The symbolic class is a wide category which encompasses those actually affected by the psychoanalytic symbolic system. By “affected,” I mean in the Lacanian sense that the degree to which symbolic debt is central to the class’ relations consists either of the disavowal of the affect, the post-interpretation of the hold over symbolic authority, and so on. In fact, Zizek I think is correct to bring in Hegelian “infinite judgement” to the case of the perception of the symbolic class because the mere sense that the symbolic class is forced to continue to inhabit the “old dimensions” opens up situations of infinite judgement, or in this case let’s refer to the syndrome as infinite prejudgement.
Ginsberg himself credits the success of the Naropa School on the Beat poet’s ability to shift a perspectival revolution. The question we must ask in the light of the symbolic class and infinite prejudgement is whether or not it is favorable to subsume oneself to a free flowing association with immediate sensory impression that adopts the “appearance as reality” view? To the post-Oedipal left, this is the biggest fault of the “symbolic class”, that when we allow our eyes to be the bearer of all truth; you are the cynic. Why does the appearance as reality view miss the point? The most apt reason I think is that when you allow sensory impressions to be the primary motor, you are ignoring the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The primary reason that the symbolic class is still considered “symbolic” as such is largely on the basis of their disavowal of the symbolic system as a force that actually shapes our lives. This denial of a structured unconscious, etc is identical to the way that traditional liberals engage otherness.
Remember Thoreau’s curious statement that seemed awfully un-Christian at the time, in Walden, “the greatest part of what my neighbors call good, I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is likely to be of my good behavior.” I argue that Thoreau is lashing out at a distinctly western, perhaps we can say distinctly American code of engaging our neighbors, i.e. of engaging the other. The way we want to characterize our differences is based on a fantasy that our neighbors do not smell bad, that they must not excrete, i.e. we simply want the decaffeinated other. Does this not strike at the heart of the biggest systematic flaw of the liberal-gradualist model; which is that through dependence on the minimum of fetishization and disavowal of difference(s) – any sharing of real difference is actually lost, and this predicament is the basis of our striving for coexistence.
The advocates of this kind of furious Thoreauian disavowal of the western model of passive engagement of otherness ask that we,
1. Remain aloof actors based on a shared cultural homogeneity within a group, and that expression both individually and collectively depends on a level of distance from other groups. William Vollman characterized this in the moral maxims of violence in Rising Up and Rising Down.
2. The philosophical justification for this view is put forth by Badiou and Zizek; the best mode of engaging others is through sharing a perverted story, or to engage them in some sort of obscene humor with the goal being to relate some sort of universality of the human experience.
3. My own version would be a variation on these, in that diversity is best served by local homogeneity and global heterogeneity. That global capitalism must learn as a system to respect diversity while local and “real” diversity situations must depend on a level of engagement across cultural lines that promote a maximization of difference. Yet, we must note that the liberal-gradualist school is really the champions of the minimal “decaffeinated other” view, which I would argue is wound un in infinite prejudgement. Nonetheless, when we deal with situations of historic tension and disrespect, difference does not mandate a certain model to erect, rather we need to support local leaders willing to reach across lines of difference and expose them however repressed and non human the interaction may end up.
If we talk about a symbolic class then what do we consider the non symbolic class? The new space and modes of class consciousness will come from this other class, which Zizek has called (in unabashed Hegelian terms) the Universal man. The Universal man fills the streets and packed tenements of the urban megalopolises of the major globalized cities, Mexico City, Katmandu, Beijing, etc. It is on these city streets, who's most potent spiritual expression is Pentecostal Christianity, (not a shock in terms of the Marxist commodity logic, that commodities begin to take on divine and magical powers) that this blighted class, devoid of a collective identity, represents the Universal man – unexposed to the professional symbolic class and system.
Both 1 and 2 above are heavily influenced by Marxist ethics and if we accept the post-Marxist canon of commodity logic then we are accepting a belief that places alienation from one another in the material and social system. Whether or not we all accept that Universal human rights is really the western powers unilateral ability to intervene on behalf of their own (internal) and reified defense of human rights, in other words, human rights is exported to the western powers to decide who is eligible for human rights protection. I am an advocate of working within the liberal-gradualist model and to transform its own inadequacies within. The “liberal-gradualist” model as Richard Rorty argues; has brought a modicum of “less-suffering” then history’s past, and I agree wither Habermas that the liberal-gradulaist project, must complete the enlightenment project. That is another post.
The deadlock of the post-Oedipal and post-symbolic order must be accepted but spaces need to be opened up to reassert, why? Because to many neoliberal academics, western civilization has achieved a sexual revolution, a civil rights; the west has reached it’s apogee of equality and the fact that a massive revolution has not occurred indicates a deadlock in the human spirit. The truth of this view is that it is a distinctly American theory of “post-politics” and it has grown to serve as the most popular justification of global-capitalism, of globalization.
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