Better To Be A Contrarian than Vapid

Nothing like the recent election in the United States to give me a reason to discuss Slavoj Zizek and Bernard-Henri Levy in the same post. 

The contrarian weighs in, arguing that Obama is more than Bush with a human face:

 So should we write Obama off? Is he nothing more than Bush with a human face? There are signs which point beyond this pessimistic vision. Although his healthcare reforms were mired in so many compromises they amounted to almost nothing, the debate triggered was of huge importance. A great art of politics is to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly realist, feasible and legitimate, disturbs the core of the hegemonic ideology. The healthcare reforms were a step in this direction – how else to explain the panic and fury they triggered in the Republican camp? They touched a nerve at the core of America's ideological edifice: freedom of choice.

So today, it's ideology critique. Maybe tomorrow it will be the hyperbolic Leninism, and he'll remind us that nobody is quite as revolutionary as himself.

Sure, that's a cynical reading of Zizek, which I think is a product of reading far too much of his work. But Zizek is also far more engaging than our vapid French "intellectual". BHL declares the election--the outcome of which he so foresightedly "predicted"--a great day for America. Why?

It is a victory for a moderate man, whose charisma remains intact.

That's the first reason: a man's got to have him his charisma. That's so important that it overshadows whatever else makes the election great.

Perhaps we can get more specific:

It is a victory for his strategy of government intervention that has allowed the United States to weather the storm for four years.

The the second aspect of this victory strikes me as ambiguous. It seems to be commending Obama's mild commitment to using government to blunt the effects of the economic downturn. But when I hear "intervention" from BHL, I think Libya, meaning that he could also be commending Obama's continued commitment to the "war on terror" or whatever it's called now.

This is followed with a bit of non-self-reflexive pundit scolding, so that BHL can reinforce  his view of what makes the election such an event. I know you're waiting for it:

It is a historic victory.

It is a great day for America and for the world.

Sometimes great nations have a rendezvous with greatness, and such is the case today.

So bold! So declarative! So historic that it can be encapsulated, if we leave out the blathering about pundits, in the most profound 262 words you'll ever read.

Or, perhaps, BHL dashed it off while nursing a wicked hangover.

This Semester...

...is the first semester during which I have no institutional affiliation as either a student or professor since I started my college studies in the mid-1990s. True, I had a year between my Master's and PhD studies, but even then I spent that time taking French and German courses to improve my language skills. I'm not unemployed, however. But I do have to figure out how to balance working 40 hours a week while completing several commitments (publications and conferences, such as the upcoming CSCP meeting) that I took on over the summer under the premise that I would be working at the University of Ottawa.

Just in case you were curious, I do have teaching for the Winter Semester, in the Department of Visual Arts, reprising my "Art Theories" course, although I will be changing up a lot of the material.

Finally, I have been reading Kevin B. Anderson's Marx at the Margins, which ought to be the handbook if you're reconsidering Marx's writings on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western societies (yes, I pretty much cribbed that from the subtitle), as well as his works on the American Civil War or Ireland. There's a passage from Marx's ethnological notebooks (as cited by Anderson) that is just waiting for Zizek to turn it into a post-Marxist slogan. Marx writes:

the seemingly supreme independent existence of the state itself is only an illusion, since the state in all its forms [is] only an excresence [sic] of society.

Zizek on Breivik and Antisemitism

After Joshua wrote a post on Anders Breivik, we started receiving a boost in traffic in google searches for "zizek breivik." Today in The Guardian is that article I suppose people were waiting for, Zizek's "A Vile Logic to Anders Breivik's Choice of Target." Zizek points out a number of hypocrisies in European responses to the rise of anti-immigrant populism, aided and abetted, I might add, by what Rancière calls 'racism from above.' A prime example is the way that some of the more opportunist right-wing sympathizers have tried to use Breivik's attacks as device to introduce the reconsideration of "multiculturalism" or immigration, revealing a clear double standard in the ways that domestic right-wing violence and other acts of violence are treated. 

This is what makes certain parts of Zizek's argument so pertinent. He notes that Breivik is antisemitic but pro-Israel, a stance that might seem contradictory, but isn't due to a kind of antisemitic paternalism: "the state of Israel is the first line of defence against the Muslim expansion" (this is similar to the way that some Christian Zionists believe that the state of Israel must exist to fulfill Christian prophecy, but otherwise...). I've emphasized what I take to be the most stinging line in the article regarding this series of hypocrisies:

A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik's attack: its mantra was that in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed "legitimate concerns about genuine problems" – mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamicisation and multiculturalism, or, to quote the Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy "as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere". The newspaper has since apologised for this editorial. (Incidentally, we are yet to hear a similar interpretation of the Palestinian acts of terror, something like "these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate Israeli politics".)

