That “something more,” was certainly palpable in the lead up and especially at the time of his election, when whole neighborhoods took to the streets to celebrate. I remember my own experience of going to the roof of my apartment building in Brooklyn and yelling “Obama!” off of the rooftop. Invariably, my cry would be met by a whoop and response of “Oooobaaamaaa!” from somewhere else in the neighborhood. The spirit of change was crackling in the atmosphere on that night.
The “something more,” is also evident in the acidic and acrimonious political environment that has followed Obama’s election. Republicans lined up against nearly every proposal he has made as president, from the economic stimulus bill to health reform to nearly all of his political appointments. There is an implicit current of xenophobia and racism running underneath much of this opposition including that of the “Tea Party” activists, who have attempted to question his citizenship status, his religion, his preparedness for office and so on.
Zizek argues that “reason Obama’s victory generated such enthusiasm was not only the fact that, against all the odds, it really happened, but that the possibility of such a thing happening was demonstrated.” No one believed America could elect a black president until we went ahead and did it. The argument that Obama isn’t really that controversial and is actually relatively conservative is basically irrelevant. As Zizek points out, “the global situation . . . is also defined by its ideological contours, by what is visible and invisible within it, sayable and unsayable.” We can now say “today President Barrack Hussein Obama, the first black president in United States history, boarded Air Force One on his way to receive the Nobel peace prize.” A few years ago, this would have sounded absurd and almost hilarious. Now it has been rendered intelligible and also truthful. According to Zizek, “words are never ‘only words’; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.” Mustering some Kantian enthusiasm is part of what is needed to make progressive changes to the antagonisms present in our world. Obviously this isn’t the whole game.
As far as how the Left must organize itself politically in order to strike at the phallus of capitalist exploitation, the privatization of the commons and the exclusion of the powerless, Zizek offers some tips. He argues that instead of opposing the “Jacobin-Leninist” paradigm of centralized dictatorial power, perhaps “turn this mantra around and admit that a good dose of just that ‘Jacobin-Leninist’ paradigm is precisely what the Left needs today.” What this means is that activists on the Left must insist on what “Badiou calls the ‘eternal’ Idea of Communism . . . the ‘four fundamental concepts’ at work from Plato through the medieval millenarian revolts and on to Jacobinism, Leninism, and Maoism: strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people.” Here Zizek shows that he does not believe that a prevailing model of diffuse, decentralized and communitarian leadership and power will get anyone very far in this struggle.
Interestingly, Zizek looks to the “Green Revolution” in Iran as a “modern example of a protest model of our era: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising manners to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. This was a genuine popular uprising of the disappointed partisans of the Khomeini revolution,” which harnessed elements of the four fundamental concepts Zizek outlined, although I would add non-violence to his list. A strong point Zizek makes is that “the events in Iran may be read as a comment on the platitudes of Obama’s Cairo speech which focused on the dialogue between religions: we do not need the dialogue between religions (between civilizations), we need a link of solidarity between those who struggle for justice in Muslim countries and those who participate in the same struggle elsewhere.”
As I posted previously, the focal point of this struggle for justice lies with the antagonisms created by global capitalism. However, resisting these antagonisms has proved exceedingly difficult. Here Zizek points to the fact that “[c]apitalism poses a problem to the logic of resistance.” He cites scholar Brian Massumi who “has formulated clearly how contemporary capitalism overcame the logic of totalizing normality and adopted the logic of erratic excess.” This is basically a fancy way of saying that capitalism has learned to co-opt and subsume any revolt or challenge to its dominant ideology.
Think of all the commercials urging you to rebel, to think differently, to be different, to reinvent yourself. To a soundtrack of cutting-edge “indie” music, someone tells you that you can become anyone and do anything with the help of capital. Alain Badiou supplements this analysis by recognizing the “exceptional ontological status of capitalism, whose dynamic undermines every stable frame of re-presentation: the task usually performed by critico-political activity (that of undermining the re-presentational frame of the state) is already performed by capitalism itself.” This exceptional ontological status extends throughout the entire social sphere, effectively neutering critique before it arises.
