One should not be surprised, therefore that scholarly discussions of inequality and economic exploitation in the twenty-first century can proceed without any mention of the socialist canon, while the postmodern emphasis on raced, sexed and gendered alterity preponderates - a conversation dominated, it must be said, by bourgeois protagonists.
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For Jameson, that is, the rationalisation of bourgeois society shattered the social collectivity, giving rise to a nuclear family that would come to occupy the boundary between the public and the private spheres. It is not by accident, therefore, that the entire collection of psychoanalytic dramas - childhood trauma, primal scene fantasies, the Oedipus complex - relied on the historically located institution of the bourgeois family. Indeed, psychoanalysis is completely dependent on the capitalist mode of production for its supply of patients: energies that were distributed over the entire social body came to be invested exclusively in the family, with calamitous outcomes. As cultural critic Michael Venture notes, “In a world where most people do work that is not only unsatisfying but also, with its pressures, deeply unsettling; and in a world where there’s nothing more rare than a place that feels like a community, we load all our needs onto a relationship or expect them to be met by a family. And then we wonder why our relationships and family crack under the load.
There is a great deal more to be said about Jameson’s reading of psychoanalysis, but for our purposes, the basic point is this: alienation encompasses the wholesale “fragmentation of the world as well as our perceptions of it”.
One can see the same happening in national politics as quasi-facist movements swim ever closer to the political mainstream. With the degree of cooperation between the two spheres increasing all the time - and with social inequality showing few signs of abating - it is only a matter of time before impotent rage - ressentiment - gets channelled into the creation of anti-democratic political movements.
I have maintained over the course of this book that various forms of inequality reverberate in the subterraneous life of South Africans, and that the major fallout has been the corruption of our relational needs. But is there empirical evidence of such a link between our external and internal worlds?
Middle-class students in South Africa, that is, are becoming increasingly adept at identifying what we now call epistemological - or symbolic - violence, while appearing oblivious to the problem of real, concrete violence. We cannot blame them, of course, because the burden of responsibility rests with us as their bourgeois teacher.