Capital registers value for those who can imagine it concretely; the case is opposite for those who can see and render it abstract. Capital, abstractly, acts like polymorphous Kraken-like creature governing not only the present, but the past and the future. In its abstraction, is not the rise of awareness and concern for LGBTQ+ rights the product of capitalist abstraction staring concrete-capitalists right in the face(s)? The people for whom capitalism registers concretely, as a thing to possess much less understand than those for whom capitalism registers abstractly as an ideology, are much better off than their abstract-minded counterparts. The abstract dimension of capital is received secondarily by, as Althusser would put it, ideological state apparatuses. Capital is abstract par excellence. Capitalism creates voracious virtual necessity with real and quickly depleting resources.
Slavoj Zizek’s problem with the real: it’s not that the real is so far bent out of proportion as to lose its essence and redeemability through dedication, honor, intelligence etc. Zizek believes in a real much like Foucault believed in life. “La vie est ailleurs” – life (the real) is elsewhere in an ideologically-free and predetermined state, but to the more fatalistic and pessimistic (by default, the most realist) theorists circulating today, there is no outside to ideology. Zizek’s brilliance in recognizing the real as a formally “empty space” should not trigger us into falling into a positivist nihilism so prevalent on university campuses and for those between the ages of 20-35. We should recognize that we, as subjects, are indeed empty and can therefore assume and play with the forms dictated to us by capital in a relatively meaningful way. Nietzsche would be proud of our current predicament: he would see it as the ultimate Hegelian negation of all values where one is free to create our own. There is no unideological life; a life pre-ideology, but only those who orbit around the empty subject looking for meaning. At some point during this perpetual hyperbolic orbit, an event might seem so tangential to the regular structure of quotidian life as free from ideology. What Alain Badiou dubs as the Event, a spurious, momentary, and highly unconscious detachment from the fabric of capitalist ideology is the only break available to us from ideology. There are only lives capable of signifying a break from ideology in spurious moments.
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