Original Article

Hating government and voting againstone’s interests: Self-Transgression,enjoyment, critique

Jason GlynosDepartment of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester,CO4 3SQ, UK.E-mail: ljglyn@essex.ac.uk

Abstract The psychoanalytic contribution to our understanding of hating govern-ment and voting against our own interests can be appreciated by invoking the cate-gories of fantasy and enjoyment. Essential to the psychoanalytic enterprise is the ideathat there is no necessary relation between a subject’s investment in a fantasmaticnarrative and how faithfully this narrative reflects a consensus reality. As a prominentnarrative element in political discourse, ‘big government’ can thus play for the subjecttwo analytically distinct roles: an ideological role (linked to our fantasmatic investmentin the world) and an epistemological role (linked to our understanding of the world).I argue that an appeal to fantasy not only helps us better grasp this difference in roles,but also enables us to appreciate its social and political implications.Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2014) 19, 179–189. doi:10.1057/pcs.2014.2;published online 6 March 2014

Keywords: self-transgression; enjoyment; fantasy; ideology; orthogonality; critique

Hatred of government and the political classes may certainly lead to calls forpared-down political institutions and a smaller state. It may also help securecitizen support for private, for-profit market-based solutions to pressing socialand economic problems. However, many academics and political commenta-tors, especially in the US, claim that this can generate a paradox: such hatredoften points in a policy direction contrary to the interests of many citizensvoting for such measures (see, for example, Frank, 2004, 2012; Lakoff, 2008).

Self-Transgression

The paradox of voting against one’s own interests resonates with whatMichael Rosen, following the sixteenth-century French political philosopher

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Etienne de la Boetie, calls ‘voluntary servitude’: ‘a puzzling but frequentlyobserved feature of political life… [whereby] those who are maltreated –

oppressed, exploited, even enslaved – do not always reject that treatment.’(Rosen, 2000, p. 393) Voluntary servitude can be understood in terms of themore general ‘problem of self-transgression’, which aims to capture an intuitionabout those kinds of situations where an individual or group appear both toaffirm an interest or ideal, such as freedom and autonomy, and simultaneously tosubvert it (Glynos, 2003, 2008).There are a number of different ways we can account for, or resolve, the

problem of self-transgression. We might offer an account that casts the agent as ahypocrite, or as someone suffering from weakness of will: I may vote for amandate to cut taxes while espousing the ideal of the common good because I ama hypocrite or because I am not strong-willed enough to resist succumbing toselfish motivations (for example, my desire to maximize disposable income). Orwe might cast the problem of self-transgression in terms of coercion: I am forcedto transgress my affirmed ideal directly through physical force, or through threatsof a physical, financial, or other sort. A role-conflict hypothesis would suggestthat one reason subjects transgress their ideal is because a competing idealrequires a course of action which, from the perspective of the first ideal,constitutes a transgression: my professional career might be compromised bytaking parental leave, or my social life might conflict with my work ethic. From arational-choice perspective, the problem of self-transgression is transformed intoa collective action problem: we transgress our publicly affirmed ideals, many ofour eco-friendly ideals for example, because there is no practical way ofovercoming the co-ordination problems associated with the free-rider effect.Then there is the popular false-consciousness hypothesis, to which I will returnlater. This suggests that subjects subvert their ideals unbeknownst to themselvesbecause they are ignorant of what ‘in fact’ advances their interests, or becausethey are mistaken in their interpretation of their ideals and ‘real’ interests.

