The Prior Question of Enjoyment

The movers and shakers in the content production industries have killed the law. Lessig is a radical because he believes in the possibility of a pluralistic society where difference is celebrated, this world lives onto life. In contrast the legal culture of the creativity clampdown is onto death, to use Lacanian parlance. All that is good about culture and life is long dead, enchantment with the future is not just gone, but the hegemonic articulation is driven forward by getting everyone involved in the death drive, like the child who delights in telling others that there is no Santa Claus.

My argument runs like this; what ever provisional solutions are written up in law reviews or other places can't deal with the prior psychic question. Law is an injunction of the superego that allows some to be onto death. The symbolic law has failed and faith in the future is no longer existant; if your entirely sure that you have passed through the first death, then it is quite easy to take others with you. Zombies would be the best metaphor here. Zizek argues that the figure of the Zombie is threating in that it is pure drive, no life, no slippage. Short story long, until we restore the fundamental enchantment with the future (traversing the fantasy) there is no shot at stopping the culture killers. The following is from Richard Sherwin's (professor of law at NYU) book about Lacan and the American legal system, "When Law Goes Pop.":

It is one of the crueler ironies of our time that uncertainty, fear, and a sense of human frailty can be so great in an era when science and technology have advanced so far. Never before have so many enjoyed so much in the way of material security and comfort and in refuge from sickness and calamity. Yet it is as if our intolerance of loss, pain and suffering, and even death itself only increases in proportion to our collective power, and desire, to triumph even more completely over the vicissitudes of everyday life. In law it is no different. In many ways, law today offers more protection against loss and suffering than in any previous era. Yet public outrage, even in the face of diminishing criminal activity and attenuated civil wrongdoing (such as exposing others to secondhand tobacco smoke) seems never to have been greater.2 Laws proliferate. But the forces of irrationality and disorder are not so easily tamed. And as the perception of law's defeat grows, the modern faith in progress, rationality, and the human ability to ensure order and security unravels a bit more-prompting more un¬certainty, more resentment, and more law.