This (the discourse that Zizek is criticizing) is an entirely self-serving logic: if one attempts to get at the root causes of Palestinian violence, one is apologizing for or sympathizing with it (right, it could never be that one should criticize the ways that one's own way of life is enmeshed in social relations that dominate others...); however, right-wing violence affords the opportunity to discuss "legitimate concerns"--an opportunity to reinforce imperialist or settler-colonialist prejudices.  

Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek, and Amy Goodman: What is Truth?

I hate to overly saturate my blogs with Žižek, but I swear he is always around the places I want to refer. If we take the Socratic question, "Is he popular because he is insightful, or is he "insightful" because he is popular?" I argue that he is popular because he is insightful. It is not that I always agree with him or understand him, but his ideas are often outside the box. When I say "box" I mean the Leftist one. He was a fitting complement to a presentation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. After watching this, the truth of the matter became much more clear; the issue is the Truth. For Žižek the Truth does not exist as a real asset until it is contextualized: Assange and WikiLeaks wielded by a revolutionary philosopher. This approach to knowledge is the difference between Žižek and Noam Chomsky. To know is of little value unless one understands.

Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

My first publication, in 2005, was a book review of Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (Verso, 2004), entitled "The Step Outside: The Act, Democracy, and Its Discontents." It was published in Critical Sense (a graduate student journal at UC Berkeley that seems to have been discontinued), Volume 8, number 1. I've decided to try something new and post the PDF directly to this blog HERE.

Like any first publication, perhaps, this one has a story. I don't know why exactly I chose to review a book by Zizek first, although its topicality was probably the impetus. I started writing it in summer 2004, which is around the same time I moved to Ottawa. This move ended up interrupting the review in more than one way; somehow I managed to save the file incorrectly (or it was corrupted at some point), meaning I had to rewrite the entire thing. After some searching, I found a printed draft, which I could use to recover about 70% of the document, but the printed draft ended up in my book bag next to a container of Indian food that leaked, producing a review curry (which, for some reason, I stored in the refrigerator in case I absolutely had to reference it--otherwise, it just sat in there on one of the shelves). I ended up rewriting the entire thing...in the end producing about two and a half reviews (there's also an original ending that is much more strident, but it wouldn't work for a review).

The reader will see a few things of note. It starts with a bang. The first few sentences read:

Zizek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle picks up the thread from his previous book focused on the war on terror, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, somewhere between the months leading up to the war in Iraq and the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib.  So, while we miss an encounter between Zizek and the torture scandal—which unfortunately, in the minds of many Americans, is just another scandal—he has nonetheless been constant in criticizing all “musings” about whether torture should be used in the war on terror as a soft step to its legitimation.  And who knew— legitimate torture and you too could become Attorney General!

The reader will also note that I don't stray far from Lacanian reference points. At the time, I was trying to work out a kind of account of those who I called 'event theorists,' Zizek, Badiou, and others, and it shows. Today, of course, I'm doing something very different.

Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the Future of Egyptian Politics

Today in Modesto California a small group of us demonstrated in solidarity with Egyptians (and by further extension the Arab world). The response from the public was overwhelmingly positive. Our signs read "No more US aid to dictators. Down with Mubarak. Let Egypt and the Arab world be free." Others said, "Support freedom." This is what the revolution is about: freedom. People that do not support this freedom keep bringing up the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood. I argue that the ideology and potential for the Muslim Brotherhood to take power is irrelevant at this point. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, once wrote "We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence." In other words, a revolution has violence, but a dictatorial regime is itself secured through violence. Yet, in the case of Egypt, the revolution has mainly been peaceful. It has been the pro-Mubarak forces that lashed violence and terror on the public for thirty years and they are the ones continuing it still. The Muslim Brotherhood is not Egypt, they are a part of it. On the Riz Khan (al Jazeera English) program Tariq Ramadan, whose grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood, and Zizek share interesting points on this topic.

Hallward and Zizek on North Africa

Both Peter Hallward and Slavoj Zizek have published pieces (here and here) on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in the "Comment is Free" Section of The Guardian.

Hallward argues that:

Routine reference to "the will of the people" has long been one of the most formulaic turns of phrase in the modern political lexicon. The actual mobilisation of such a will, however, is less easily dismissed. Ongoing protests in Egypt – and in Algeria, and Yemen, and Jordan, indeed throughout the Middle East – may well oblige their governments to decide fairly soon whether they mean what they say.