If our socio-economic system no longer excludes the excess, and instead directly posits it as its driving force—as is the case in capitalism, which can only reproduce itself through its constant self-revolutionizing, through the constant overcoming of its own limits, how do you oppose it? For Zizek, “the true question here is: how is externality with regard to the state to be operationalized?”
This is where Zizek’s call for the “Jacobin-Leninist” ideal of power comes into play. He asks:
what if today’s global capitalism, precisely insofar as it is ‘world-less,’ involving a constant disruption of all fixed order, opens up the space for a revolution which will break the vicious cycle of revolt and its reinscription, which will, in other words, no longer follow the pattern of an evental explosion followed by a return to normality, but will instead assume the task of a new ‘ordering’ against the global capitalist disorder? Out of revolt we should shamelessly pass to enforcing a new order. (Is this not one of the lessons of the ongoing financial meltdown?)
With global capitalism’s logic of excess and self-revolution in mind, the Left, proletariats in solidarity and concerned with egalitarian justice, must create and enforce a new legal and political framework that cuts off and limits capitalism’s totalizing effects. In this respect, Zizek takes aim at the state and not “capitalism,” the amorphous ideology. Here he presents two axioms. The first is that the failure of “communist state-party politics is above all . . . the failure of anti-statal politics, of the endeavor to break up the constraints of the state, to replace statal forms of organization with ‘direct’ non-representative forms of self-organization (councils).” The second is that “if you have no clear idea of what you want to replace the state with, you have no right to subtract/withdraw from the state.” Zizek thinks that the true task is to make the state itself work in a “non-statal mode,” repeating shamelessly the “lesson of Lenin’s State and Revolution: the goal of revolutionary violence is not to take over state power, but to transform it, radically changing its functioning, its relationship to its base.”
To radically change the way the state functions, Zizek believes in a modified “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He argues that, “the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is a kind of (necessary) oxymoron, not a state-form in which proletariat is now the ruling class.” Only when the state itself is radically transformed, relying on new forms of popular participation, are we truly dealing with this “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Drawing on the work of Noam Chomsky, Zizek demands that “we should confront the limitations of parliamentary democracy, specifically its “passivizing” core, which makes it incompatible with the direct political self-organization of the people.”
To illustrate what he means, Zizek draws this analogy:
in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king—but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration . . . the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? This is why in “free elections” there is always a minimal aspect of politeness: those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to give them power—in a way which mirrors the logic of a gesture meant to be refused.
This isn’t to say that Zizek thinks democracy is completely ineffectual. He argues, “[t]here is no reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth—on the contrary, as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology.” Voters are presented with a slate of candidates that have gone through a rigorous pre-screening process. Candidates without political connections or fund-raising prowess or who might be perceived as "radical" in any way are weeded out early on. Indeed, in the US, we don’t even have the multiple parties present in other parliamentary democracies, leaving us with two parties that jockey to secure the votes of abstractions like “mainstream Americans” or “average voters.” Zizek thinks “there can be democratic elections which enact an event of Truth—elections in which, against skeptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemony of ideological opinion. However, the very exceptional nature of such an occurrence proves that elections as such are not a medium of Truth.”
Zizek worries that this “authentic potential of democracy” is at risk of being totally overrun by the rise of what he calls “authoritarian capitalism,” or “capitalism with Asian values.” With the rise of China, we have witnessed that capitalism can function very efficiently without any need for its trusty sidekick democracy. If civil liberties continue to be hollowed out as they were under the presidency of George W. Bush and as we saw recently with the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, corporate money will continue to infiltrate every pore of the political spectrum and Western democracies will become “democracies” in name only.
