Actually existing liberalism

One of the best Zizek lectures I've ever heard, from a little while ago (November of last year). I myself would get behind a lot of what is said--including the comment on Latour. The look at the contradictions in the notion of individual choice is precise. But also featured are levelheaded remarks on the artificial (biological life), the posthuman and augmented reality, Freud (materialist) and Jung, thought and modernity, and really or actually existing liberalism.

David Harvey again

From Marxism 2009 last year. Though I'd heard of him and his excellent work before, I only really started to read some of Harvey when I was writing on Raymond Williams (Harvey has the single best piece on Williams--in Spaces of Capital--thinking through Williams' problematic "militant particularism"). I'm liking him a lot. Again, if you haven't seen the Reading Capital course, check that out. It's a good way to get through that book, which is one of those no one ever reads all the way through unless it's assigned (not unlike anything by Hegel). That's not always a bad thing, of course (certainly in Hegel, though only reading the master-slave passage in the Phenomenology or the beginnings of the greater Logic and thinking the dialectic is "therefore" necessary to "overcome" is pushing this way too far). I'm planning on going all the way through Capital 2 and 3 shortly (I've only really gotten through the beginning of 2 and the end of 3), so it's a great refresher and a good way to pick up those parts of the first book (especially part 7) I never made it through. I never touched anything really after the chapter on the working day (except some pieces of the machinery chapter and the amazing part on primitive accumulation), even when I reread it for exams last summer: in literary studies, due to Derrida and his specters, the focus is still on the first three chapters on use and exchange value (though not confusing the labor theory of value with the value theory of labor has enough attendant complications), often to the detriment of the theory of surplus value as a whole.

One more thing. Harvey above (and in a recent paper) talks about a transition from capitalism to socialism--revolution--taking just about as long (or at least involving as much complexity and work) as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. This is a welcome comment (obviously drawn from Marx's sense of things itself) when revolution has always had the connotation of radical, instantaneous breaks on the one hand, and on the other has been conceptually discredited by the theoretical left itself in the US for about forty years in favor of micropolitical models of change (or a a dour sort of pragmatism, which turns quickly into a fatalism, rightly thrust to the fore for critical inspection at Planomenology--though one should also point out Zizek too often trades in this pessimism). To this, I would also just add a pragmatic remark about the relation of revolution to violence by by Fredric Jameson:

What is always at the bottom of the quarrel about the term [revolution--MJ] is the conception of revolution as violent, as a matter of armed struggle, forceful overthrow, the clash of weapons wielded by people willing to shed blood. This conception explains in turn of what may be called demotic Trotskyism, that is, the insistence on adding the requirement of "armed struggle" to whatever socialist proviso is at issue: something that would seem both to substitute effect for cause and unnecessarily to rase the ante on salvation. Rather, this proposition needs to be argued the other way around: namely that the other side will resort to force when the system is threatened in genuinely basic or fundamental ways...
 -"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 388

Then I would follow that up with how he shows, pointing rightly at Allande's Chile, just how plausible the beginnings of such a long revolution (Raymond Williams' term) actually are:

Left electoral victories are neither hollow social-democratic exercises nor occasions in which power passes hands definitively: rather, they are signals for the gradual unfolding of democratic demands, that is to say, increasingly radical claims on a sympathetic government which must now, in obedience to that development, be radicalized in its turn, unless it sells out to the appeal for order. The revolutionary process in this sense is a new legal dispensation in which repressed popular groups slowly emerge from the silence of their subalternity and dare to speak out--an act which can range, as in Allende's revolutionary Chile, from the proposal of new kinds of laws to the seizure of farm lands [which right now we find in Venezuela--MJ]; democracy necessarily means that kind of speaking out, which can also be identified as the truest form of the production of new needs (as opposed to consumerism).
-"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 391

So new laws, new freedoms, new regulations, alongside the building of new economic infrastructures under the emerging new state:

The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics [...] They directed co-ops [...] to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives , and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year's wages into the firm's equity fund, wages earned in the apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to yearly review by the councils.
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars, 296-7

And one more thing: this sort of conception of revolution concretely situates any cultural or discursive struggle--struggle on that level is only of finite use, and takes place at that level. Cultural politics is only politics (often just politicization, often just micropolitics) unless it also hits at or ties into economic levels--as Jameson (who some might call a mere cultural Marxist) never gets tired of saying.

But then again it is also necessary to register (with Harvey--see this lecture of his for an elaboration of his point about Ch. 15, footnote 4 in the short piece above--and Jameson) that there are many levels of struggle, and that no one who seriously is engaged in cultural Marxism believes they can turn the world around just at that level. No, it's often a micropolitical model that believes that--along with people who dismiss cultural Marxism as a safe or partial form of commitment. The dismissive sense of that last word shows that its positive sense--that indeed, as applied, it is a piece in a larger situation--isn't available from this perspective, one that also believes with the micropolitics of Foucault especially (and tendencies in critical theory in general) that institutions (the "academy") are what is big and bad, and moreover are what determine and compromise the situation of cultural anti-capitalist critique (rather than capitalism, which is precisely much larger--and smaller--than any institution).

My point is that "the production of new needs" is what cultural criticism is about (finite, because representational, demands and Utopian possibilities), but is about this alongside other--indeed partial--sorts of activities and commitments that are by no means incapable of this sort of production (Jameson's phrasing here is precisely calculated to emphasize the fact that these needs can be and are produced at these other levels--even especially at economic ones). Significantly, it is precisely the cultural level (or the level of everyday life) that is most engaged by the recent statements of Zizek, Jameson, Harvey, Badiou and others to think hard about what communism might be, to imagine Utopias, to speak up out of subalternity and present alternative experiences of the world, and, indeed, to think about revolution: "carving out autonomous spaces," as Paul Ennis recently calls it, in various ways (he talks about what Badiou thinks is necessary, against Zizek, but I think Zizek too thinks this Utopian--and I use this word in an approving, Harveyian, Jamesonian sense that too few share--enclave-production occurs or is at least pragmatically necessary). And it is this cultural level that is most misunderstood by people unfamiliar with that level and what it involves (including the sacrifices that I don't think we can just say are nonexistent--unless we keep thinking all cultural Marxists are just "humanists" in a disturbing new sense). That, however, means education is necessary (both of yourself and the misinformed, as Harvey insists upon above: part of the problem is that this stuff isn't taught, or only gotten through someone like Zizek), and repeated reconnection of this level to others (an act that cultural criticism and recent ideology critique has learned to do in perhaps the most adept and tactical way).

And indeed, cultural Marxism is great at this too: what is culture but a way to reconnect while recognizing that separation of levels, rather than try and construct a one-off sort of immanent metaphysical level at which every microelement just is or is not political? I don't even think you can say cultural Marxism has gone too far--which is what the reactionary consensus in the US (indeed increasingly in literary studies) seems to be. We need more cultural studies, not less. As these studies make their way into departments dealing with urbanism, architecture, media theory and design--where some of the most radical Marxist work is now being done--I think they become more concrete and produce more connections and reconnections, perhaps, than they did when this study was done primarily in literature and film (or philosophy). But that's a development and transformation, which is also probably a shift made in accordance with changes in the system studied and the new forms reconnection to other levels is imagined to take.

Bad theory

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or combated in the name of preserving continual micro-self-differentiation etc., etc. Rather, bad elements (that is, bad procedures, bad ways of writing into which we slip--bad theorizing rather than bad theoretical positions or theories) should be identified, isolated, and clipped off or left alone to wither. Here then is what might constitute the "bad theory" (and it should be clear that by "bad" I mean something like "defunct" or "spoiled") that we might just hesitate before putting into service yet again, in another empty denunciation of... what have you:

Theory gone bad is theory that tries to assure the unqualified prolongation of theory. Theory should be finite--more than that, it should continually, with each use, project the point at which it might not be of use. Thus even if you want to say theory is immanent to thought itself, and therefore finite in that respect (when thought dies out theory will die out too), it would still be avoiding the issue: the issue is that the production of something different than theory cannot just be problematized from the outside.

