🏛️🧠💫 Geistesfront 🏛️🧠💫

The transition from the proletariat to the precariat cannot be explained in terms of one social law getting invalidated and being replaced by another, since precarization is the process that decomposes the logic that social laws rely on. The element that is eroded and lost by precarization is everyone. But it’s not a particular everyone, it’s the function of being everyone, it’s the universal quantifier “∀” in mathematics [1].

The proletariat was able to be everyone because it was a multiple under the singular boss and it united against him. Both sides of this contradiction are masculine: The singular boss is masculine and the multiple workers uniting against him are masculine as well. This dialectic can recursively self-repeat and propagate to different fields like trade union, party, parliament, government, etc.

Organization relies on the rule-based multiple that says “everyone is subject to the law” but the obverse of this multiple is the ruleless one that says “there is one exempt”. This exempt person may be a friend, a foe or a transitive element. (S)he is sometimes the one who organizes and commits everyone, sometimes the one who alienates and confronts everyone, sometimes the one who surprises and motivates everyone. In any case, it is possible to “organize everyone” only by conserving this exceptional position of exemption.

The precarization strategy (1) neutralizes this singular exceptional position of exemption and (2) renders it impossible to form “everyone” relative to that position. The singular is the fulcrum of the multiple; so when the singular falls, the multiple loses its support; it is apparently liberated but it is truly adrift. Careful: This singular point can assume many different functions; whether it becomes the focus of love or hate or surprise, it is this point of relativity that establishes “everyone”. Remember Archimedes’ famous saying: “Give me a fulcrum and I shall move the world!”

When the fulcrum that holds “everyone” falls, “everyone” is abolished. This is a sexual transition:
1) Organization is masculine because the fulcrum of society is the phallus [2].
2) To lose one’s fulcrum is to be castrated.
3) The precariat is feminine because it is the castrated proletariat.
At this point, one must not neglect to mention the dissipative effect of feminism on society (especially its versions co-opted by neoliberalism). Neither can one deny the fact that masculine social organization consists of imposture.

To dissipate the society, it’s not required to actually destroy the fulcrums, it’s sufficient to render people indifferent/apathetic to the fulcrums. The feminine logic does not say “everyone is subject to the law”; instead, it says “nobody is exempt from the law”. But a law can be defined only by stepping out of it. If nobody can step out of a law, that law becomes unknowable, unfathomable, undecipherable, it remains an enigma; such a law is feminine, it is not-all (incomplete), it is where “everyone” is undefined.

The greatest trick of neoliberalism (or its upgraded form: neofeudalism) is to impress on the whole world (beginning with the demand for “sexual liberation”) that struggling with this feminine enigma of incompletion is “an enjoyable life-style”. Since the return paths are blocked, we now have to find a way to organize this incompletion. In the postmodern world where masculine fulcrums are inoperative, it is essential to find a way to establish a feminine fulcrum.

The masculine fulcrum, eager to render reality possible, disavows the impossibility and rushes forward with his courage of ignorance. But the feminine incompletion is able to sense the veritable impossibility and beware that the masculine fulcrum is posturing. If reality could be rendered possible without disavowing the veritable impossibility, a feminine fulcrum would be established. Or perhaps there is no such probability, for fantasizing about the “phallic mother” is the dictionary definition of denialism.

(Turkish)

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] See “Lacan’da Cinsiyetlenme Formülleri”

[2] “Shocking as it may sound to vulgar materialists and obscurantists in their unacknowledged solidarity: the phallus, the phallic element as the signifier of “castration,” is the fundamental category of dialectical materialism.” (Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies) See “Evrende Kızıllaşma ve Morlaşma: Marksizm ve Feminizm: Fallokristalden Başkası Değildir”