoerotically-charged beatings and humiliations of younger comrades) as by official regulations. This sexualised violence does not undermine order in the barracks: it functions as its direct libidinal support. Regulatory power mechanisms and procedures become ‘reflexively’ eroticised: although repression first emerges as an attempt to regulate any desire considered ‘illicit’ by the predominant socio-symbolic order, it can only survive in the psychic economy if the desire for regulation is there – if the very activity of regulation becomes libidinally invested and turns into a source of libidinal satisfaction.

Slavoj Zizek, ‘You May!’ (1999)

Her [Butler's] starting point is that both Lacan and her own theory endorse the premise that the process of interpellation (symbolic identification) of the subject is incomplete; however, the precise status of this incompletion is different. For Butler, the part of subjectivity excluded or ignored by interpellation is historically variable and as such submitted to possible change (the ignored or excluded part can be re-integrated into subject’s symbolic identity). Lacan’s bar that divides the subject cannot but appear as an ahistorical/transcendental a priori indifferent to political struggles for hegemony[...]

[...] Butler’s project remains within the frame of liberalism: the bar is not inscribed into the very notion of subject, it signals incompleteness as a series of contingent exclusions that can be gradually undone, even if this means an endless process.

For Lacan, the bar is not the bar Butler talks about, the bar that separates the recognized part of the subject’s identity from its non-recognized (excluded) potentials. It is the bar that excludes subject from the entire domain of objectivity, of objective content, the bar that separates something (not from another something but) from nothing, the nothing/void which “is” subject. It doesn’t exclude something, it excludes nothing/void itself. The bar simply means that subject is not an object. In this sense, the bar is constitutive of subjectivity, it is Lacan’s name for what Freud called Ur-Verdraengung, the primordial repression, not the repression into-the-unconscious of any determinate content but the opening-up of the void which can be then filled in by repressed content. To put it succinctly, the (future) subject is interpellated, the interpellation fails, and subject is the outcome of this failure. Subject is the void of its own failure-to-be.

Zizek's critique of Butler in Sex and the Failed Absolute (2019)

Butler, Laclau & Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000)

Butler & Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)

Judith Butler: The call for that exercise of freedom that comes with citizenship is the exercise of that freedom in incipient form: it starts to take what it asks for. We have to understand the public exercise as enacting the freedom it posits, and positing what is not yet there.

There's a gap between the exercise and the freedom or the equality that is demanded—that is its object, that is its goal. It's not that everything is accomplished through language. No, it is not as if, “I can say I'm free and then my performative utterance makes me free.” No. But to make the demand on freedom is already to begin its exercise, and then to ask for its legitimation is also to announce the gap between its exercise and its realization, and to put both into public discourse in a way so that that gap is seen—so that that gap can mobilize.

Even when Bush says, “No, the national anthem can only be sung in English,” that means he's already aware that it's not being sung in English, and it's already out of his control. He's actually heard the petition and refused it.

And, of course, the question that's left is not whether the national anthem should be sung in Spanish. It should be sung in any language anybody wants to sing it in, if they want to sing it. And it should emphatically not be sung by anyone who has no inclination to sing it.

The question is: is it still an anthem to the nation, and can it actually help undo nationalism? I think that’s an open question for which I don’t have the answer.

Butler & Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)

Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak: I agree with Judith strongly that the matter of singing a national anthem does not carry within itself a performative promise of this new thinking of rights to come. What is important to remember, across more or less benign situations, is that the national anthem—incidentally unlike The Internationale (or We Shall Overcome)—is, in principle, untranslatable.

The national anthem of India was written in Bengali, which happens to be my mother tongue and one of the major languages of India. It has to be sung in Hindi without any change in the grammar or vocabulary. It has to be sung in Hindi because, as Bush insists, the national anthem must be sung in the national language. No translation there.

When the Indian national anthem is sung, some Bengalis sing loudly with a Bengali pronunciation and accent, which is distinctly different from the Hindi pronunciation and accent—but the anthem remains Hindi, although it is Bengali. The nation-state requires the national language.

The anthem mentions many places with different nationalities, different languages, and, sometimes, different alphabets—two different language families, some of them Indo-European, some Dravidian in structure, like the Finno-Ugric agglutinative languages. The anthem also mentions seven religions.

Remember, this is not the situation of postcolonial migrations as in Europe or post-Enlightenment immigration as in the United States. These are older formations. Yet, the language of the anthem cannot be negotiated. Arendt theorized statelessness but could not theorize the desire for citizenship.

Butler & Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)

Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak: In such a world, global feminism might seek to reinvent the state as an abstract structure, with a persistent effort to keep it clean of nationalisms and fascisms. Indeed, when you sing the national anthem in Spanish, it is to these abstract structures that you are laying claim.

As Judith insisted, the mode of this claim is performative and utopian. But what utopia does it claim? The point here is to oppose unregulated capitalism, not to find in an unexamined membership with the capitalist state the lineaments of utopia.

The reinvention of the state goes beyond the nation-state into critical regionalisms. These polyglot areas and these large states are of a different model. Hannah Arendt, speaking of them in the wake of the Second World War, could only think of them as a problem. We, in a different conjuncture, can at least think of solutions.

It may be possible to redo the fairly recent national boundaries and think about transnational jurisdictions. Conflict resolution without international peacekeeping asks for this precisely in order to fight what has happened under globalization.

We think of the decline of the national state as a displacement into the abstract structures of welfare, moving toward critical regionalism combating global capitalism. Hannah Arendt thinks of capitalism in terms of class rather than capital. We need a sense of the determining role of something which is neither national nor determined by the state. This is capital—and Arendt does not think about it.

Butler & Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)

David Chalmers, Can There Be a Mathematical Theory of Consciousness? | Natural Philosophy Symposium

https://youtu.be/ZsvePdaYw7M