Ethical theory is theory gone bad. There is too much talk of ethics and responsibility now, and this produces a lot of bad theory. This is because the use of ethical terms is the quickest way to build a bridge between politics and theory, or rather the politicization that takes place as theory (as I've outlined before) and the realm of society in all its diffuseness. Perhaps it is an attempt to thicken the overquick linkages to the political realm which early theory indeed made. But there's no reason this has to take the form of ethics--except possibly because this allows theory to sound more relevant, to issue more injunctions. At it's limit, this involves the dissolution of everything political about theory into philosophy, which has always been too comfortable with staying out of politics as it is: why ethics and responsibiliy are semi-proper philosophical subjects is because politics often comes to interrupt and situate philosophical speculation, embarrassing it. Theory that strives to be philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) shouldn't go down the same road. In this respect I agree even with the extreme assertion of Zizek that, within the period under consideration (1933 and a little after), Heidegger's politicization of his philosophy is more valuable than his outlines of the structures of proper philosophizing (in his courses especially) that borders on an ethics--which is what in general I take away from his recent consideration of Heidegger's joining the Nazis (in In Defense of Lost Causes). That doesn't at all make what Heidegger did right--as Zizek would crudely hold, himself couching things in an overblown ethical language which supposes that the value of this could have been disclosed to him personally and guided his action at the same time as that action could represent a value attributed after the fact, which we perceive as the imposition of politics on the situation (this language--increasingly Badiouian--confuses things almost completely, as I've said before regarding Zizek on this fraught issue). But to attribute such value means (however crudely or confusedly) to recognize that politics imposes itself continually and is actively contained and bracketed by philosophies as well as other forms of knowledge. Theory normally attempts to trace what is thereby left out--but with an ethical turn (which was foreshadowed in the "deconstructivism" practiced at Yale by de Man, where people preached to no end about responsibility in reading), it loses its vocation and becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, and insofar as this irrelevance suffuses theory, "the political" comes up more and more, leading us to the next form of bad theory:

Reifying concepts in order to protect them from reification. Such, at least, is the strategy I see behind such ugly invocations of "the political" or "the social." This form of parody only lends itself to a high seriousness that undoes the reason for adopting the parodic gesture in the first place.

Similarly, bad theory trades in commonplaces. These include the use of phrases like "identity politics," which are most of the time just codes for a reactive movement against queer or feminist impacts upon the humanities. But "western metaphysics" is also a commonplace. Eventually, this trade in commonplaces (a dissolution of the commons?) results in a prohibition on experience itself, as each of these are traded in for something supposedly known (and never described in detail)--or turned back into their reified pseudo-philosophical counterpart by the move we just mentioned.

This is related to the bad-theoretical overuse of alterity as a concept. The dynamics in which alterity engages us are ultimately reductive and need to be reopened back up into the contexts (experiential) from which they emerge. Even if the concept is used to precisely fight reduction, to insist on irreducibility, it has become an uncreative way to reorganize a wide array of phenomena along too-familiar lines.

This is also the way that bad theory ends up relying too much on "language," and makes it into a homogenous field through which everything has to pass. Language isn't that important to good theory. Or, rather, when it becomes a crutch, it isn't language.

Next, bad theory quickly displaces social dynamics too quickly into theoretical terms. An example would be the oft cited "subordination of feminism by Marxism." What and who are we actually talking about here? It is here where Foucault's "discourse" comes in to save the day: when in doubt, say discourse does it. Theories of ideology, in comparison, have infinitely more subtlety--and that's saying something. In Foucault himself, the notion is structured (in the Archaeology of Knowledge) to get him out of precisely the dilemma this question (what? who?) produces, as it is posed to him by people who rightly were wondering just how he was able to coordinate so much information concerning the rise of the human sciences. While it's right to insist that the stratifications of discourse, as well as its effectivity (and by means of such insistence, discourse thereby becomes a richer concept in Judith Butler and Edward Said), this might not be enough to rescue the concept from its reduction to an empty field producing too many of those effects. Discourse has to be used more carefully, with more structuralist concepts brought in to thicken the mix.

Bad theory thinks of itself as avant-garde. It has an easy relationship to its own history that sadly ends up mirroring the simplistic histories of ideas which it was supposed to displace. In general, it proceeds as an arrogant new humanism by thinking of itself as a progressive adventure.

Bad theory thinks it only includes by opening itself to multiplicities. While the focus on alterity is reductive, it'd be wrong to see multiplicity as an alternative, or something that does the job better--even if one conceives of it "rightly" (that is, itself fraught with difference or composed only of differences and dimensions, as in Deleuze rather than in Laclau and Mouffe). Multiplicity might not always be the right thing to which a situation must be opened up or in terms of which it should be conceived. Something like totalization can be mobilized against universality and even unity and oneness, as in Sartre or Adorno.

This touches on another aspect of bad theory: it's unwillingness to use more than one or two theories. Bad theory is usually only one or two theories, which gets stuck to or followed to the letter. It's not yet dogma, because it has so much functionality and can in general also be illuminating. But it seeks to eliminate other theories or foreclose their imposition--which occurs often, and as an annoying conceptual muddle--precisely by extending the one position (and flattening or restricting itself so they can be assimilated without reducing them--which would require changing the current stance). Good theory is polyglot and patchwork: it knows when to shut up in one system and shift to another (in other words, it shouldn't proceed by increasing the number of prohibitions upon itself--something nearly all bad theory does--and then get angry at those who misunderstand the minimalist language). Just because the concept itself--here multiplicity--is actually structured (rigorously) in order not to foreclose something, doesn't mean everyone should see how it doesn't exclude something. Everyone shouldn't have to get on your page (or be immanent to whatever) to be on the same page. Moreover, theory should actually open itself up to other things at the edge of theory, which theory isn't--thus I insisted at the beginning on the finitude of theory, which now is rethought spatially--indeed like literary theory and literary analysis. This leads into my last characterization:

Bad theory thinks it itself is politics: while theory represents the politicization (if only by oblique suggestion) of various other fields and their materials and procedures, it has to be interrupted by something from outside itself--or, as theory, has to go someplace other than the lecture hall--in order to actually become something like activism. Along these lines, one shouldn't think that because one's theory says it does not separate a particular conception and politics (like in theoretical Spinozism), introducing the concept into an arena is not political, nor does it link the politicization that might (and only might) thereby occur to actual politics. It's not that there is a gap which we can never bridge--it is simply that politicization and politics itself requires this lack of certainty as to whether it is, in any instance, traversed, as I think Judith Butler (for one) outlines quite well.

Reversals

Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb "always"? It reminds me of the bumper stickers that instruct people in other cars to "Question Authority." Excellent advice, perhaps wasted on anyone who does whatever they're ordered to do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile!
-Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 125

I've always thought this remark of Sedgwick's demonstrates most concretely the misreading of "Jameson's Imperative" so very prevalent wherever his work is considered. The phrase "Always historicize!" is to be taken dialectically, as is clear from the opening of The Political Unconscious in which it first appears:

Always historicize! This slogan--the one absolute and we may even say "transhistorical" imperative of all dialectical thought--will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well.
-The Political Unconscious, 9

One is tempted, in the end, to rewrite Jameson's "we may even say" the other way around. For what gets missed by someone like Sedgwick is that this imperative is also "the one absolute." This means that we have to read such a statement as already expressing a contradiction. Thus the "always" is not to be seen as atemporal, and blindly used as "proof" that the motto's inconsistency is fatal to its integrity. Yet you see that this is what Sedgwick does, planted firmly as she is in the stance of reflection. Indeed, if we view things rightly, we see that Jameson calls it an imperative only in order to anticipate his anti-dialectical readers precisely on this point, to try and get them to actually think the contradiction (this is also why he uses transhistorical, in quotes). Instead, they bastardize the contradiction and act as if Jameson is accountable for it.

