The Subject Supposed to Care
Jodi Dean explores the creation of meaning in our increasingly neo-feudal times.
‘Nobody cares’ is a common refrain, repeated in headlines, articles, and social media, about a wide array of issues that many people seem actually to care quite a lot about. Nobody cares about the carers, about Haiti, about new COVID variants, about climate change. Nobody cares about political corruption, unraveling social institutions, scholasticide, gun violence, declining life expectancy, increasing suicide rates, rising anti-Semitism, fires in Canada, floods in Greece, record-breaking temperatures in Pakistan. An article on why the Middle East doesn’t fully support Ukraine quoted a young Syrian man at a café in Berlin: ‘Assad is still in power, the Russians still support him—and nobody cares.’ A billionaire partial owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team said, ‘Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay. You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you really care, the rest of us don’t care . . . I’m just telling you a hard, ugly truth. Of all the things I care about, yes, it’s below my line.’
On October 3, 2023, an opinion piece arguing that the best the Palestinians can hope for is ‘a reservation-type arrangement that the US gave Indians and the British gave the Aborigines’ ran in the Jewish Press. The title: ‘The Palestinians: A People about Whom Nobody Cares.’ Seven months later, the New York Times quoted Ra’fat Abu Tueima, one of 600,000 Palestinians pushed out of Rafah—which had previously been declared a safe zone—by Israeli tanks and air strikes. Because of Israel’s US-backed onslaught on Gaza, he and his family of nine children had been forced to move six times. Abu Tueima said: ‘No one even cares about all those women and children here.’
Since the issues and events about which no one allegedly cares are actually matters about which some people care quite deeply, why is the sentiment that ‘nobody cares’ ubiquitous? My argument is that ‘nobody cares’ points to the decline of symbolic efficiency, the absence of a symbolic space of registration that functions as the background knowledge that one can assume that others accept. There’s no big Other who cares or who sees us caring. Little others may care, but that’s not enough to assuage the feeling that, when it comes right down to it, we are on our own, especially with respect to the fundamental conditions of our lives. Everything feels chaotic. We’re awash in vibes without agency, submerged in catastrophic forces beyond our control. The subject of neofeudalism is missing because there’s no big Other who can see it.
The neofeudal social manor is populated by fragile, competitive others struggling within a broader landscape of anxiety, fragmentation, shamelessness, and hierarchic dependence. Its affective infrastructure is built on what Lacanian psychoanalysis describes as the imaginary plane, a register of identification, aggression, and rivalry. Exploring this infrastructure involves tracking the effects of declining symbolic efficiency in a setting where capitalism is increasingly no longer recognizably capitalist, but something worse. Rather than reliant on a subject in the sense of modernity’s disciplined citizen or psychoanalysis’s neurotic (which are the same), neofeudalism absorbs us in a psychotic atmosphere of unrelenting demands and overwhelming enjoyment in a setting lacking symbolic bearings.
Lacan distinguishes between the normal and the psychotic subject. The normal subject goes about their business in an uncertain world, not questioning everything too closely, accepting a kind of ‘good enough’ consensus about the way the world works. Unable to access the commonly accepted symbolic order, the psychotic creates a delusion, becoming fixated on what Lacan calls a ‘captivating image.’ We might think of the ways issues circulate as images indexing a psychotic atmosphere. Unending streams of photos of murdered children, snipers on top of university buildings, demolished cities, and so on can make us feel crazy. Why is this happening? Why doesn’t anybody do anything? Images cover over the holes in meaning, the absence of a signifying structure in which common sense can be made. The psychotic adapts by fastening on the image, using it to get their bearings, within a dialectic of imaginary identification. Does the image mirror the ego back to itself or does it reflect an aggressor? Does one see oneself or one’s rival? The captivating image doesn’t offer a position from which to see oneself as a subject. Remaining at the level of the imaginary, it’s an object within a relation characterized by identification, aggression, and rivalry. There’s no third, symbolic, space or terrain of meaning.
‘Psychosis’ indexes the ways that people living in neofeudalizing times try to become subjects by creating meaning in the context of a war around meaning. Words mean different things to different people; everyone has their own definition. If one can identify with something, it matters. If one can’t, then that something will likely be feared or hated. We feel threatened or aggressed by everything around us, fighting for survival in systems beyond our control. In his classic study of feudalism, Marc Bloch tells us that ‘behind all social life there was a background of the primitive, of submission to uncontrollable forces of unrelievable physical contrasts.’ This background is neofeudalism’s foreground: networked personalized media, extreme inequality, and climate change in a setting where nothing makes sense, where cruelty and violence run rampant while images, words, language, and grammar are weapons and terrain of battle.
In his illuminating exploration of ordinary psychosis, Darian Leader sets out the three types of psychosis recognized by the Lacanian field: paranoia, schizophrenia, and melancholia. Paranoia is characterized by a sense of persecution. For the paranoiac, ‘It’s always someone else’s fault . . . The paranoiac is in the position of a complainant, pointing to the fault in the other.’ As Leader makes clear, contemporary society is a habitat conducive to the flourishing of paranoia: not only are we enjoined to think of ourselves as victims, but we receive validation for detailing the trauma and injustice that we suffer. The paranoiac may strive to be an agent of change, opposing cruelty and corruption. Often paranoia manifests in an attachment to certainty, whether one found in the truths of ancient texts or in detailed and comprehensive knowledge of oppression. Again, the affective infrastructure of neofeudalizing society supports these attributes as it encourages everyone to do what they can to save the world and enjoins us to find out for ourselves the real truth behind the lies—even as there is no space where divergent truths are reconciled. To be sure, in a brutal, violent world there are real victims and there are good and true fighters against oppression. What we lack is agreement on who they are, perpetually suspicious of the Real of power and enjoyment. Who are the monsters and who are the heroes?
With schizophrenia, the other is not an external oppressor. The other is inside; the subject isn’t separate from the other. My thoughts may be the thoughts of someone else. The schizophrenic isn’t sure. Any message could mean anything, come from anywhere. The schizophrenic may not recognize their own body, wondering if it is someone else or experiencing it as a surface to which they have no real attachment. Finally, the third type of psychosis, melancholia, involves self-blame: anything that’s wrong is my fault. The melancholic repeats an endless litany of self-loathing, how useless and awful they are. Doom-scrolling confirms it.
The right is generally more likely to fall into paranoia and the left into melancholic self-hatred, but the terms right and left are unstable, most useful for those who want to say what they are not. Those who feel buffeted between the two—or by the relentless and ongoing effects of economic immiseration, climate catastrophe, and genocide in a setting where nobody cares—might fall into a sort of everyday schizophrenia, alienated from and punished by their own bodies, unable to shake tormenting and intrusive thoughts. Again, my claim is not that people are these sorts of subjects. It’s that the affective atmosphere of neofeudalism is psychotic and these three types of psychosis—paranoia, schizophrenia, and melancholia—provide the patterns for imagining oneself and one’s experience that the social manor encourages. Most people and political orientations resist easy categorization. As we’re incessantly reminded, everyone is different, and nothing compares to anything.
An excerpt from Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle by Jodi Dean.