Enjoyment

How then might we approach the problem of self-transgression from a psycho-analytic perspective? One way is to be found in the enjoyment one derives fromthis transgression, that is, unconscious pleasure –what the psychoanalyst JacquesLacan called jouissance (Lacan, 1992, p. 184). In the field of clinical psycho-analysis, it is widely attested that analysands ‘enjoy’ their symptoms (Fink, 1997).Freud used the expressions ‘flight into illness’ and ‘gain from illness’ to evoke theidea that subjects unconsciously enjoy their symptoms as a means of escapingdeeper psychical tensions (see Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, p. 183; see alsop. 165). In these cases the affective investment in the symptom always appears

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excessive because there is something else at stake: the attempt at all costs to avoida more painful confrontation with some basic ‘ontological truths’. Enjoyment thusdraws much of its energy from our transgression of these ‘truths’. Returning to thecollective aspects of the problem of self-transgression, we could say that what bindsa community together is often not simply identification with a common ideal like‘justice’ or ‘freedom’, but also an identification with a common form of enjoyment-in-transgression (see Žižek, 1994, p. 55). Various coded political communicationtactics – populist ‘dog-whistle’ politics for example – could be readily understood inthis light (see Connolly, 2008, pp. 54–56).The psychoanalytic contribution to our understanding of the problem of self-

transgression sits alongside, and combines with, a set of explanatory hypothesesand normative impulses derived from other disciplines and traditions of thought.We might start by getting a preliminary fix on the dimensions in play in eachparticular case: dimensions of enjoyment, hypocrisy, weakness of will, roleconflict, coercion, rational choice, and false consciousness. Clearly, the relativeimportance of each of these dimensions and how they combine with one anotherwill vary as a function of our interpretation of the dimensions and the specificcontext of the case at hand.Consider the case of voting against one’s own interests. Adopting a psycho-

analytic perspective might very well train our attention on the tenor of the hatreddirected at big government, showing how this hatred is not simply an emotionborn of legitimate anger and resentment but that there is something disturbinglyexcessive in the way this hatred is expressed and lived. We might then read thishatred as an affective investment that is enjoyed in the precise psychoanalyticsense discussed above.This is where things start to get messy, however, as the enjoyment dimension

here comes into contact with other explanatory dimensions. One tempting wayforward involves thinking together the enjoyment and false-consciousness dimen-sions: subjects enjoy their hatred of big government and this enjoyment blinds themas to their ‘real’ interests. Thus voting against government initiatives such as astimulus package designed to reverse the economic downturn, or thwarting effortsto create a government-sponsored universal health care system, or helping todismantle an existing one, is a bit like shooting oneself in the proverbial foot.Perhaps this way of combining the enjoyment and false-consciousness dimen-

sions is too easy. Perhaps its plausibility relies on our taking for granted acommon set of presuppositions (broadly shared by left-leaning progressives) thatare descriptive, explanatory, and normative in character. In other words, itpresupposes a particular account of where we are today and where we could (andought to) be: for example (to take just one hypothetical but readily imaginableaccount), that a set of economic policies over the course of the last few decades inthe US and UK, coupled with a dramatic decline in the power of labour unions,has resulted in stagnant average wages relative to productivity and ballooningprivate debt, amplifying inequalities in income and wealth in an uprecedented

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way, enabling the rich to entrench those inequalities even further by exploitingtheir financial clout in the domains of politics, the media, education, and so on,thereby leaving government as the only plausible countervailing force that couldfight against an increasingly blatant plutocracy on behalf of the average citizen,assuming, of course, that it is not already too late. Enjoying our hatred of biggovernment blinds us to these ‘facts of the matter’, enabling the taking root andstabilisation of a false consciousness.It is not so much that the progressive account illegitimately combines the

enjoyment dimension with other dimensions, such as the false-consciousnessdimension, but rather that it elides two things in particular. First, it elides what isdistinctive and troubling about enjoyment. I will explain this in a moment withreference to what I call the ‘orthogonality thesis’. Second, it elides the complexway that each one of a number of dimensions can come to depend on one anotherin different ways at different times, and I elaborate on this with reference to whatI call the ‘overdetermination thesis’. I will now say something more about each ofthese two theses.