There's good reason, however, for this situation. One doesn't point at an inconsistency in the dialectic and say "Gotcha!" just because one takes it reflectively. Rather, it comes from a distrust in general concerning what we might call the dialectical reversal--that shift in emphasis caused by the turning of things into what they weren't supposed not to be. This reversal is, for Jameson, never an instance of something local multiplying relations, inflecting things slightly differently--however quietly it may occur. The tortuous paths that Hegel traces while turning quality into quantity may seem to involve extremely small points (how did we end up discussing gravity?), but these points never reverse things because they are local. Rather, the reversal occurs when something larger comes to force things to put up or shut up, to move towards definite closure--as Jameson always excellently puts it.

It is an intolerance of this sort of pressure from closure, of the totality bearing down on the instance, that then makes us avoid the reversal. Or, as Jameson would rather describe it, a general jadedness with respect to such massive structures--a belief in their irrelevance and even a feeling that they are not interesting, or only are interesting to moralists (who love their generalizations). Indeed, a sense that Jameson's writings are always heavyhanded, that they carry their lesson, seems to float around in discussions of him. We certainly see this in the quote from Sedgwick, who sticks him on that bumper. Personally, I find Jameson much lighter in tone than that.

It's rather those with the unconditional regard for the local who seem to me to couch things in moralistic terms (respect the particular!), in order to emphasize how something can ever have effects beyond the local context. Thus, it's no accident that Sedgwick invokes close reading at the end of that essay where she dismisses historicizing and advocates, instead, weak theory (a promising notion that I'll return to sometime):

What could better represent "weak theory, little better than a description of the phenomena which it purports to explain," than the devalued and near obsolescent New Critical skill of imaginative close reading?
-Touching Feeling, 145

There's the moralistic insistence that the focus which never goes beyond its immediate context is, paradoxically, obsolescent, tougher to do than it sounds, nearly impossible. It's no matter that close reading has from the beginning been "devalued," or rather an attempt to make such attention virtuous (as D.A. Miller rightly argues). Seen beside the dismissal of Jameson's "always," we see that close reading ends up as something like a mere refuge for those who distrust that total shift of emphasis.

At the same time, though, I wonder whether the reversal merits this distrust when dialectic becomes identified with something like what Zizek does. For while everyone seems to worry whether Zizek does violence to the object by ramming it through the dialectic, I'd rather take a Jamesonian stance and wonder whether the victim of Zizek's dialectic is the dialectic itself. Why? Though it reverses things, the dialectic doesn't take up whatever it finds and proceed to turn it around. Such a maneuver may be necessary to get the wheels going, but it amounts to the same thing, really, as "imaginative close reading" and stems from the same overemphasis on the particular--or inability to see the totality. The Frankfurt School did much to widen the gap between the local and the total, and provide many intermediaries--such as constellations--that could allow you to move more carefully from one to the other: Zizek would benefit from using them, because rather than imposing too much of something external on the content, his moves simply are not formal enough. This is why Jameson explains dialectic as something like forcing a closure--the reversal has to come from elsewhere and the effort to get there. And this is also why it doesn't resemble a shock or short-circuit (as Zizek calls it) so much as a different emphasis.

Critique and revolution

In what I won't hesitate to say is the single best essay I've read on Derrida, "Marx's Purloined Letter," Fredric Jameson says (I paraphrase) that Derrida committed himself early on to the idea that systemic change was the only change there could be, and yet that this change could itself not be brought about by any existing system. This makes his work resolutely political in a strange, irresolute way: it seems more about preserving the possibility for change than bringing about change itself, as if on the one hand he wanted to freeze in time that ("magic" I think Badiou recently called it) moment between 1960 and 1968, after the post-war philosophies and before the post-68 micropolitics, and on the other, constantly found new ways to unfreeze this possibility in surprisingly relevant ways even into the 21st century. His project is then extremely consistent because it focuses itself on a type of change that has that sort of afterlife within (or before?) its life. This also makes the sort of change it protects extremely (and, for many, frustratingly) hard to realize.

Zizek recently (in In Defense of Lost Causes) characterized current postmodernist discourse as the result of a crisis of Leninism. To me, he's beating a dead horse, more than surprising us with something we should have already known. At most, that is, he's bringing this crisis home to the most ignorant, those who have the most secret sympathies with postmodernism despite allegedly breaking with it long ago, and haven't realized this was true twenty years ago. Sometimes that's necessary of course. But it seems old to me because Derrida seems to see this from the get-go. Thus there is not only explicit resistance to the Leninism of his interviewers in Positions, but also a resistance to giving them any very stable alternative. The alternative is, indeed, that of "overturning and displacement," which he calls a strategy. What I'd like to suggest is that this move here, as well as that of founding an impossible science of grammatology (among other things) are indeed part of an effort to rethink revolution in a way that both resists the classical Leninist position, as well as the more populist-leaning plans one will find after '68, though Derrida has, I think, more sympathy with them. What people often called his resistance to Marxism was indeed a resistance to vanguardism--and, I'd say, to the way vanguardism can creep into postmodern attempts to bypass it.

Spivak said once that Derrida wanted to write a book on Gramsci, but assembling the fragments was so demanding he never got around to it. I have a feeling that the book would indeed be about socialist strategy, but wouldn't quite resemble Laclau and Mouffe's writings. Gramsci indeed offers the alternative to revolution, but not so much by abandoning class, as they say. Acting as if purifying Marxism of class will be a major factor in overcoming the Leninist vanguardism--which Laclau and Mouffe don't entirely do, but which ends up being the postmodern position in general, often using their theses as justification--really only just keeps vanguardism rumbling underground. It is only dispersed into micropolitics of various sorts, pockets of local resistance which we can only add up, or agglomerate. And this only preserves the idea that in the end it is revolution that is the goal.

What Derrida does politically, from the beginning, is challenge any notion that revolution can occur through such local struggle. At the same time, he affirms that what we can see, what we can adequately deal with, will always be local struggle--or will manifest itself only in those terms. So this cuts off the additive connection, and makes us think always about that particular "short-circuit" (to use a Zizekian word) between the local and the totality (and the other way around--how total struggle strikes to form local contradictions). This doesn't exclude reform as a possibility (to pick up the old opposition). Rather, because his position makes reform something less subordinate to revolution, something different than the failed revolution or total change, his position encourages it. The point, though, is that we lose any notion of direction, of leading, and of the agglomeration of small groups of whatever sort that would ultimately end in an overturning of the present order.

Thus there is an intimate connection between revolution and globalization in Derrida: the revolution of the circle does not exclude, but rather encourages, the notion that if we expand our horizons (rigorously excluding what falls from above or rises from below, the Zufall), if we expand our world, we will all, ultimately, be connected and lead together through some great change. In this way, thinking globally and acting locally becomes indistinguishable, at a certain point, from thinking locally and acting globally. Both these propositions pass into each other, but what we find out is that at this moment, each has lost its meaning--as one can see in various aspects of the "go green" "movement" which Zizek (I think rightly) finds disgusting, along with the other perverse attempts act as if multinational capitalism can be fought through consumption itself (though one shouldn't entirely condemn reform--that follows from what I said above concerning separating it from revolution). Somewhere the system, the totality, has been missed. And this is why Derrida wants us to think revolution differently, in terms of something like strategy which opens onto total effects which it cannot anticipate on a horizon (what he calls the invention of the other).