Of course, if you read the comments section for this article (at your own risk!), Hallward's claim that in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt we see the will of the people is driving plenty of conservatives and parliamentarian liberals crazy (viz. 'how do you know!?'). I suppose they think that you've either got to be standing there interviewing however many hundred-thousand people there, or maybe taking a poll with a ballot box or two. His fundamental point is correct: we know it's the will of the people when every reformist gesture and every so-called concession brings more people out into the street, reinforcing the revolutionary and collective practice of the uprisings. Hallward again, with reference to Fanon:

Rejecting all distraction through "negotiation" or "development", Fanon insisted on decisive action here and now – the goal was not to reform an intolerable colonial situation over an interminable series of steps, but to abolish it. The "fundamental characteristic of the struggle of the Algerian people", Fanon maintained, is suggested by their "refusal of progressive solutions, their contempt for the 'stages' that might break the revolutionary torrent, and induce them to abandon the unshakable will to take everything into their hands at once". The fate of their revolution depends on the people's "co-ordinated and conscious" participation in their ongoing self-emancipation.

In today's Tunisia and Egypt, as in 1950s Algeria, to affirm the will of the people is not to invoke an empty phrase. Will and people: rejecting the merely "formal" conceptions of democracy that disguise our status quo, an actively democratic politics will think one term through the other. A will of the people, on the one hand, must involve association and collective action, and will depend on a capacity to invent and preserve forms of inclusive assembly (through demonstrations, meetings, unions, parties, websites, networks). If an action is prescribed by popular will, on the other hand, then what's at stake is a free or voluntary course of action, decided on the basis of informed and reasoned deliberation.

Zizek, without any references to movies or chocolate laxatives, attacks the hypocrisy of Western commentators:

What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty, and demanded freedom and economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven wrong. The big question is what will happen next? Who will emerge as the political winner? [...]

Here, then, is the moment of truth: one cannot claim, as in the case of Algeria a decade ago, that allowing truly free elections equals delivering power to Muslim fundamentalists. Another liberal worry is that there is no organised political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not; Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal ornaments, so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak – it's either him or chaos – is an argument against him.

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent."

Zizek Blames the Left for the Rise of the Right

Recently Slavoj Zizek was interviewed on Democracy Now to talk about the rise of anti-immigrant fervor in Europe and his newly published book Living in the End Times. Addressing the current rise of the Right in Europe and the US, he referred to Walter Benjamin's observation that, "Behind every fascism is a failed revolution." Unlike his frequent rantings that can be difficult to follow at times, he makes his points in this interview very clear: The Left is to blame for the rise of the Right.

Spanish Anarchism and the Post-Soviet Malaise

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917-1920) and the initial success of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are often fetishized by Leftists. At anti-war demonstrations one can see anarchists and Marxists chanting old slogans, pining about the good ol' days and revolutionary missed opportunities. The ambiance is that of a Renaissance Fair for the Cold War era. What the Bolshevik Revolution and Spanish anarchists did was demonstrate that society can be structured in various ways. Capitalism and liberal democracy are not sent as a cure-all from a Judeo-Christian God. They are also not a "natural" outgrowth of progressive evolution initiated by the human species. Slavoj Zizek summed it up best when he noted that twenty-first century thinkers can conceive of a massive environmental catastrophe before they can think outside the notion of capitalist democracy.

In this youtube is a clip from a documentary on Spanish Anarchism. It makes clear that there is a world of possibles. Instead of trying to relive the past, this history should motivate a confidence in the future. Each time and place has its own unique set of circumstances. In Zizek's 2002 Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin From 1917 he states:

The return to Lenin aims...[not] at nostalgically re-enacting the "good old revolutionary times"..."Lenin" stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post-)ideological co-ordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot (prohibition on thinking) in which we live--it simply means that we are allowed to think again (11).

I will add, the Spanish Anarchists of 1936 have some creative ideas in which to share.

A Critique of Zizek on Charity

Hot on the heels of their animated David Harvey talk on capitalism, the RSA has animated a recent talk by Slavoj Zizek. They do quite a job of having some fun with controversial topics, this one being Zizek's critique of "the logic of charity."

