[D66] "symbolic efficiency"

[Jugg]

http://marginal-utility.blogspot.nl/2012/09/symbolic-efficiency-liquid-modernity.html

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Jodi Dean's use of "symbolic efficiency" (borrowed from Žižek, who 
adapted it from Lacan) offers one way of theorizing this condition. For 
Dean and Žižek, the loss of symbolic efficiency means we have a hard 
time believing in the sort of expert systems and ideological constructs 
we are supposed to believe in to fix our identity within socially 
sanctioned limits. The problem of course is that society now sanctions 
chiefly limitlessness for personal identity; family, religion, etc. are 
mostly outmoded by the technologically enhanced pursuit of experience 
that we can record and recirculate to enrich the media circuits of 
"communicative capitalism."

Dean writes in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, "we never 
really know whether what we say registers with the other as what we mean 
as well as our sense that we are never quite sure what 'everybody 
knows:' There is no ultimate guarantor of meaning, no recognized 
authority that stops our questioning or assuages our doubts." No big 
Other to believe in or to do the believing for us.

In the absence of guarantees that the rightness or wrongness of our life 
choices is stable — a loss of faith in the language in circulation to 
talk about such things as duty, honor, virtue, etc. — we fall into the 
trap of pursuing quantity of experience instead. The given identity from 
society tends to be that of an insatiable consumer, the residual 
identity left after other identity groups are destabilized. "As a result 
of the critical work of these [social] movements, as well as the 
accompanying decline of the welfare state and empowering of 
neoliberalism, racial, sexual, and ethnic identities are less fixed, 
less stable, less available as determinate subject positions." The 
result, Dean argues, is a shift from a "Keynesian to a neoliberal 
ideological formation" in which identity is open-ended, not fixed by ISAs.


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