Now, this also means intense reading of the local--that is, activities that are usually involved in something like critique. Derrida wishes to get beyond critique (thus deconstruction continually opposes itself to criticism), but he isn't against reading (as should be obvious). This, perhaps, hasn't actually been stressed enough: too quickly he was seen as precisely a critic (see Foucault's famous remarks on him at the end of History of Madness, which accuse him of justifying something like infinite explication in old philosophy classrooms--which are weirdly affirmed in the U.S. as what "saves the text" by Paul de Man), that somehow was against the normal way of reading. Everything about this view must be reversed. Meanwhile, one can wonder (with Zizek and many others) whether, at this point, it is actually at the other end of the spectrum that we should be working: thinking, that is, on the level of totalities. The only thing that Derrida did in this area is something Zizek thinks is particularly postmodern: he thought that the experience of thinking a totality had to be something like Benjaminian weak messianism. Perhaps this is indeed postmodern (approaching something like worship of a God without being). But if you tie it back into the thinking of revolution, and the rethinking of vanguardism, we see its origins, at least, are different. Zizek would rightly say that we don't need anything weak right now. But what I'd stress is that Derrida gives us a weakness that is, when perceived against this background, something more productive than what Zizek and various Lacanians have their sights set on (that postmodern religion and religiosity--which I agree can be interesting, but is a weird and suspicious turn for things to take). And what this means is that he offers us a way where elements of the local, which take over the interpretive aspects of the critical, can be retained to fight something like the crisis of Leninism--which indeed ends up in that precise fatalist sort of religiosity (our local struggles can't do anything, our thinking of the global can only be weak, so we just have to keep doing what we're doing, which is emptily criticizing both the local and the whole system at once). For too quickly the call to think new total systems sees itself as opposed to not only criticism, but the activities involved in criticism--like reading and interpretation. What I'd argue is that this can end up being just another form of criticism, now empty of all of its content. Derrida gives us a notion that we can pull away from criticism by modifying its elements, precisely by making the total system bear upon them. If we have now discovered this also means thinking the totality has a relationship to these elements (partially because, with Derrida, we have blinded ourselves to the inner dynamics of institutions, the possibilities of reform within them that are not ultimately directed towards revolution, and focused continually on their forms of founding violence--the other side of the naive recognition that they are, indeed, organized organizations), and perhaps a more important role than this strategic activity, this is perfect--we're not then really claiming that we're giving up all that reading that is involved in making visible, and rendering strategic, the local changes (in other words that the changes will have, for us, local effects). Don't get me wrong: it's not that interpretation and reading are something really great in themselves. But I just want to make clear that there is a danger in renouncing them. This would be to continually convey, in writing and through reading, that giving up writing and reading means we're going to immediately start thinking the totality. And this, I'd claim, might only be the other side of a certain postmodernism (which, people don't seem to remember, specifically militated against interpretation--i.e. Foucault and his historicists), and it tends to creep into certain discourses now that suspiciously lay all the blame on critique, on hermeneutics of suspicion.

For alma mater...

What lurks at the horizon... is the nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for other's beliefs: a society immobilized by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is and in which individuals are engaged in regular rituals of "witnessing" their victimization. When I visited the University of Champaign in Illinois, I was taken to a restaurant where the menu offered Tuscany fries. When I asked friends about this they explained that the owner wanted to appear patriotic apropos the French opposition to the U.S. attack on Iraq, so he followed the U.S. Congress and renamed French fries "freedom fries." However, the progressive members of the faculty (the majority of his customers) threatened to boycott his place if freedom fries remained on the menu. The owner didn't want to lose his customers, but still wanted to appear patriotic, so he invented a new name, "Tuscany fries." This had the added advantage of sounding European, and also echoing the vogue of idyllic films about Tuscany.
-Slavoj Zizek, Violence, p. 130

A tribute to Slavoj Zizek

I have been a bit harsh to Slavoj Zizek on this blog here, but I want to sort of take a step back and note that my harshness only comes from a deep belief that I think he is one of the best people that we have thinking today. In the end, my quibbles with him are with the particular directions that I see him going, never ones regarding the core of what he is doing and what he stands for. I actually think he is perhaps one of the most responsible intellectuals we have around. I want to outline here why I think this is so, and also why I think it is important to defend him against the ridiculous, uninformed slander that appeared a couple days ago in The New Republic about him.
This utterly disgusting denunciation of Adam Kirsch's--a young, unqualified, almost uneducated, unbelievably arrogant hack who works as a quote book critic unquote for the eminent literary journal that is the New York Sun--tries to pose as a review of Zizek's two latest books, Violence and In Defense of Lost Causes, but basically uses tired, pathetic arguments to try and remain as deaf as possible to anything Zizek has written. First, it says Zizek's 2007 article on the prevalence in the US of quite indifferent (but not scientific) discussions of torture--an amazing article, I think--is a trick Zizek pulled just to look good. It presupposes that he is a celebrity academic and that people are willing to read him because he is fashionable. Zizek would then be just trying to sell more books by acting like the good guy who denounces torture (see the article). In short, he'll say anything. Second, it claims that he is a jet-setting professor who poses as a rebel. This presupposes that what he says is dishonest or ineffective because of his position as an academic--and that the academy is disconnected with and ultimately hostile to reality (as if this article, this periodical, and this author wasn't). Third (and perhaps the most vomit-inducing) it makes him out to be un-American. In short, it presupposes that his Slovenian worldview is too restricted and inherently prejudiced against the US and capitalism.
Now, I think it is important to resist this slander because--as you can see from these presuppositions--all these points are the most banal but most prevalent ways people can dismiss him rather than engage him rigorously. I like to think that we're past this view of him--the view of him as a celebrity, as a provocateur, as a foreigner. This stupid image of him, I think, has shown itself just to be uninformative when we actually pick up his writings. He writes in the most calm, perspicuous philosophical English and is willing to engage the most analytic of philosophers in serious debate. This should be enough to convince us that what troubles the little imp here and makes him want to put Zizek down is actual philosophical language, proffered to us in the spirit of discussion--the kind of language you aren't exposed to as a feted Harvard undergraduate (Kirsch's only qualifications) because complaining to your wealthy parents and your connections is usually enough to make the problem (language that makes your tiny brain actually work) go away. "You can talk about these things?! Gasp! I thought capitalism, morals, ethics couldn't be discussed!" For this imbecile, this snot, a discussion leads to thinking, to questioning. This can't be allowed: either you're with us or against us--that is, the unprofessional, unintellectual, staggeringly stupid, yet wealthy, connected white male aesthetes.
But if these presuppositions hang on a bit even in our circles--and like I said, I don't know how much they do, but I'd like to kill them off for good here--it might be because of that fundamental feeling we get from the subject matter of his writing: that is, its inflammatory content, produced by astonishing reversals. Now, Zizek is inflammatory--but, quite frankly, I think he just shows us how little we know how to regard the tradition that he works in: that of (primarily Lacanian) psychoanalysis. For is it really for shock value that he talks about these things? Or is he really just trying to make sense of aspects of our life that are, indeed, tied intimately to the unconscious?
I could go further: so what if he was indeed trying to shock sometimes? Don't we know by now that this is precisely the effect of using what psychoanalysts called constructions? Or, to put it in more modern terms, don't we know by now that this is precisely the effect of the process that Lacan called "traversing the fantasy?" We perhaps display, that is, a fundamental naivete with regard to this Freudian and Lacanian post-hermeneutical process, a naivete which is typical of our thinking in the United States. The fact that something the analyst says to us--and Zizek is most certainly that, a critical analyst or producer of a cultural symptomatology--shocks us does not have to issue from the fact that what is said is shocking. Rather, our shock is the release of affect that comes with hitting something that makes our fantasy--our stable vision of the world--look just as constructed as what the analyst says. In short, the shock is part of the function of the interpretation that Zizek gives us. This means that the interpretation is not a mere commentary, but something that is mobilized in order to do something other than what it says. If it is said just to shock, what this really means is that it is said to try and bring about some change in relation to the fantasy that our unconscious produces and sustains. The point is then to bring us into a healthier relation with respect to the possibility of culture to build fantasies--that is, to be able to begin to live with an unconscious.
In short, Zizek shows us, like Freud did, that we are prudes. Not prudes with respect to sexuality, depravity, and the like, perhaps, but prudish with respect to dirty or indirect arguments: we don't want them to function any different than by meaning. Once we understand that what Zizek says perhaps has a function besides meaning--namely, traversing the fantasy--then our relationship to its shocking content becomes more mature. Of course, this doesn't mean that loses its ability to shock--and we begin to understand that we wouldn't want it to. For what is crucial to note here is that this non-meaningful function of traversing the fantasy takes place precisely through meaning: that something means when it is said is the precise thing that Zizek takes up and fiddles with--he thereby uses the fantasy against itself to try and shift the way the unconscious constructs it. So what I'm claiming is not that we are prudes because we are shocked by what Zizek says: indeed, what he says is sometimes rough to take. What I'm saying is that we are prudish because we are not open to the fact that the meaning can take on something that our unconscious gives it, and that perhaps its functioning, if altered, can be different. (Of course we would not be open at first--this fact here is repressed--but, afterwards, we might have a more open and mature relation to what happened when the repressed returned in this way. This is what we lack. In other words, we can't be prepared for what Zizek is saying, but we can, after he says it, be more committed to understanding why and, more importantly here, how it was said. This would produce genuine discussion--with disagreements--with less dismissal in front of a particular topic... fisting, for example. This would also allow us to think more about how to understand how Zizek can be wrong, or mislead--something I'm still not sure how to talk about without my prudish dismissal.)
So when this idiot quotes Zizek and tries to get the better of him with arguments any imbecile can make, we understand that, beyond the bankruptcy of the anti-intellectualist and xenophobic remarks, there is also a fundamental misunderstanding, and prudishness, at work that makes him take what Zizek says at face value. Really, is irony--which here I'll define positively as the capability of a discourse (whether theoretical/analytic or not) to function other than by direct reference--still that tough to comprehend? Perhaps, yes, to know, since what we are dealing with is a process that works back towards the unconscious and actually uses the fact that what is said gets its irony precisely from meaning... but knowing is not the same as comprehension, or a basic grasp of the importance of openness, not unlike the openness of a patient to analysis that she or he exhibits in just showing up.
But enough of this disgusting essay: I want to outline what I think is so eminently valuable about Zizek in more of my own terms.
For me, first and foremost, and as I've remarked before, a notion of the unconscious as closer to the sublime of Kant, which ultimately bridges the tradition of psychoanalysis with the tradition of phenomenology and the tradition of German Idealism, all at one go. It makes the unconscious able to be looked at through many more lenses more quickly.
It should be immediately said after this that this is another unbelievably valuable trait: the willingness to find a set of concepts that can function as a meeting-point for several discourses at once and thereby allow a clearer explanation of what is going on. Zizek is unparalleled in this respect, I think, both on this side of the Atlantic and on the Continent. He is, hands down, the best explainer we have. Like Anglo-American philosophers, he is still so willing to use examples, which I appreciate immensely. But he also thinks of concepts as things like examples--as structures that can, in their working, be ranged alongside each other and chosen for use based on whether they will allow more or less phenomena to be explained by them clearly. Thus the functioning of the sublime, above. If one really reads Zizek's summary of the concept of the sublime, one will be disappointed and find all sorts of inaccuracies. But--again this discourse functions as well as means--if one realizes that the concept is doing more work than just what it did in Kant, that it is something like a priveliged concept that can join together both experience and other discourses, well, Zizek becomes much clearer, and you will be able to disagree with him on more substantial issues.
This brings me to the next virtue of his work, which is what I disagree with him least about: his strident opposition to populism. For me, some of his best articles are those that resist Ernesto Laclau's recent work. This is not because they promote a sort of anti-democratic and anti-identity politics (after all, populism is arguably, as a response to trends in existing democracies, both of these). Rather, it is because he wants to see democracy differently but not take the easy way out of the problem that populism is. In short, he wants more government, not more people--and this is not anti-democratic. At the very least once could say that he wants to find ways that having a more substantial governmental role is amenable to the principles and the freedoms that democracy cherishes. This, for me, is precisely a response against what is most nihilistic, most pragmatic about populism: the idea that freedom will just sort of consolidate itself with more voices involved. Zizek thinks the tough political thought--but it is also one that has deep roots in Freudianism--that the people perhaps do not know what is best for them. In doing this, he takes up the most basic of political problems and affirms it against something that would dissolve this. While perhaps he takes this thought too far, I think that he is perpetuating something important and allowing us to see what it opposes, which is crucial for us.
Finally, there is the affirmation of the absurd and the disgusting as an important part of psychic life--as something that makes up a substantive part of psychic life that we do not want to throw away. At the end of a recent lecture, he said something about what he wants out of a loving relationship--it was something close to being able to be humiliated but almost indifferently... I think it was being shit on, as some sort of fetishistic gesture. While indifference can always be pursued too far--and Zizek always goes as far as possible, perhaps too far--I think indifference is something we have to understand that we inhabit, particularly after the atrocities of the 20th century and its machines of mass death. Part of this understanding is thinking about the fact that in the space of the indifferent, in the absurd, we can still have meaningful and valuable relationships. While we may not want to risk entering into them, broaching that area for thought is, right now, crucial I think for adjusting ourselves to a more techno-scientific, hyper-rational society, in which humiliation for another is sometimes just the effect of one's existence. To think about our own indifference and its more happy possibilities might allow us to undo aspects of it that we have imposed upon others.