The Orthogonality Thesis: On Radical Contingency and the IdeologicalDimension of Critique

The first thing that the above attempt to articulate different dimensions elides isthe distinctive character that psychoanalysis ascribes to enjoyment: what isdistinctive about enjoying one’s hatred of government is that the efficacy of thisenjoyment appears to be largely independent of – ‘orthogonal’ to – the questionof whether such hatred is actually justified from a descriptive, explanatory ornormative point of view. The plane of ‘psychic reality’ associated with suchenjoyment is orthogonal to the plane of ‘reality’, in the sense that the relationsbetween elements in each of the two planes are governed by distinct logics. Whilepsychic reality is governed by the logic of fantasy, linked to the subject’s stancetoward desire and anxiety, the plane of reality is animated by logics ofepistemological validation and normative justification. This means that thediscursive element under scrutiny (‘big government’) can play a double role whenit finds itself at the intersection of the two planes. It partakes both of ‘reality’ (thatis, it points to something in reality, namely, a ‘really existing government’ that isunderstood to be worthy of our support or condemnation), but it can also serveas a site of ‘fantasmatic enjoyment’ (that is, it assumes a role in the fantasmaticnarrative of the subject, and thus the logic of its desire). The appeal to ‘psychicreality’ aims to capture something about how a subject is fantasmatically investedin a discursive element (psychic truth), while the appeal to ‘reality’ aims tocapture something about the intersubjective meaning of that discursive element(epistemological truth and normative significance).

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The essential kernel of fantasy is its capacity to organize desire, not to representreality in a faithful way. This is what, in my opinion, makes fantasy a moreapposite category than knowledge when thinking about ideology. ‘Big govern-ment’ can thus play for the subject two distinct roles: a psychic-cum-ideologicalrole and an epistemological-cum-normative role. From this point of view, key tounderstanding ideological enjoyment is the subject’s capture in a logic of fantasyand desire, regardless of whether or not the fantasmatic content coincides with agiven reality. In other words, a psychoanalytic perspective insists upon aseparation between the epistemologico-normative and ideological roles of adiscursive element, and an appeal to fantasy helps us see this.The epistemological role of ‘big government’, for example, involves linking the

subject to a shared universe of meaning: big government is meant to correspondbroadly to features of our intersubjective understandings of it. Here the issue iswhether our understanding of government is actually ‘true’ (or ‘false’), in thesense of conforming (or not conforming) to ‘the facts of the matter’: Is ‘biggovernment’ really ‘big’? Does big government actually foster relations of depen-dency? (And is dependency normatively undesirable? Under what conditions?)Am I, unbeknownst to myself, a receiver of government benefits? In what ways,precisely, is government the cause or solution to which problems? And so on. Thepsychic role of ‘big government’, on the other hand, is to keep the anxietyassociated with the radical contingency of social relations at bay, that is, to closeoff from view the idea that there is no ultimate law governing our social world. Bypartially enjoying our hatred of big government, we betray how governmentfunctions not simply as an obstacle to an ideal – an ideal of individual self-sufficiency for example – but also as a condition for idealising this ideal,conjuring in this way the promise of a future full enjoyment. Hatred of biggovernment is necessary because it appears to guarantee the integrity of ouridentity and forestall threats of disintegration.I would argue that this psychic role also serves an ideological function, where

ideology is understood as the attempt to pass off as necessary what in fact iscontingent (Laclau, 1991). The excessive character of one’s subjective investmentin big government has a precise ideological function: it blocks from view thecontingency of social relations in a rather straightforward way, namely, that oursocial, political, and economic identifications and ideals could be otherwise. Thiscontingency, moreover, is radical in the sense that it points to an ontologicalimpossibility that characterizes subjectivity as such: the constitutive failure of anysocial objectivity to attain a full identity (Laclau, 1991). Appearing in a range oftheoretical guises (‘split subjectivity’, ‘lack in the Other’, ‘structural undecid-ability’, ‘irreducible negativity’, etc.) such radical contingency goes to the root ofthe subject’s sense of being. The fact that confrontation with radical contingencyprovokes anxiety accounts for the degree of fantasmatic investment in one oranother discursive element: without this guarantee or promise of ‘full enjoyment’,the subject would be ‘lost’, his or her identity destabilized or dislocated.

