Postmodern Marxism Today: Jameson, Žižek, and the Demise of Symbolic Efficiency

Matthew Flisfeder

Postmodern Marxism Today: Jameson, Žižek, and the Demise of Symbolic Efficiency

Matthew Flisfeder

Abstract

Communism as our new common sense master code arises in Jameson and Žižek’s recent projects, from Žižek’s volumes on The Idea of Communism, to Jameson’s essay “An American Utopia” (contained in the book of the same name, edited by Žižek, which we might also count as another volume in The Idea of Communism series). What they both continue to demonstrate is that in the face of the absolute foreclosure of the signifier, the deadlocks of capitalist exploitation, as well as its own inherent internal contradictions, can only go on and transform into absolute excess. As Žižek has put it, “when people tell me that nothing can be changed [my response is] – no it can, because things are already changing like crazy. And what we should say is just this: if we let things change the way they are changing automatically we are approaching a kind of new perverse, permissively authoritarian society, which will be authoritarian but in a new way” (Žižek 2013: 50).

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