Zizek, as one has come to expect, takes on the common sense (in the Gramscian sense) view of charity as obviously helpful by arguing that it perpetuates the system of inequality that it claims to transform. This 'simple' issue of charity that he discusses, in fact, blurs the distinction between two different activities. First, he's right to criticize the hypocrisy of 'charitable' capitalists who give to charity with one hand and perpetuate inequality with the other. As he says, drawing on Oscar Wilde, you can't solve the injustices of private property with private property.

However, he confounds this argument with another that isn't about charity, it's about conscientious consumerism. The idea is that the extent of activism of Western consumers is to purchase commodities that seem to make the world a better place. I don't have a problem with the critique that conscientious consumerism is not enough to change the world, and that it blocks a more radical, anti-capitalist response (this latter response requires not just a concept of the event, but also some degree of organization and class consciousness or, if you prefer, solidarity-consciousness...but we'll have to talk about this later).

My problem is that Zizek calls the egoism of conscientious consumerism a kind of charity. He's conflating marketing tactics, consumerism, and ideology with the reasons why capitalists as a class have had to switch to slightly less exploitative forms of capital accumulation. Let's follow his example of Starbucks and fair trade coffee for the sake of simplicity. Even the general framework of the movie Black Gold shows (if I remember right...my argument doesn't rise and fall on the movie itself) that it's neither capitalist nor consumerist philanthropy that generates what we might call 'slightly more equitable commodities,' it's  some degree of organized social struggle and political pressure. By subsuming these changes under the "logic of charity," with only Western dramatis personae, Zizek misrepresents the subjectivity and collective action of the activists and workers who fought to implement fair trade practices through social struggle as a kind of passive acceptance of better conditions.

I don't want to fetishize fair trade products as the solution to exploitation, because they aren't; Starbucks uses its fair trading as a kind of battering ram to hammer on its Western competitors (namely local cafes). Might I also add that they offer health insurance as part of their benefits package (I know because I worked there for several years)-- again, not out of the kindness of their hearts but to stave off attempts to unionize.

In any case, we know from Capital, we must leave the "noisy sphere" of the market, "where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone," and follow the owners of money and of labor-power "into the hidden abode of production." There we will find the relationship between uneven geographical development, exploitation, and, most importantly, social struggle. What I gather from Zizek, especially because he's pushing this critique of "cultural capitalism" rather than a critique of neoliberalism, is that he's not willing to make that dialectical leap.


(Hat tip to Santi for bringing the RSA video to my attention).

Slavoj Zizek Interview

It is about time that the great cultural critic Slavoj Zizek make an analysis of his own rising popularity. It seems his role as a popular thinker even baffles establishment media. I am posting an interview of Zizek from the BBC arts program The Culture Show. The interviewer, Paul Mason, points out that Zizek is known to discuss Marxism while incorporating concepts from the Matrix film. He asks if Zizek's use of Marxism can only be tolerated in this manner. Then Mason asks if it could be the global financial crisis that makes Marxism once again palatable. This is the interesting duality of Zizek. Zizek is a "marketable" thinker because he is a showman and a spectacle. At the same time he breaks down the harsh realities of capitalism and modern society. He is like a humorous court jester that operates simultaneously as a prophet bearing bad news. Zizek preforms his jokes that tell of ominous tidings: Everyone laughs and then realizes how serious things really are.

"A Brief History of Neoliberalism," Chapter 3

Let's face it: the more prominent contemporary continental philosophers have not attempted  too many in-depth analyses of the functions of the neoliberal state form. Given that they are often focused on revitalizing a theory of the subject in our cynical and consensual times, and given that talk about seizing state power evokes whispers about Lenin or Stalin-- that is, authoritarianism-- this makes sense. Nevertheless, it also makes sense that a theory of collective subjectivity should say something about what we are up against, about the interaction of the state and capital in what David Harvey calls neoliberal governance.[1]

Hardt and Negri have already shown us the wrong direction; recall in the heady days when so many people were reading Empire, how misguided their celebration of the end of big government was even then, which they attempted to rectify in Multitude.

Since then, Zizek has taken some interest in delineating the relationship between the state and capital, but he has been unusually tentative. When talking about the use of patents to generate profit through rents, in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, he writes:

Perhaps therein resides the fundamental "contradiction" of today's "postmodern" capitalism: while its logic is de-regulatory, "anti-statal," nomadic, deterritorializing, and so on, its key tendency to the "becoming-rent-of-profit" signals a strengthening of the role of the state whose regulatory function is ever more omnipresent (p. 145).[2]

The general point about rent extraction is correct, but it's addled with enough Deleuzian jargon and inverted commas that its impact is completely muted. I've annotated this passage in my copy; it says that Zizek could straighten this out if he spent more time reading up on political economy rather than Chesterton, Paul, etc. [3] Which is why we're now reading through the third chapter of David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Probably part of the provisional character of the philosophical analysis of the neoliberal state is derived from its pragmatic variability. While the neoliberal state is relatively simple to define in theory, neoliberal governance often departs from the theoretical template. If we accept what I will call Harvey's 'class power thesis': (neoliberalism is a political project to restore class power), then these pragmatic departures should be expected.