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The sense and significance of the ‘orthogonality thesis’ can be furtherappreciated by looking at two different ways the epistemological and ideologicalfunctions of a discursive element can intersect. In a first sweep, we could say thata statement may be no more ideological for being false. In other words, the falsecharacter of a claim is not in itself sufficient to transform it into an ideologicalstatement. For example, a CEO may falsely insist that his company’s financialaccounts have not been ‘massaged’ to boost its shareholder value (as JeffreySkilling and Kenneth Lay did in the heydays of Enron), but a lot more workwould be required to show that these false claims and accompanying deceitfulpractices are also ideological in the psychoanalytic sense. It would involveshowing how they relate to broader social and cultural ideals that structureindividual and collective forms of enjoyment.To more firmly grasp the sense in which the epistemological and ideological

planes are orthogonal to each other, we can take a second step: not only is thefalsity of a claim not sufficient to transform it into an ideological statement, it isalso not necessary. In other words, a statement may be no less ideological forbeing true. Consider Lacan’s claim that just because his wife is found, as a ‘matterof fact’, to be sleeping around does not mean that a husband’s jealousy cannotstill be treated as pathological-cum-ideological (see Žižek, 1989, p. 48). Whatmakes something ideological, in this view, is not linked to the issue of whether ornot it corresponds to an intersubjective understanding of reality so much as tohow it is caught up in a fantasmatic narrative governed by a logic of desire.Translated into the political field, these observations resonate with the basic

intuition we have that people on the left can be just as ideological as people on theright. Consider, for example, substituting the term ‘big government’ with ‘freemarket’ to yield the expression ‘hatred of the free market’. What fantasmaticinvestments are revealed in these particular hatreds? Or, to put it slightly differently,one could consider substituting ‘hatred’ with ‘love’, yielding ‘love of big govern-ment’ or ‘love of the free market’. The ideological force linked to fantasmaticenjoyment can be mobilised in any number of political and normative directions.

The Overdetermination Thesis: On Contestability and the NormativeDimension of Critique

If it is a mistake to ignore the ideological force of fantasy, it is also a mistake toignore its concrete normative implications. It is a mistake, in other words, to takethe orthogonality thesis as justification for moving too quickly from the idea of‘no necessary relation’ (between psychic reality and reality) to the idea of ‘norelation’ (between psychic reality and reality). Things become a lot messier oncewe refuse this elision: while enjoyment might be orthogonal to meaning, thefantasmatic narrative that makes enjoyment possible is not. This is because

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fantasy shades into reality in a myriad of subtle and not so subtle ways. In short,reality is overdetermined by fantasy.The way we characterize reality and the normative significance we attach to

elements of that reality is often hotly contested. No doubt some of theseperspectival differences can be put down to deliberate, systematic, but sometimesalso inadvertent, acts of misinformation and disinformation that conceal what isreally going on; and in a context of historically unprecedented inequalities ofwealth and income this is a scenario that many argue is not only more likely butalready fully realised. However, many scholars working in the fields of philoso-phy, the history of science and social science, and in political studies in particular,have for a long time recognized that the issue of contested realities goes muchdeeper than a ‘false-consciousness’ picture of the world suggests (see e.g., Gallie,1956; Kuhn, 1969). Individual facts may indeed be contested and debated.However, the way facts are understood or the way significance is attached tothem is a function of how they relate to other elements in a wider discourse. Giventhat people subscribe to different discursive frames informed by differentontological and normative principles, moral and political contestation cannot beunderstood in purely epistemological terms, as if appealing to the ‘facts of thematter’ could itself settle the case. It is for this reason that the false-consciousnesshypothesis discussed at the start of this article can be usefully supplemented withanother hypothesis when discussing the problem of self-transgression: let’s call itthe ‘normative parallax’ hypothesis – a hypothesis that affirms the idea that one’sdiscursive position or identity shapes the way one understands and evaluates theworld, including one’s own interests.What psychoanalysis adds to these now widely accepted ideas is that a discursive

