I’m having a hard time accepting Zizek’s statement (from p. 25) that “commodity fetishism occurs in capitalist societies, but it capitalism relations between men [and/or other gender identities] are definitely NOT ‘festishized.’”
Zizek goes on to quote Marx in describing how social relationships are masked by it relations of things in a capitalist society . . . but I just don’t buy it entirely. It seems like there IS still a power setup in the way people interact with each other, especially if there is a power split involved, for example boss versus employee, professor versus student, etc. Am I supposed to accept that the manifestation of social relationships is founded on nothing more than the shape of social relations between things??
I acknowledge that this is a rather immature reading of the text, but I just don’t buy that EVERYTHING is founded upon the way things (in capitalism) hold the symbolic and “real” meaning and that this is what shapes our relations socially.
I'm not sure your reading is incompatible with Zizek. I read him as attempting to "short-circuit" Lacanian and Marxian theory in order to deconstruct and move beyond both. I think Z would argue that you're exactly right - contrary to Marxian theory, not everything in bourgeois society is reducible to the territorializations of commodity fetishism - and furthermore, this is why Marx and Lacan necessarily supplement one another. The Real is the Lacanian term for precisely that which refuses symbolization and thus erupts, traumatically, at points of weakness in the symbolic ordering of everyday life. Manifestations of power might be one such example: at a time when much theory suggests that we're all equally caught in an inevitable mess of power structures, moments when concrete hierarchies lay themselves bear become deeply traumatic. At least when we're (under the impression that we're) all equally stuck, domination and confusion can become invested with libinidal pleasure - jouissance. But that's a problematic illusion. Theories, such as the Marxism that Z caricatures, arguing that everything is constituted through the symbolic relationships of commodity fetishism / panoptic society / nostalgia / etc. risk becoming ideological in their own right. Indeed, radically so: claiming that one ideological system (e.g. commodity fetishism) has already foreclosed social life and thus eruptions of the Real are a priori impossible does an extreme disservice to "real, existing" power relations.