Against "complicity:" or, theory after criticism

The aspect of deconstructive practice that is best known in the United States is its tendency towards infinite regression. The aspect that intersts me most, however, is the recognition, within deconstructive practice, of provisional and intractible starting points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its insistence that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself complicit with the object of her critique; its emphasis upon "history" and upon the ethico-political as the "trace" of that complicity...
-Gayatri Spivak, "Draupadi"

Everything in this remark needs to be opposed. It is not that the aspect of "deconstructive practice" that Spivak brings out here is not an aspect of what Derrida is constantly talking about--that is, the remark does not need to be opposed because it is a misinterpretation of what Derrida said (a useless fiction, especially in this case). It needs to be opposed because it takes what Derrida says and grafts it onto a logic of complicity. Before we get into what "complicity" means here, we have to remark that even the graft is not in itself bad: this is not a logic that is foreign to "deconstructive practice," indeed (as many remarks of Derrida himself testify). However, it is clear that the logic of complicity is one that relies upon concepts that this practice from the get-go disrupts. In short, Spivak wants to act as if this graft works only one way--for her it is the "positive" aspect of "deconstructive practice." But in grafting this practice to this logic, the logic is necessarily disrupted by the practice. Complicity is not the end-all, be-all of this "practice." It is, therefore, precisely what cannot be totally "disclosed," what can work as a "starting point" for analysis.
But what is this logic of complicity? Why does it contain that which this "deconstructive practice" disrupts? Well, we can see what Spivak says: the complicity is like a point, a point "where a will to knowledge would create oppositions." It is that which her practice (I'll refer to "deconstrutive practice" this way, indirectly, as Spivak's practice, since I find the phrase awkward and misleading) discloses. But shouldn't we be suspicious of any assertion that said Derrida was trying to effectively disclose something? Or even that what he did in effect, as a byproduct, disclosed something? Disclosure in Derrida is interrupted as soon as it begins. Now, Spivak is saying that we should pay attention to the trace of this disruption--this is what is amazing about her practice to her, and what constitutes that point, that "provisional" "where" with which to begin furthering her practice along. And this would be right, except that she thinks of this trace as a trace of complicity. And here everything goes awry. Again it is not an issue of whether this is wrong--Spivak is usually always technically right, which is why she is hard to criticize (and so resistant to criticism)--but about how the particular way this being-right is colored, such that, if it were taught or disseminated or overheard--and here is the crucial point, the crucial point in the history of the interpretation of Derrida in the United States--it would be misunderstood. One can say this is just moving the accusation of misunderstanding one step back. Perhaps this is right. But that would be precisely to overlook what is historically significant about the transmission of Derrida in the United States: the fact that it was taught precisely as what could allow students to find in texts points where Western discourse was complicit in atrocities. In short, it is what allowed his theory to become criticism.
Now, I am saying that we need to oppose complicity as a logic with which to interpret this theory of Derrida's (one that is not even totally a theory, and what I say only has a weak relationship to other theory--however, I keep calling it this because the conclusions here might indeed apply to theory in general in the US). I don't personally assert this, either: it is where the theory is already going in America as we speak. Doesn't this mean extracting and extricating the theory from criticism, then? In the end, I would say, yes. The theory has to cease its critical function, which is precisely a pragmatic function of finding complicities. Only then can it become theory--that is, a theory of those complicities, whatever they may be. And insofar as this is the case, it is only the case for criticism understood in the most boring, colloquial sense of the word: that is, as a statement with negative value judgement implied. Insofar as this is an argument for theory after criticism, it is also an argument for criticism after criticism.
This is not to say that this theory or criticism would be a discourse free of complicity: it means, however, that theory would not become, as it has in Spivak's case--and, I would argue, Zizek's (though he is getting better--one might summarize this whole effort of opposition I am arguing for under his motto, "forget, but never forgive") as well as Stanley Fish's (also Laclau, in a big way)--theory would not become primarily the effort to avoid those complicities. One can fight to free theory from criticism and move it towards the realm of description (which is what I'll call theory sans complicity for now), without it also extricating it from any complicity it might participate in. The difference is, however, that this description does not confuse what it describes as something that is "disclosed," or "recognized." In short, it does not make the mistake of thinking that the only form of working against a bad situation--whether this opposition be ethical, political, or whatever--is looking for and pointing out its complicity. Political opposition, for example, without this pragmatism would be precisely that criticism which we are saying is after or beyond criticism.
Perhaps most important, this description would not see what is described as a "starting point"--opposed, that is, to something that isn't. We would get the feel for how what Derrida says is precisely a trace that allows no pragmatic way of orienting oneself to it. With respect to "deconstructive practice," this means rediscovering in it precisely that "tendency towards infinite regression" that Spivak dismissed. It remains, I think, to be felt in the US--we have been too busy with historicist studies and politics. History and politics, as well as ethics, might only be able to really be addressed if we make this felt or at least widely and in a dim way sensed.

