Pure satisfaction with some good thing (ideal, utopia, virtue, etc.) is never as satisfying as an intense dissatisfaction with the supposed obstacles to that thing (others, neighbors, aliens, etc.). Thrashing the bad object is much more enjoyable (not just personally but also socially) than obtaining the good object. Negating the satisfaction is not only more satisfying than achieving and retaining the satisfaction, but also socially way cooler and more enviable. This is known as jouissance: pleasure in pain, pain in pleasure.

People do not make it to the “middle class” by objectively obtaining certain valuable commodities and positions; they rather strive to be perceived as “middle class” (typical, normal, acceptable, etc.) by learning to eshew certain unsavory “lower” urges, whatever they are [1], and participate in the official sacrifices of the common scapegoats. The usual scapegoats of the society are the marginalized, but personally blaming political leaders is also a kind of scapegoating [2].

The notion of typical or normal behavior expected from the “middle class” is quite relative and wildly varying. Whatever the currently “dominant norms” are [3], representatives of the capital will always cast & rate people for their “middle class” performance and cast rations accordingly. Since the imaginary model of this social castration is shaped by the actors and actresses that are cast & rated in the movies, it is not astonishing that the castration of the “middle class” would simulate (and further stimulate) the particular dissatisfactions that are being staged in the movies.

Castration is neither rational nor sheerly irrational but cast-rational. To be cast & rated is to be “thrown to the lions”: thrown (geworfen) to feed the superego. What truly feeds the superego and compels people into castration is their deep fear of privation. The way to bar privation is to carefully distinguish dissatisfaction (one’s explicit point of identification) from frustration (always attributed to the other). One never admits one’s frustration publicly, but displaying one’s dissatisfaction inadvertently generates a spectre of frustration, which in turn “needs” to be projected to the other. In fact, there is only a difference of sign between dissatisfaction and frustration, their difference is not essential but merely imaginary: Since those who are frustrated “evidently” don’t have the phallus, the performance of dissatisfaction is an imposture to “prove” that you have the phallus [4].

The more idealist and utopian (dissatisfied with “the world”) you are, the more scapegoats you will need to bully around (and project your spectral frustrations). The sadistic aggression of the dissatisfied idealist is just a veil to cover his/her true secret masochistic identification with the frustrated victim [5]. If the aggression is allowed to continue, it will inflict the aggressor’s masochism onto the victim. As a result, the victim will similarly adopt a sadistic (dissatisfied) cover in order to victimize (frustrated) others and continue to perpetuate the secret masochism that (s)he has inherited. This is the contagion of the superego virus.

A young male member of the Hearth of Ideals [6] recently put up a banner that says “Territory is honour” to protest the uncontrolled entrance of millions of Syrians and Afghans into Turkey. Since this banner was incongruous with the party line, his “nationalist” bosses responded by abducting him, threatening him, and forcing him to talk to the camera and verbally retract the authenticity of his political act. In the video the young member said (visibly against his will): “I apologize for the banner, I was tempted by an opposition party official X.” [7] So his castration by his boss amounted to being cast & rated for the gaze of the superego-in-power. To display his “good will”, he just needed to participate in the official performance of dissatisfaction and project his spectre of frustration onto one of the official scapegoats. This is what “Territory is honour” means today: Not rational, not national, just cast-rational.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Depending on the social circle, the “lower” urge could be homosexuality, heterosexuality, sexuality, asexuality…

[2] More about this: René Girard, The Scapegoat (1982).

[3] In truth, there are no longer any socially dominant norms, neither in the moral sense nor in the statistical sense. There is only the pseudo-social perpetuation of dissatisfactions.

[4] See “Frustration and Dissatisfaction, Privation and Castration”, “Internegation and Positnegation”, “Proof is masculine, evidence is feminine”

[5] See “An account is being blocked”

[6] Ülkü Ocakları, youth section of the Turkish nationalist party, the second party in the government.

[7] Incidentally, the opposition party in question is literally called the GOOD party: İYİ parti, ironically for us, unironically for themselves. The party in power is similarly called WHITE party: AK parti.