In its theoretical form the state would promote individual choice through the guarantees of property rights, free trade, free markets, and rule of law. Individual choice is contrasted with state decision making, and in all cases-- theoretically-- the interaction of and competition between individuals in the private sphere/market is held to be more efficient and productive than public decision making (of course, more efficient and productive for what end?). The 'free choice' of the individual-- even if this is the legal fiction of the business or corporation as individual-- is "regarded as a fundamental good" (p. 64). Hence neoliberals are "assiduous" when it comes to implementing the privatization of public goods and the deregulation of markets (what, following Harvey, we've called forcing open markets), and they exhibit strong preferences for juridical resolution of individual-social conflicts rather than democratic or parliamentarian means.

Even in theory several contradictions and tensions are present. Harvey notes that neoliberalism has some theoretical difficulty when confronted with monopoly power, market failures (especially regarding environmentalism) that are often conjured away with questionable assumptions, and a fetish regarding the 'technological fix' for all problems (do I have to mention BP here?), even if technology is in some cases socially disruptive.  Nevertheless, these tensions have often been turned to pecuniary advantages through temporary fixes. Rather than resolving crises, neoliberalism provokes them:

There is an inner connection, therefore, between technological dynamism, instability, dissolution of social solidarities, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, rapid shifts in time-space relations, speculative bubbles, and the general tendency towards crisis formation within capitalism (p. 69).

Rather than interpret this situation as an accident, the class power thesis grasps these connections as means for the redistribution of wealth. Even crises, as Harvey discusses in Chapter 4, serve as a mode of redistribution.

In practice, neoliberal governance exhibits two fundamental biases that show how decisions favoring class power trump the theoretical template. First, when faced with a decision between 'fostering' a 'good business' or 'good investment' climate and labor or environmental concerns, neoliberal governance chooses in favor of business and investment. Not that on all levels these decisions are specifically made with class motives behind them. Rather neoliberal political economy is structured to coerce competition between cities, regions, countries; so while not all decisions need exhibit class motive (often at the local levels they are made to preserve a collapsing set of social relationships), the structure does.

Second, neoliberal states "typically favour the integrity of the financial system and the solvency of financial institutions over the well-being of the population or environmental quality" (p. 71). 

The neoliberal reliance (or is this a fetish too?) upon monetarism and the integrity of money means that neoliberal governance "cannot tolerate any massive financial defaults even when it is the financial institutions that have made the bad decision" (p. 73). This is a particularly perverse bias. From a theoretical perspective, the neoliberal ought to hold individual investors responsible for their bad choices, just as neoliberals would want to force people to be responsible for their actions and well-being, their health care, education, pension, etc. As Harvey notes, some "fundamentalist-minded" neoliberals argue that organizations that protect investors, such as the IMF, should be abolished. But they don't prevail over pragmatics Their failure is not unexpected if one uses class analysis.

The protection of finance also benefits the upper class at the expense of the public. Domestically, the general populace is forced to bear the burden of financial failure, just as it happened, most recently, in the 2008 bailout. Since this burden is shifted through the state-- that is, as public debt-- it also constrains future deficit spending on public goods that benefit the majority. [4] Internationally, finance-protection-- brokered through the IMF-- is used to transfer wealth from the global south to the global north through austerity measures,  debt repayment, and the removal of barriers to the flow of goods and capital /foreign investment (although the reverse does not hold).

Of course, the neoliberal response to the movement of organized labor and forms of social solidarity is, as we've already seen, the exception to the rule. One of the prime difficulties of confronting neoliberalism is that it uses competition between regions and improvements in communication and investment flow to break social solidarity. Capital accumulation benefits from uneven geographical development. Even if labor is able to move to regions with better pay and greater benefits, the state can still manage this movement through restricting immigration, or increasing it.

In addition, the state, with its monopoly on violence, can curb certain forms of "redistribution through criminal violence" (what a great phrase) through incarceration (p. 48). It is difficult to ignore both the tendency toward surveillance and incarceration as social policy over the last few decades, especially in the United States. While Harvey does not discuss these social transformations in detail, one of the purposes of reading Harvey is to establish the features of neoliberal pragmatics before turning to how it interacts with other social institutions.