Specters of communism

(Thanks to comments from Grant, I revised a lot of this post--see his comments below for some good insights. It is basically an attempt to extend certain frustrations of Fredric Jameson in his essay "How Not to Historicize Theory" to the way the events of the last few weeks were covered in the news. Postscript: the general thrust of this article aligns vigorously with Jiri Pehe's August 24th article on the Prague Spring which everyone should read: there Pehe says "I suspect that our lasting reluctance to discuss the period [of the Prague Spring] openly is, more than anything else, a sign that the trauma of communism is still very much alive today, despite the last 19 years that democracy has had to take root.")
Bill Keller said the following in the Times a couple days ago:

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.
So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.
If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

This seems completely backwards in so many ways (even in referring by proxy to Fukuyama, who himself has backed away from that thesis for a long time now), but it comes down to the following for me: if we in America think this summer in particular heralds the return of giant post-Communist powers, as Keller says, it is only because here in America we never quite found a way to deal with their passing away.
Now, indeed, Keller himself seems to argue this when he says,

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

And yet, he doesn't because he puts it in all the wrong terms: precisely the terms of return that I am speaking about. And this misses everything important.
In fact the verbal slip here is indicative: somehow Keller relegates "the beginning" of the end of the Soviets to the category of "end," discounting it as "a beginning," a beginning that was greater than that of an end. In other words, we have the beginning of the end, and then we have the end as a beginning, as a beginning that exceeds any beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire is not really a beginning, even though Keller must still call it only a beginning.
And what does this real beginning, the beginning that exceeds any mere beginning of the end, bring about or begin? In short, resentment. The end of Communism was the beginning of the very indirect, passive aggressive resentment of the West instead of the Cold War's more direct and clear combat with it. And this is the real problem with Keller's analysis, what makes him miss the point entirely: he characterizes Russia as a country that has suffered a particular pseudo-psychological defeat that has been seeting under the surface all these years to resurge in a sort of nationalist aggression like we see now in Georgia. This is why, as he says, 1989 was a real "beginning"--and why saying this is something different than saying that in our "victory" over Communism we have not learned how to cope with its passing (my personal thesis).
Why is this so mistaken? Because it presupposes a sort of psychodynamic or communal-consciousness model of the operation of the state and its people that was probably only valid for thinking about the actions of Nazi Germany--if it is even valid there. Thus, he says the fall of the wall and the disbanding of the USSR did the following:

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Very nice, but this is also the way we talked about Bosnia, which, as we will see, is mistaken for the same reason: it moves quickly between an idea of nationalism or community and the idea of totalitarian psychological frenzy, without making clear what allows for the jump across between the two. Furthermore, it seems only to apply to the states of Eastern Europe and anything resembling a Communist or post-Communist society. It is as if, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, it couldn't happen here. In short, one could call it the logic of the losers. But doesn't this betray the fact that it is merely a way of bolstering the idea that we were and still are (despite all signs to the contrary) the winners? Something seething under the surface, the inner core of a repressed Communism: this is what, for Keller, motivates the action and the nationalism going on in Russia now. Similarly, China is seen--though Keller only moves towards this somewhat--quite similarly, since it has supposedly given up its real hardcore Communist core and embraced capitalism.
And as I began to indicate, what the idea of the return of Communism qua failed-resentful-post-Communism does is, however, more important than whether any of this actually really corresponds to the reality of the situation. This idea covers up the extremely pressing issue of dealing with the "minor-league monsters" which Keller dismisses here but are very much a problem of globalization in the wake of the fall of Communism--indeed despite what Paul Krugman maintains. These monsters aren't just hiccups in the process of globalization and--here is the flipside--neither are they the the fallout of the collapse of any major government that would challenge that of the West.
As I suggested earlier, one would need to see how we dealt with the Bosnian War (and Rwanda, and, now Darfur--though I'll confine myself to Bosnia) as the template for precisely how this work of covering up the real problem proceeds. What was so horrible about Bosnia was the similarity to a large scale nationalism working on such a small scale, and yet so effectively: this obviously came to a head in the unbelievable work of ethnic cleansing. (I should note that a great movie on Heidegger, The Ister, makes certain connections between Serbian nationalism and Nazism that are very well thought out and well depicted.) Indeed, we still can't really seem to cope with this sort of nationalism that we find now with Serbians, particularly in their reaction to the arrest of someone so unbelievably evil as Radovan Karadzic. What produces it? We must work here at the level of more minute and precise forces than those Keller seems to naively posit are at work. In other words, we must not be taken in, as Keller is, and so many are, by the size of the nations and the movements involved (the hugeness of China, in particular). At this huge level, the forces needed to unify a movement just fall into all the old categories of propaganda that now seem so extremely irrelevant: is it really the case that Serbs hate other ethnicities because people tell them? Adorno already in his time gives extremely good reasons why this is a bad way of putting the problem (cf. "Education after Auschwitz").
Now, our ignorance in the face of these problems is precisely not what is addressed by the policy we took in Bosnia. That is, this is not because there is no way to address this level of the micro-forces, it is just that our models of action, which stem from the policy of aid and international peacekeeping which were honed in Bosnia, and which devolved into full out war, precisely avoid them. What is needed is a new way of dealing with the spread of globalization and the destabilization that post-Communist or post-authoritarian regimes introduce into it as this spread occurs. Aid has the tendency, it seems to me, to merely compensate for this destabilization and restabilize, but it allows what is problematic--which is precisely not solely economic, nor cultural, but political through and through--to fester anyway. That is, the problem is a political problem, located at the foundation of the political union that constitutes these post-Communist states, and in some cases, can be ethnic. But it is a problem not of seeing these ethnic interests a s things that are psychological--rather one must think them as the thing that unifies the notion of political action. And again not in the sense of propoganda: rather we are dealing with the idea that politics is founded on a notion of a living body of a certain type, and a sort of filiation or purity between its members: in this sense it is very much ethnic, though not in a cultural way. This takes me into further territory, which is too complicated and confusing for me now. I'll wrap this up.
One thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter--one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it by trying to shift certain aspects of it (those that allowed these politico-ethnic regions to somewhat unify under Communism, if they did unify) into areas like culture, separate from the economy or from the operation of the political sphere in these countries as such. The key is to see that Communism does not return into our thinking as a big massive, homogenous albeit weakened force, like we often depict China and how Keller tries to get us to think about Russia (it is homogeneously resentful): we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally (or rather, ethnic-politically) determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Fredric Jameson's insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists that this is still actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.