This of course is not the only threat that Zizek sees rising out of the configuration of contemporary capitalism. There is also the issue of “immaterial work” and the privatization of the “general intellect itself.” He notes that “[w]hen ‘immaterial work’ (education, therapy, etc.) is celebrated as the kind of work which directly produces social relations, one should not forget what this means within a commodity economy: namely, that new domains, hitherto excluded from the market, are now commodified.” When an iPhone, Google, and Facebook become necessities for social interaction, mediating interactions with others and infusing marketing into the equation, and public space that hasn’t been branded with advertising slogans is hard to come by, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a vantage point from which to engage in resistance.
Additionally, Zizek argues, “3 components of the production process—intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the provision of material resources—are increasingly autonomized, emerging as separate spheres.” The social consequences of this separation “appears in the guise of the ‘three main classes’ in today’s developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class: intellectual laborers, the old manual working class, and the outcast (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space).” Zizek sees this as “the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and ‘identity’ politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss.” What we end up with is “each part being played off against the others: intellectual laborers full of cultural prejudices against ‘redneck’ workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such.”
What Zizek touches on here is especially pertinent today, with Americans ever more divided by “identity politics.” In America, the overwhelming feeling of hope and unity that briefly accompanied the election of Obama has given way not only to concerns about the economic recession, but also a vicious and highly partisan political atmosphere. Americans who should be banding together to demand what kind of economic system forces average tax-paying citizens to bail out some of the biggest banks and companies in the world are still divided over “death panels,” abortion, “socialism”, climate change, and our president’s birth certificate. Those at the top don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them, those in the middle channel the anger and confusion that accompany lost jobs and lower wages into reactionary and “populist” outlets, and those at the bottom, the outcasts, seeing their situation going from bad to worse, sink further into despair and violence. Zizek suggests that “the old cry “Proletarians, unite!” is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of ‘postindustrial’ capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory.”
In today’s chaotic and crisis plagued world, it does often seems as though we’re incapable of uniting to solve our most pressing problems and that what once was considered “progress” is leading us to the brink of collapse. It is this very notion of “progress,” which Zizek asks us to confront. He states, “this is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of ‘divine violence’ would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress.” Indeed, he argues that we should “ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is ‘on our side,’ that History is ‘working for us’ like the famous old mole digging under the earth, doing the work of the Cunning of Reason.” Instead, he argues that to confront disaster, be it social or environmental, we must “break out of this ‘historical’ notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time.”
Here Zizek is relying on the work of Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who thinks that to avert disaster, “we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of our future) counterfactual possibilities . . . upon which we then act today.” From this perspective, the only way to prevent disaster is to accept it as inevitable, to believe it will happen and start working against it before it happens. In a way, this is the rationale behind changing out the light bulbs in your house for energy efficient ones. Here you are inserting a small “counterfactual possibility” into the past of global climate catastrophe. What Zizek is proposing is essentially to make a pre-emptive strike on the future.
In a counter to the kind of logic used by climate skeptics to argue that we don’t yet know how our actions will actually affect our climate, and thus we should do nothing, Zizek reasons that “the certainty on which an act relies is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief: a true act is never a strategic intervention in a transparent situation of which we have full knowledge; on the contrary, the true act fills in the gap in our knowledge.” In this statement, Zizek rejects the notion of scientific socialism and technocracy that has taken hold of our societies. Our tendency to put our leaders in the position of what Zizek calls the “subject supposed to know,” someone whose activity is grounded in full understanding of the laws of history, economics etc., has certainly led us to our most recent economic calamity (see Alan Greenspan et al.), and will continue to do so. Indeed, Zizek thinks, “[t]his perhaps is the lesson to be learned from the traumas of the twentieth century: to keep Knowledge and the function of the Master as far apart as possible.”
To end on a rather cliché note (although no less pertinent), Zizek’s message is loud and clear: no one can change the world for you. We must trust in ourselves. As the old Hopi saying goes, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Today more than ever, if we tune out and let the status quo work itself out, we are in for a world of hurt. In Zizek’s words: “left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse; what alone can prevent such calamity is, then, pure voluntarism, in other words, our free decision to act against historical necessity.”
Wow! Chris, this is so good! I want to read more.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I enjoyed your word choices: "the phallus of capitalist exploitation" sounds scary!