frame is shaped also by collectively shared fantasmatic narratives that have veryprecise concrete contents, appealing among other things to ideals, obstacles to therealization of these ideals, threatening Others, nightmare scenarios, and so on.Thus, while there is something important we need to hold on to about the force ofenjoyment that is distinct from the specificity of normative content, we should alsoacknowledge how fantasmatic content, animated by logics of desire and enjoyment,can hook up with normative content in multiple overdetermined ways.One further aspect of the overdetermination thesis is worth noting here. Just as

it may be important to acknowledge the mutually overdetermined characterof the relation between fantasy and reality, so too the very identification ofphenomena as worthy of fantasmatic analysis can, and perhaps should, beunderstood as normatively overdetermined. And since there will always be arange of ‘enjoyed’ symptoms populating the socio-political landscape, engagingwith normatively informed explanatory accounts in social, political, andeconomic studies may help identify those enjoyed symptoms worthy of ideologi-cal investigation and critique. On this view, we – as psychoanalytically informedsocial and political researchers – would embark on our psychosocial task intandem with, and informed by, such work. We could then point to the ideological

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work that fantasy accomplishes in framing the way we invest in the world,including the descriptive and normative aspects of the world. In short, thevantage point that such a psychoanalytic perspective opens up might benefitenormously from engaging with, and perhaps taking up a position with respectto, social and political studies that offer critical explanations of key phenomena.This is one way to read Thomas Frank’s account of the rise of the Tea Party

movement in the US in the wake of the financial crisis. It may appear strange thatthe most prominent agents to whom responsibility has been attributed for thefinancial and wider economic crisis in the US and UK are ‘government’ and‘politicians’. From the perspective of the left on both sides of the Atlantic thisappears so at odds with the ‘facts of the matter’ as to beggar belief. And yet thereis an identifiable ‘logic’ to this development. Motivated to make sense of thisotherwise paradoxical state of affairs in the US, Frank chronicles the shift in thetarget of populist blame from Wall Street to Washington, a shift accompanied byloud demands for cuts in taxes and government spending (Frank, 2012). FromFrank’s own critical political economic perspective, this shift moves in a directionthat can only exacerbate the situation, especially for those lower down theincome and wealth ladder. Tea Partiers are clearly supporting measures that goagainst many of the interests and ideals they claim to be defending. However,Frank does not see this as a simple case of false consciousness. Although he maynot use this language, he is clearly alert to the palpable enjoyment of Tea Partiers’hatred of big government, leading him to suspect there is more at stake here thana mere misidentification of their ‘real’ interests and the ‘real’ role of government.What he finds instead is a potent narrative bolstered by certain strands of UShistory and mythology, not least with regard to the economy as seen through theprism of Ayn Rand’s novels, and triggered by key events (such as the famous‘rant’ by CNBC journalist Rick Santelli on 19 February 2009, or the antics ofGlenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and others). Perhaps we could posit the operation of afantasmatic logic in which the free market is elevated to the position of absoluteideal, whose purity is cherished and guarded so tenaciously, so religiously, thatthe smallest intimation of government intervention threatens the most horrific ofapocalyptic consequences. At a deeper level one can perhaps also discern arejection of the very idea of a ‘Caring Other’ on whom we can legitimatelydepend in times of need. Potent fantasies of mastery, control, and self-sufficiencycrowd out all doubt about how we should comport ourselves in the world,thereby substituting confident certainty for radical contingency.A similar pattern can be discerned in the UK during the notorious Members of