Next Week: We will be working through at least Chapters 4-6.

Notes

1. On 'governance': Harvey writes that one of the pronounced features of neoliberalism is the shift from government ("state power on its own") to governance ("a broader configuration of state and key elements in civil society"). I think this distinction is useful as long as that we add the phrase "... which includes the redistribution of state resources, and transfer of state functions, to private corporations." See p. 77.

2. "Becoming-rent" is discussed in more depth in Christian Marazzi's accessible (although marred by some typographical errors) The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Trans. Kristina Lebeveda (Semiotext(e), 2010), 44-66.

3. Since I'm on the topic, has anybody else noticed how Zizek hardly references Lacan in First as Tragedy? Is this the case in Living in the End of Times as well? Matt, I'm asking you!

4. Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew (Metropolitan Books, 2008) argues that neoconservatives deliberately misgovern in order to later justify privatizing government functions.

Slavoj Žižek, "Living in the End Times"

(Verso, 2010)

In light of the ongoing financial crisis and the oil hemmorhage in the gulf, I recently conversed with a close friend of mine about "living in the end times". Who other should pop up on my radar with a book by that very name than philosopher-superstar Slavoj Žižek! Needless to say, there is a fair bit more humour in the book than there was in the aforementioned conversation. Not to mention the ideas are bolder and the arguments more complex. Alas, If I had to rate Žižek's latest offering as an elementary school teacher would rate his pupil, I would say that Living in the End Times must apply itself; it should "straighten up and fly right", "spend more time on philosophy 1102 and less time on cultural gossip 1101", etc. In short: this is a mess of a book, but it could very well have been a major philosophical statement on our times. It contains some great ideas and instances of ideology critique in action, but these are scattered almost as if at random in the course of its ungainly 402 pages.

The book takes as its basic premise that the apocalypse is at the gates. The "four horsemen" of the present conjuncture are the environmental crisis, uncertainties surrounding new biotechnologies, the social-economic crisis, and burgeoning forms of apartheid. The argument (?) is loosely based around the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, despair, and acceptance. Each of these gets a chapter which loosely has to do with its title. These are accompanied by "interlude" chapters expanding on some of the ideas; in the case of the interlude on architecture, Žižek appears to be having fun while trying to tie things in to his bigger picture. The punchline of the invocation of Kübler-Ross is that "acceptance" here does not denote quietism in the face of the end. Rather, it speaks of a militant communist subjectivity stripped of its ideological baggage and prepared to run the doomed train of history off its rails. In the words of Mao: "There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent".

For my money, the best parts of the book are the section on China, Congo and Haiti, and the speculations towards the end as per the possible role of art and the artist in a communist society. Readers familiar with his works will find that Žižek does not offer too much of substance that is new here; this is especially frustrating given the vagueness of his political prescriptions as offered up in the recent In Defense of Lost Causes and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

I complain about Žižek, but the very things about which he frustrates me are the things that keep me coming back for more. I do enjoy a good cultural critique, especially one that's counterintuitive. I just can't shake the feeling every time I finish one of his books that I've been had.

On Philosophy in the Present

Philosophy in the Present (Polity, 2009) is a recent translation of talks given by Badiou and Zizek in Vienna in 2004 and published in German in 2005 as Philosophie und Aktualität. Ein Streitgespräch.

I'm not going to give a review of either Badiou's or Zizek's contributions, because much of what they say has been taken up by them in other works. Badiou offers some initial comments about the conditions of philosophy (if you haven't heard, they are politics, art, mathematics and love), and then he reproduces his "Eight Theses on the Universal," published previously in Theoretical Writings (edited by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, Continuum, 2004).

Zizek's essay largely re-affirms Badiou's stance in general, and presents his argumentation for why we should reject the concept of totalitarianism: that it presents a false equivalence between the egalitarian project of communism and fascism. In addition, the concept of totalitarianism, for Zizek, blocks a more "appropriate socio-politicial theory with which we can analyse these of course deplorable phenomena like Nazism and Stalinism in their own conceptuality as projects" (57). Basically themes that have been treated more extensively in his other work (like, I suppose, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?).

The discussion between the two is more entertaining than it is a contentious debate.

