Religion of Enjoyment

A. Kiarina Kordela
That in the future of secular capitalist enlightened democracies power would be
exercised primarily not by state coercion, confinement, censorship, and
propaganda but by over-exposure to information, opinions, trivial culture,
endless choices, and the ubiquitous infliction of enjoyment (or, to put it in Neil
Postmans way, that our present vindicates not George Orwells but Aldus
Huxleys vision)all this is well known.* What is likely less known is the
religious character of this form of power.
While revisiting his own dystopia in 1958, Huxley encapsulated the
premise of this form of power by juxtaposing it to the earlier, primarily
ideological, state: the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press
envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be
falsereflecting the historically corresponding (monotheist) association of
religion with judgments of "true and false" (there is only one true god, and so
forth). But the vast mass communications industry of our Western capitalist
democracies is concernedneither with the true nor the false, but with the
unreal; this world is ruled not through a thirst for truth but through an almost
infinite appetite for distractions. Distraction means the loss of self and of the
sense of time. Like ecstatic religious rituals in archaic societies, distraction is the
closest contemporary experience can come to a state of immanence, a boundless
flow of non-differentiation between subject and object or being and language, in
a nirvana-like timeless eternitywhere everything is, in George Batailles words,
like water in water. This absolute immanence, this purely hypothetical, yet
(logically) necessarily presupposed overlap of absolute being and representation,
of immortal, irrepressible, indestructible life and the locus of the Other (signifier),
is the referent of Lacans jouissance of the real (as opposed to, in Jacques-Alain
Millers words, the jouissance of the imaginary). Fullfledged secularization
entails the shift from the (monotheist) jouissance of the imaginary back to the
(archaic) jouissance of the real. Bataille saw the essence of religion in the longing
for the return to immanence. Via Lacan we rectify: the dream that defines the
essence of religion is access to jouissance, whether, depending on historical
conditions, imaginary jouissance (Truth) or jouissance of the real (immanence).
Since time immemorial, humans have been yearning, with an infinite appetite,
for jouissance, which is why religion accompanies humanity since its dawn and
can never relinquish its hold on humans, not even a farthing, not even in the socalled secular capitalist enlightened democracies.

*More specifically, I am referring to Orwells Nineteen Eight-Four (1949), Huxleys

Brave New World (1931), and Neil Postmans Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985).