Parliament expenses scandal in 2009, which followed detailed revelations in themedia about what politicians claimed on taxpayer-funded expense allowanceschemes (Chang and Glynos, 2011). What was particularly revealing about thiscase is that while the hatred and rage directed at MPs in the press was sharedacross the political spectrum, the way this excessive enjoyment was buoyed updiffered in meaning and significance as a function of the precise fantasmatic

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narrative within which MPs and government were embedded. Fantasies under-pinned by ‘the Caring Other’ and ‘the Self-sufficient Self’ struggled against eachother in the way they pressed facts into their service, resonating strongly with thetypically dichotomic market-versus-state character of political debate (see alsoLayton, 2010). This focus on MPs during 2009 successfully installed them as thenumber one culprit for our present woes, displacing in a rather spectacularfashion bankers and other financiers who had held this position the year before.

Conclusion: Identifying the ‘Right’ Interests and Interpreting our ‘Enjoyed’Symptoms

My aim has been to situate the idea of voting against one’s interests and the hatredof government in relation to a more general problem, the problem of self-transgression, in order better to contextualize and foreground how the significanceof a psychoanalytic contribution can only be appreciated on a case-by-case basisand in relation to other competing and complementary contributions to the generalproblem. I have argued that one way of appreciating the psychoanalytic contribu-tion is through a focus on the dimension of enjoyment and fantasy, exploring howthis dimension relates to other dimensions, particularly the false-consciousness andnormative parallax dimensions. I suggest that a psychosocial approach to socialand political phenomena might benefit from taking seriously both the ‘orthogon-ality thesis’ and the ‘overdetermination thesis’, both of which are essential to thetask of delimiting the precise scope and contexts in which the enjoyment dimensionplays a significant role in accounting for the grip of an ideology, whether left orright, the manner in which it buttresses policies and practices of domination,exploitation, and oppression, and how one might go about sapping its force.How one goes about sapping the force of fantasies, caring and self-sufficiency

fantasies for example, is no doubt complex, speculative and experimental,especially when these have succeeded in dichotomizing large swaths of thesocio-political sphere.1 However, these efforts at sapping the force of fantasy or,rather, transforming the subject’s mode of fantasmatic investment, can beamplified and multiplied by reconceptualizing these processes through an appealto adjacent concepts such as mourning (see Glynos, 2014), by embedding them inpsychosocially-informed participatory action research projects, by re-reading keycultural productions, artistic performances, and political actions as enacting suchprocesses, and so on. Such endeavors are readily re-signified as ‘critical fantasyinterventions’, suggesting we delimit a new field of investigation whose aimwould be to inform and learn from such interventions: critical fantasy studies. Inthis article I have sketched out a psychoanalytically informed perspective thatgestures toward just such an enterprise, combining descriptive, explanatory,normative, and ideological dimensions.

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Hatred of government and the very possibility of voting against one’s interestsclearly point to the power of narrative and the media in democratic polities. Thatsome measure of assent by the public is required if state actions are to be granted anair of democratic legitimacy only highlights the crucial role discourse, storytelling,and fantasy play in shaping not only the way we see and participate in the world,but also how we come to enjoy particular elements of that world. Identifying ourinterests is not simple, as we have seen, because they are always discursively andfantasmatically overdetermined. Such a complex process cannot be reduced to anepistemological project that promises to uncover our ‘real’ interests; far better tosee this process as a critical and collective struggle to construct and advance the‘right’ ones.

About the Author

Jason Glynos teaches Political Theory at the Department of Government,University of Essex. He has published in the areas of poststructuralist politicaltheory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, focusing on theories of ideology, democ-racy, and freedom, and the philosophy and methodology of social science. He isco-author of Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory(Routledge, 2007), and co-editor of Politics and the Unconscious (Special Issueof Subjectivity, 2010).

Note

1 Some Lacanian scholars, such as Slavoj Žižek, have approached this issue in terms of ‘traversing thefantasy’ (see Glynos, 2001, pp. 96-99).

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