Despite the repetition, or because of this repetition is here more accessible, Philosophy in the Present is being touted as an introduction to Badiou and Zizek. However, I don't think it is very useful in this function, not just because the texts are unpolished, or that they don't introduce new material, but primarly due to Peter Engelmann's introduction. Keep in mind what I have said above, and read:

It was not after all very long ago that we talked about what the role of the philosopher Karl Marx had been in the totalitarian regime of Russia, and later the countries of the Soviet bloc. Wasn't the mass murderer Pol Pot an intellectual educated in Paris? How many people were humiliated, expelled and murdered during the Chinese Revolution? [...] the participation of intellectuals in the crimes of the twentieth century weighs heavily on the self-understanding of this social group, at least insofar as it maintains a practical memory of history (viii-ix).

Now, is not the purpose of an introduction to introduce something of either Badiou or Zizek's theory of political commitment? Because this passage ignores, or is a deliberate evasion of, both of their extensive bodies of work, which reject the ideological frame that naively blames intellectuals for political purges or that assumes consensus around the meaning of the Chinese Revolution, not to mention the false equivalence of Marx, who did not live to see any communist state revolutions, with Pol Pot, other intellectuals, or obviously Mao. I find it bizarre, and disappointing, that two philosophers who are sharply critical about revisionism (like Badiou's unapologetic position about his Maoism) let a book be published that is prefaced by such revisionism.

A more honest, and more productive, procedure for the introduction isn't to critique intellectuals for their participation in leftist politics, but ask how intellectuals continue to participate in maintaining and affirming the status quo of liberal democracy. This question isn't too abstract, being that the French media created the nouveaux philosophes, and it actually functions to introduce something of what makes both Badiou and Zizek interesting, rather than recycle platitudes about leftist intellectuals.

Thus, for introductions, instead, I recommend Badiou's Ethics, and perhaps Zizek's most current title (but the clock is ticking...) First as Tragedy, then as Farce (our review is here), or, of course, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Haiti and Imperialism

I just want to add to our two previous posts (here and here), one more statement about disaster capitalism and imperialism, really some more background to Haiti's place in the Western world (I've deliberately used this term), or more specifically, how it is understood within Western ideology. Haiti, we should recall, won its independence as the first successful slave rebellion in 1804. When the country established diplomatic ties with France in 1825 it came at the cost of 150 million francs. Zizek summarizes the situation (in a review of Hallward's book Damming the Flood):

Denounced by Talleyrand as "a horrible spectacle for all white nations", the "mere existence of an independent Haiti" was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal price - for the "premature" independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as "compensation" for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti's payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray).

Then, there was a coup led by the United States, France and Canada (See Engler and Fenton's Canada in Haiti)-- can you guess one of the reasons?, and continuing impovershiment ever since, partially through forced neo-liberal structural adjustments. My concern is not that they will become a victim of disaster capitalism, because there is a long history of that already, but that they will again be forced into continuing "structural readjustment" that will continue to constrain their ability to undertake political reform. That is, when foreign soldiers (peacekeepers) aren't their to constrain them. Nevertheless, we should not call, as Hallward and Zizek stress, Haitians victims. Instead, as Zizek writes,

The Lavalas movement [which included Aristide] has won every free presidential election since 1990, but it has twice been the victim of US-sponsored military coups. Lavalas is a unique combination: a political agent which won state power through free elections, but which all the way through maintained its roots in organs of local popular democracy, of people's direct self-organisation. Although the "free press" dominated by its enemies was never obstructed, although violent protests that threatened the stability of the legal government were fully tolerated, the Lavalas government was routinely demonised in the international press as exceptionally violent and corrupt. The goal of the US and its allies France and Canada was to impose on Haiti a "normal" democracy - a democracy which would not touch the economic power of the narrow elite; they were well aware that, if it is to function in this way, democracy has to cut its links with direct popular self-organisation.

It's a familiar story; change the names and we have been told the same things regarding violence and corruption about Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and even Brazil. Now that a natural disaster has opened Haiti to international aid, let's hope it doesn't come at the cost of already existing political solidarity.

Update: See also this short article on the role of USAID in these structural adjustments.

First as Tragedy, then as Farce

Slavoj Zizek's new book (Verso, 2009) examines the current world financial crisis and attempts to delineate a coherent Leftist response. The book is relatively accessible, and readers frustrated by his unruly and largely redundant previous effort In Defense of Lost Causes will find Zizek back in top critical form.