Zizek on Heidegger and Nazism, again

I presented a somewhat detailed response to this topic a while ago: since then, the essay Zizek wrote on "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933" has made its way into his newest book, In Defense of Lost Causes--the topic thus merits a reconsideration, but I'll be more brief and more blunt.
Zizek's effort in this book is valiant. One can take this recent and precise characterization of the book by Terry Eagleton (a rarity in Eagleton's corpus--and perhaps the only one in this shallow, resentful review), and affirm it against Eagleton's scorn:

The self-consciously outrageous case the book has to argue is that there is a “redemptive” moment to be plucked from such failed revolutionary ventures as Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Žižek is by no means a champion of political terror: the Mao he offers us here, for example, is the mass murderer who mused that “half of China may have to die” in the Great Leap Forward, and who remarked that though a nuclear war might blow a hole in the planet, it would leave the cosmos largely untouched. His aim is not to justify such demented views, but to make things harder for the typical liberal middle-class dismissal of them (my italics).

Perhaps Eagleton phrases it in an asinine way, but I think that this "making things harder" of Zizek is precisely how we should read Zizek's effort. Phrased a little less cynically, we might put Eagleton's statement this way: Zizek restores weight to politics, philosophy, and culture--this is his mission and has been his mission consistently throughout this career. And rather than losing momentum over the years, he has only become more intense--his ambitions and his fire only have grown.
But Eagleton's idiocy locates the problem in this restoration--he makes the same mistake as Zizek, but falls only on the other side of its result. The problem is this: who is the subject to which Zizek addresses his discourse? Granted, unlike other big thinkers on the Left (I'm particularly thinking of certain Frenchmen, with their extraordinary academic and state apparatuses), Zizek's ideas is less institutionally supported in the sense of having a stable and somewhat more closed forum in which to speak--indeed, his best work is when he is among psychoanalysts. But his major works are always more global than that: he is probably the first thoroughly global (and this does not mean international) thinker. This means that his remarks are directed somewhat all over the place. And in the end, who reads them? Well, in the UK and in America, the typical middle-class Anglo-American thinker (I bypass the great and much more fruitful reception he has had elsewhere, and merely talk about our Zizek, the Zizek that we see and talk about here). I'm not saying the people are middle-class who read Zizek. It is that the particular middle-class that Eagleton has in mind is the one sympathized with and identified with by the Left intellectual: the subject needed to be mobilized and enlightened in order to do something substantial about capitalism. Zizek's great achievement is to try and restore some weight to Marxist notions and the Marxist spirit by showing Marxism isn't as old as we thought: it still has life in it yet, because it can link up in a creative way with Lacan--that is, an anti-humanistic (but not Althusserian) thinking. This must resolutely be called "making things harder" only in the sense that this means an ascesis, a training in thinking and in activity so as to be able to adjust thinking to the radically new problems posed by capitalism--those problems which escape the more rigid Marxism of most of the twentieth century. In short, it means thinking about action: Zizek is the thinker of individual and collective action against and within capitalism--if this means things must be harder, it means that we also are on the way to addressing their difficulty by becoming hard. Eagleton cannot know what this means: all he can do is seek out points where real thinkers are complicit in the capitalism they criticize.
Thus, where Eagleton would stupidly see some hypocrisy in the precise identity of the Anglo-American subject of Zizek's work (shouldn't Zizek mainly be talking to the rebels?), we can begin to see that the real problem in this identity is that it can only be marshaled into action by appeals to practicality--or at least this is what Zizek seems to assume (and with some grounds for doing so). The extremely impractical restorative weight that he gives to certain problems, then, ultimately has to turn on almost being able to be confused with the immediately practical: this is the one, sole aspect that constitutes the Zizekian flair in almost every sentence. There is a reversal on a conceptual level that he effects--for example, what Heidegger did in 1933 (join the Nazi party) was not evil, but actually a rare thinking-through of the commitment his philosophy was making politically and one that took place not within that philosophy itself (smuggled into texts) but in action--and this reversal almost of itself can seem to be absolutely pragmatic--it suggests that one should not philosophize politics as much as engage in political action. The force of this reversal is always an appeal to pragmatic action--and this because the audience Zizek writes his sentences for is one that needs not only conceptual shifts and reversals but clues to guide their practical activity. In short, the people Zizek writes for can't just think through a conceptual reversal--they need the force of this reversal to reflect some practical action they can engage in then and there.

While this might be right about these readers, I wonder whether Zizek doesn't need to rethink this aspect of his writings--for in a case like this with Heidegger we see that perhaps another way of arguing and appealing would be both more practical and intellectually interesting. For what is Zizek's treatment of Heidegger, after all? It doesn't say much besides its title: in short, postmodernist philosophers who sneak politics into their words are weak compared to even Heidegger, who had the smarts to join a party in the open, as an action--that is, be committed to what one says even more than theorizing it. Of course this was a monstrous choice--but in principle, with other parties, this is what the Left needs. So Zizek argues, but this is only to isolate what is most obvious about the case of Heidegger: that he made a political decision which was tied into his thinking. Beyond the shock, the appeal to mobilize in a similarly counterintuitive way (but with a totally different party)--precisely because (according to Zizek) Heidegger's case is a paradigmatic instance of the risks of political engagement for thinkers--this does not do much. And it risks making a sly appeal to the perverse in Heidegger's action as what we should feel if we are being political, if we are being active--it gives us something disturbing that we can be okay with so we can get off our asses and mobilize. In other words, this makes it seem as if the bar is lowered for all of us and that political action is just perverse since it always risks being an abomination. In short, it risks being pragmatic for the sake of being pragmatic--that is, just to mobilize. And it is willing to sacrifice the conclusions for this aim. This is Zizek's fault--and to say this is to be as far away from chastising him as a provocateur as possible.
In the end, if Zizek is advocating an action like Heidegger's but directed differently--if he is saying that most political action of thinkers has to risk becoming Heidegger--well I can't see how this isn't a refusal to think what is so vile in Heidegger: the privileging of presence, of activity, of manliness, of the poetic; and the denigrating of the calculating, the prosaic, the everyday--all this, so prevalent in his writings, being made into a Nazism, committed to very specific ideals that are unspeakably disgusting. Many thinkers have had these privileges before: they are not Nazis. And if Zizek is saying that they are precisely not politically engaged because of this--well, he is waging a war not just pragmatically in the now against capitalism, but with a lot of human history. It all comes down to this: is Zizek's discussion of Heidegger an example for a revolutionary mind? Or is it something more impractical? If it is the latter, well, I don't know how we would read Zizek.

The unconscious(es)

There are perhaps more unconsciouses than we think there are whenever we talk Freud. I've heard three so far, and am realizing that what I've always thought was the right view (the last--Zizek's) might be helpful if it were not asserted as correct against the others but put beside them and used when the occasion permits. I'll therefore do so here:
First, we get the unconscious (Unbewusst) as merely sub-conscious or not-conscious. Freud explicitly rejects this view in The Interpretation of Dreams, a fact that is probably more significant than we usually think. It means resisting, to some degree, any dialectic between the two systems. Thus the perception-consciousness system, which resides between the two in the earlier writings, becomes crucial.
Second, we get the unconscious thought not in opposition to the conscious--that is, as a separate system--but with certain elements that consciousness exhibits attributed to it. This is the unconscious of classical ideology (when it does not merely mean subconscious), but it is also the unconscious of many remarks in the work of trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth. All of these people talk about "unconscious memories," or "forgetting trauma," which are things that would happen not in the unconscious proper, but in the perception-consciousness system. Obviously this gets more complicated with trauma, masochism, and all the economic problems that make Freud change his model to the I, super-I, and It model later, and so it might help to be open to this view.
Third, the totally unconscious. No memories (though there are inscriptions, psychic energies, etc.), and no talk of "changing" anyone's unconscious by reverse-ideology tactics of whatever sort--at least changing it directly. The only one of these that would do anything is the extremely indirect (though, when used badly, direct--and therefore useless) Lacanian model of critique and analysis. It is utterly foreign to discourse, though able to be localized by certain structures of that discourse. In a certain sense, it is like the Kantian sublime: it exceeds our capacity to cognize what it might be whenever it presents itself to us as such. Paradoxically and crucially, it is not able to be cognized precisely because the truth of the matter is that what we cognize daily actually is it already. That is, the effect of its rupturing our consciousness when it presents itself is to keep us from knowing that there is no real difference between what we cognize and it. In a sense, we make our reality uncognizable in order to keep ourselves from cognizing it, when it irrupts into cognition.

