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THE REVOLT AGAINST REVOLT The turn to a society of enjoyment is a mixed bag in terms of political activity . On the one hand, subjects in this society are much less willing to accept the pronouncements of authority figures on face value, and questioning becomes a fundamental fact of life. However, this questioning does not often manifest itself in political activity. One of the most counterintuitive features of the society of enjoyment is its paucity of radical political activity. The turn away from prohibition would seem to open the possibility for political engagement that prohibition had stifled. However, when we look closer at the political effects of prohibition, it becomes apparent that the sacrifice of enjoyment that it demands has the inadvertent side effect of politicization. That is, a society structured around prohibition produces dissatisfied subjects , even if these subjects agree to accept this dissatisfaction as the price for social living. Despite the fact that it most often remains politically unrealized , this dissatisfaction has an inherent radicality to it; dissatisfaction carries the seeds of political dissent and of a desire to change the structure of the social order. Most subjects, of course, do not act on this desire, and many never become conscious of it. In these cases, the prohibition of enjoyment works effectively. Nonetheless, the society of prohibition, in its fundamental structure (of enforced dissatisfaction), creates the inherent possibility of— and an incentive to—political action. If subjects remain apathetic in this society , they at least have political engagement as a tangible possibility that they 137 Chapter Seven The Politics of Apathy have avoided. In short, the dissatisfaction resulting from prohibition creates an incipiently political subject. The emergence of the society of enjoyment marks a clear contrast. In this society, subjects become increasingly incapable of experiencing dissatisfaction as constitutive for social existence. Clearly, we continue to experience dissatisfaction today, but we tend to see this dissatisfaction as the result of a mistake , something that might be remedied, rather than as that which constitutes us as subjects. What is absent, then, is a more general sense of dissatisfaction. This is significant because dissatisfaction is the engine behind desire for something else, something more than the existing social order has to offer. Desire, in other words, energizes radical political activity, insofar as it cannot find satisfaction in the status quo. Traditionally, desire is what we receive in exchange for our sacrifice of jouissance on entering the symbolic order. Though we don’t have the Thing (the source of our enjoyment), at least we’re not satisfied with the sacrifice of it. As the product of this sacrifice, desire is essentially hysterical, continually questioning the symbolic order, questioning why things are the way symbolic authority says they are. Because it consists of a constant questioning of the master and of mastery, desire has an incipient radicality. It is the threat of revolutionary change, a threat lying dormant within society. This radicality disappears, however, when the dissatisfaction of desire becomes the self-satisfaction of imaginary enjoyment—the mode of subjectivity in the society of enjoyment. Immersed in imaginary enjoyment, subjects become satisfied with their situation and with the social order at large, regardless of the degree to which they discover any enjoyment in the Real—an enjoyment that would represent a challenge to the status quo.1 Throughout his career as a social critic, the primary target of Christopher Lasch’s critique has been the social costs of imaginary enjoyment. In The Culture of Narcissism, his most well-known work, Lasch points out the contemporary predominance of the imaginary order and its effect on social relations. His final book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, moves in a new direction, examining the widespread apathy that works hand-in-hand with this turn to the imaginary. In this work, Lasch is not concerned with the disappearance of radical political activity per se but with the disappearance of political engagement among the privileged classes. Though the elites have never been the bastions of radicality, their retreat from politics, as Lasch accounts for it, echoes the same retreat among lower- and middle-class subjects whose political activity would potentially be of a more radical stripe. Both the elites and the rest of society become apathetic for similar reasons, and Lasch’s book chronicles the triumph of this apathy over politics, a triumph symptomatic of the transformation from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. In a society of enjoyment, no...

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