The current crisis is read in light of a comment of Marx's, to the effect that historical events must occur twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. September 11, 2001 (treated previously by Zizek in the engaging Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso 2002) was the tragic moment showing the naive utopianism of the Fukuyamean/Clintonite "happy 90's"; the bailout of banks and manufacturers by Congress is its farcical repitition (farcical because, among other things, it answers this naive utopianism with the spectacle of failed millionaires being put on a kind of welfare). As always, Zizek zeroes in on the counter-intuitive features of his historical conjuncture - the populist Right is after the wrong targets, the liberal Left is shoring up the big companies - with a view to unmasking their ideological core.

The second half of the book concerns the "communist hypothesis" (Badiou's term) in the present conjuncture. The communist hypothesis, discussed by Badiou in recent texts, is the hypothesis that communism is the right political solution (accepting, of course, that attempts to work it out have hitherto failed). Zizek bets on this hypothesis; he emphasizes however that whereas both Actually Existing Socialism and contemporary liberal capitalism belie an utopian core, his communism is not guilty of a happy Hegelianism that would count history on its side. Rather, Zizek maintains that the Left should assume a coming social / environmental / biogenetic catastrophe, and work backwards to how it might have been stopped. In short, Zizek sees the task of the Left as stopping history in its tracks by communist means and for communist aims. One sees again his affinity for Lenin, who it will be recalled was a voluntarist, strategic reader of Hegel.

Some of the prescriptive vagueness of In Defense of Lost Causes is repeated here, but I believe that Zizek gives the outline of what could prove a compelling philosophical argument for a communist response. He lives up to his reputation for weaving philosophy, pop culture, politics and psychoanalysis into an engaging whole; ultimately, however, the philosophical meat of his arguments is to be sought in earlier texts (now on Verso as "The Essential Zizek").

Zizek on Health Care and Ideology

Just having acquired First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, I found, via Verso UK's blog, an interview with Slavoj Zizek. I've found some of his latest work to be somewhat uneven. Read, for instance, his list of demands at the end of In Defense of Lost Causes, and try and figure out how these points are supposed to be implemented. Lately, however, Zizek has returned to analyzing ideology, which is always his strong point. For all the right reasons, he states (see also the comments of this co-star of The Examined Life):

This is was the point of my big fight with Simon Critchley. I think it's too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let's withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. Here, I'm an old Hegelian. I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: ""I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. That's what I miss in today's left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible. This is why I supported - ok, my support doesn't mean anything, but as a public gesture- Obama. I think the battle that he is fighting now for healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The real core of the anti-Obama campaign is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is how freedom of choice is something beautiful, but works only against a very thick background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. This is the problem. As I like to emphasise here in the States, there are freedoms of choice which I am glad to renounce. I like to do a parallel between healthcare and water and electricity. Yes, you can say I don't have a choice in choosing my water provider. It's imposed by where I live. But, my god, I gladly renounce this choice. I prefer to have some basic choices made by society - water, electricity, and some elementary healthcare.

What Zizek doesn't mention is that the Democrats seem to be the only people who don't understand the debate over health care to be an ideological battle.(of course, some of them have been well paid off by the insurance industry). The Republicans know that, which is why they have spent so much time trying to defeat it. The very core of conservative ideology is that, with the exception of the military, the government is bad, and that it should (although they don't say it like this) force public property into private markets. The very basic step of fighting this position is to show why water, electricity and health care are public goods that need to be distributed in a regulated and more egalitarian manner. If there were disagreements between my friends and I on the left during the election season, it was about whether Obama being elected mattered. They said no. I still say that, with a few of his legislative plans, his administration can overturn the ideological coordinates that have dominated American political life for 40 years. This is a positive step. It is still capitalism with a human face, but it is also a failure on the left to not show how civil and cultural struggle is also connected to economic struggle. And on this point, I agree with Zizek: it's not only a practical failure but also a theoretical failure. Which is why I started reading up again on economics.

Which is also why we should question the expectation that the legislative process can accomplish this without popular support. Recall that Jim Clyburn called health care a civil right. The comparison is apt, because Clyburn is really saying that if people want change, it cannot be fully accomplished without popular demonstration. The precise point: history is made from below, not by politicians. We didn't have civil rights legislation in the 1960s because politicians felt like they should be more egalitarian, we had civil rights legislation because people were out in the streets showing that the system oppressing African Americans could no longer function without open and explicit violence. But Clyburn also noted the the backlash is going to be ugly, as it was in the town hall disruptions over the summer.

Now there is a limit to the comparison, but the point is that the public option rises or falls on people's involvement. The good part is that people have been getting out to convince others that the public option is the key component of making it health care reform and not insurance industry reform. Not only in practice, but in theory.