Zizek on Children of Men, post-apocalyptic space (Chernobyl), and the bricoleur

Slavoj Zizek's comments on Children of Men (included with the film, from which I quote below, but also on the films' website in a slightly different form), are just genius (the italics are mine):

I think that this film gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or to use another political term, biopolitics. And my god, this film literally is about biopolitics. The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life. But again, I think the crucial point is that this obvious fact shouldn't deceive us. The true despair is precisely that; all historical acts disappear. Like all those classical statues are there, but they are deprived of a world. They are totally meaningless, because what does it mean to have a statue of Michaelangelo? It only works if it signals a certain world. And when this world is lacking, it's nothing.

This is so extremely correct, and seems to be what both Grant and I (though Grant was and is much better at this than me!) were trying to grope towards in my previous post on the film. It also, therefore, seems to completely contradict the egoistical and asinine comments of Cuarón about constructing a future--indeed, like all good art, it is more relevant than even the author's most interesting intentions.

This is Zizek at his best, when his understanding of Lacan really is just unbelievably correct and so helpful--that is, when he is elaborating another's diagnosis or interpretation, moving beyond their hermeneutic. As if to sum up the above (especially the sentence I emphasized), in his comments on the film's website he says:

Indeed, as Jacques Lacan put it, after God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted.

That is, all that is left in the world of the film are the pure, empty rules of biopolitics, without any of the possibilities that these rules (or any resistance to these rules by the unmeaning, the rebellious, the excluded, etc.) were regulating. It is not that there is nothing left to regulate--though Zizek's language often sounds as if this is the case--but that the system of empty regulations is not developed or coherent enough to be able to sustain itself. This is why Zizek harps upon the fact that Children of Men is set in (and perhaps could only be set in) England:

It’s against this background [a world of total prohibition] that the film approaches the topic of immigration and so on. By setting in the movie in England, only there can the despair be felt. England’s one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t have a constitution because it can rely on it’s substance of traditions - you don’t need it written and it’s in such a country that the loss of historical dimension, the loss of the substance of meaning is felt much worse.

In other words, the traditions--the rules that regulate behavior even more than those that could be codified (in a constitution)--are not able to sustain the reliance necessary in times of an apocalypse (the time that they should--according to that very reliance upon them--kick in the most). Thus, total prohibition is a substitute or compensation for the lack of effective regulation: this is why it is disturbing, not because the prohibition is prohibition as such.

For regulation is not an evil for Zizek. Incoherent regulation, however, is. His comments regarding the protagonist, Theo, bring this to the fore. What is amazing about the film, for Zizek, is precisely that the world that it displays does not give meaning to the protagonist's quest. Rather, the opposite is the case: Theo becomes the site in which we are able to understand the world in which he moves (the "background," as Zizek says--and one that must be kept in the background, not made into the instruments that the hero can take up). Again, I think he would agree that this is also the case in Blade Runner--indeed, this is the reason why the protagonist becomes not Deckard, the noir detective clone, but Roy. But what is crucial is that this transforms the role of the main character in this type of film: he is made into a bricoleur, a point that takes up what is around him, but which is merely a placeholder so that the structure of that very environment around him can be understood.

In other words, what Zizek likes is that it brings out the particular logic underlying bricolage: as I tried to outline in a previous post, the bricoleur is not a McGyver, but an extremely fraught, anxious placeholder for the forces that work around him. He constructs rules and practices, but only out of that material give to him by the structured environment in which he moves. He does not wield them well, he is no phronemos (in fact, he is the opposite)--in fact, we should say that the environment constructs its rules through him. He is the site of action on which the very last level of structuration plays itself out (indeed, this is why the MacGruber parodies are so hilarious: the McGyver character still has agency, but only as distraction because he can only take up what the environment gives him--his agency is still only as a function of that environment: thus getting obsessed about his appearance, whether someone said something bad about him behind his back, or, in a very interesting and subversive model, becoming an alcoholic).

Now, what is crucial is that this does not make him a compulsive, trauma-laden subject, though he nears this. It is simply that the structure of which he is a function has not structured itself as coherently as it can. It is precisely when the environment places its prohibitions upon this subject in order to compensate for its own disorganization that there is dominance, and we have the possibility for the subject in question to become a mere traumatic site for this environment. What is more important is that this subject has a form of agency as a function of the system--nothing positive, but relationally, dispersed over a determinate field. For Zizek, looking at this field is crucial--precisely because we want to turn the bricoleur into a phronemos like McGyver: this is the level at which ideology works, channeling this want. Indeed, this is precisely how the "post-modern" idea of a generalized traumatic subject (cf. Cathy Caruth) is precisely able to be turned (with the utmost degree of cynicism) into an object that sustains late capitalistic ideology.

But the bricoleur, Theo, is not this traumatic subject: what he does is not repetition, not compulsion (at least in the popular sense of these terms). We should not require traumatic subjects produce themselves as evidence of the decline of civilization (this seems to be the demand of some--usually American--thinkers): rather, we must conceive of the post-apocalyptic actor as someone who regulates himself and others with the insufficient rules he is given--so that he turns these rules into more refined, and yet equally incoherent, products.

The bricoleur is the site of displacement, therefore, not the site of compulsion. His action, and not his existence, is evidence or rather expression of the psychosis of society (if it were the latter, then he would merely be traumatic). He is similar not to McGyver (in the crude sense of a handyman), but similar to those who document the post-apocalyptic space of Chernobyl. If one looks at Google Earth around the nuclear facility, one begins to notice (and this is just one example of the extensive documentation) all sorts of labels made by users of where and what is going on. This is actually quite an extensive process taking place all over Google Earth--but the tone here becomes visibly different. It is not merely curious. The entire abandoned town of Pirpyat is completely labeled, furnished with photos and relevant documents, stories and ruminations. The fascination with this ghost town (and this is the case with the ghost town in general), however, would be lost if one were to explain it as merely reactionary or compulsive, the attempt to make up for apocalyptic nuclear disaster. Indeed, this is the threat of this activity of documentation--that it makes Chernobyl and the surrounding "Zone of Alienation" into a romantic, melancholic, aestheticized atmosphere (full of a mysterious and fetishized radioactive ether, like Newton's long ago) where one can just reflect on the depravity of humanity in general. Rather, what is going on is a precise act of bricolage, of trying to take the incident and its construction and flesh it out more, move it around, bring it into a sort of play that would, in stopping (and it needs to stop, if anything the compulsion is here, in refusing uninterrupted, continuous play), sets up limits, defines spaces in which meaning does not exist, but perhaps would be possible. This working-out of the apocalypse that was Chernobyl and that documents the disaster zone endlessly, then, would be similar to those acts of Theo: they aren't trying to make sense of the environment so much as be better functions of it, thereby bringing that environment into a tighter density in which it may subjectivize still with prohibition, but without incoherent or near-psychotic prohibitions. This doesn't mean this "making sense" is rational, not by any means. But it does mean that it is a representation of an environment (and a subjectivity) that must be accounted for and not lumped together into an unspeaking, traumatic irrationality. This is not to impugn trauma--it is to leave it space in which it can develop its own representations of itself and that of which it is a function and constitute (or have constituted for it) its own particular activities towards betterment.

In other words, while being able to define post-apocalyptic activities and practice, Zizek's thoughts give trauma room to operate as a condition, and does not make it meaningless or a mere exterior to "authentic" activity. And on this note, we must end with Derrida, for whom the bricoleur is a mere compromise (conceived by Lévi-Strauss) and a way to exit the responsibilities to the other(s)--this is why he opposes this figure so vigorously. Zizek is on the way to this conclusion, yet (rightly, I think, in this case) believes theorizing the limits of this particular subject (and not that one who would respond and is already responding to these others) is more important--and is again why he is able to give us such a profitable analysis.