Use Your Illusions
Žižek offers hope for those of us burdened by cynicism. He also touches on genocide, farming and the importance of awakening from our dreams. (Tom Waits might counter, “you’re innocent when you dream” and Zizek may reply, “Shut up you’re not real!”)
I wanted to be the one who links to a Žižek article for a change. I even went to Wikipedia to copy the funny Z’s.
Obama’s victory is a sign of history in the triple Kantian sense of signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. A sign in which the memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its abolition reverberates; an event which now demonstrates a change; a hope for future achievements. The scepticism displayed behind closed doors even by many worried progressives – what if, in the privacy of the voting booth, the publicly disavowed racism will re-emerge? – was proved wrong. One of the interesting things about Henry Kissinger, the ultimate cynical Realpolitiker, is how utterly wrong most of his predictions were. When news reached the West of the 1991 anti-Gorbachev military coup, for example, Kissinger immediately accepted the new regime as a fact. It collapsed ignominiously three days later. The paradigmatic cynic tells you confidentially: ‘But don’t you see that it is all really about money/power/sex, that professions of principle or value are just empty phrases which count for nothing?’ What the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions.
…It is unlikely that the financial meltdown of 2008 will function as a blessing in disguise, the awakening from a dream, the sobering reminder that we live in the reality of global capitalism. It all depends on how it will be symbolised, on what ideological interpretation or story will impose itself and determine the general perception of the crisis. When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a ‘discursive’ ideological competition. In Germany in the late 1920s, Hitler won the competition to determine which narrative would explain the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it; in France in 1940 Maréchal Pétain’s narrative won in the contest to find the reasons for the French defeat. Consequently, to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms, the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations – lax regulation, the corruption of big financial institutions etc.
The New Socialism
Matthew Yglesias:
Over the past 30-35 years or so, the world as a whole has retreated from the high tide of state management of the economy that was reached around midcentury, and moved more in the direction of laissez faire. But I think it’s fair to say that though the trend has been perfectly general, the political leadership in this movement has tended to come from Washington and London, where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the loudest and clearest exponents of it and their successors on the center-left tended to confirm, rather than reverse, a new Anglophone consensus. And yet:
The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. […] The Treasury’s openness to direct infusions of cash is a remarkable change in tone from a few weeks ago, when the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, discouraged such actions in testimony before Congress. “Putting capital in institutions is about failure,” Mr. Paulson declared on Sept. 23. “This is about success.”
This is what a lot of left-of-center economists said in the first place, but the ideological taboo against nationalization was very strong. Now, though, the forces of looming collapse in the banking sector are proving even stronger. Thus, it looks like it’ll be George W. Bush, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke who bring a very strong dose of socialism to the United States of America. And yet Andy McCarthy’s busy worrying if Barack Obama is a closet Maoist.
Vote for Obama
Shaviro over at Pinocchio Theory argues that, despite the fact that the Democrats will more than likely disappoint anyone who thinks anything will actually “change” beyond a pathetic return to Clintonian neoliberalism, one should nevertheless vote for Obama:
It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes. And not in spite of the Democrats’ hypocrisy, but rather precisely because of this — because their hypocrisy is, as it were, the compliment that vice pays to virtue — the only moral thing to do in this election is to vote for Obama.
(Via I cite.)
Toyota Brown
Posted at 11:42 PMSo although many people seem to be dreaming of the slightly more exciting Republican nominee, last night I had the strangest dream involving Obama and McCain. It took place at a surreal convention center; the decor reminded me of a mix between a David Lynch film and a vibrant Nintendo videogame. Anyhow, the video being broadcast was showcasing, in a cartoony, almost socialist realist form, all of the various ways in which Barack Obama was better than McCain, making the case for how easy it should be for him to win. A typically stupid “dream as a fulfillment of a wish,” as Freud said.
Then John McCain took the stage with someone who was apparently an old buddy of his from their rock and roll days. The guy had sagging, but tight white skin, numerous piercings, shades and a soul patch, reminiscent of Tommy Lee. His nickname for McCain was “Toyota Brown,” the origins of which were not explained, except that it was referred to as a term of endearment from when John McCain, too, was evidently a hard rocker in the mid- to late-70’s.
Which is all to say that from now on I’ll be referring to John McCain as “Toyota Brown” on this blog, and hope others follow in my footsteps.
Vote for Change
The Obama campaign has a nifty, Katamari Damacy-esque website where you can register to vote quickly and easily, unlike the McCain campaign, which could only conceivably win if they were to actively discourage new voters from registering. I followed the instructions and was able to register to vote absentee in my county in about 10 minutes tops. I think the process for normal voting is a bit shorter, since you don’t have to take a detour through state and then county websites. (Via Bitch, Ph.D..)
The Audacity of Rhetoric
Another Zizek article in In These Times, this time specifically on the subject of Barack Obama. I haven’t read it yet since I’m in a hurry, but I like the quote the editor highlighted:
Measured by the low standards of conventional wisdom, the old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ is one of the most stupid things one can say.
Back to the Futura
Given all of the idiocy the radical right has been spewing in recent days about how Obama’s trip to Germany is somehow a step closer to him burning the Reichstag, it’s worth noting, as John Holbo does, that the Obama campaign has chosen German “New Typography” for their posters and advertisements. Here’s an interesting excerpt from German Modern:
After the Nazi’s rise to power in 1933, however, when the Dessau Bauhaus was closed (the school had moved from its original home in Weimar in 1925), it was forbidden to use modern design or sans-serif typefaces such as Futura, which Goebbels called a “Jewish invention.” Rigid, central balanced composition returned and traditional (and often illegible) Fraktur type was touted as symbolic of the glories of the nation. (17)
For typophiliacs or those interested in the art of the Third Reich, I recommend reading the entire article over at Crooked Timber.
The Audacity of Listening
A strangely sensible op-ed piece by Gail Collins on Obama’s recent “triangulation.” I say “strangely” because it’s in the New York Times. Zing! (Via Wonkette.)
FISA Passed
To the surprise of no one, the FISA bill that grants retroactive immunity to telecoms and legalizes warrantless wiretapping has passed today. I think the vote was something like 69-28. Even though pretty much the entire Internet is aware of this, I figured I would post a link to mark the historic occasion.
Anyhow, here is a comprehensive article over at Salon by former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald on why this bill is a great leap forward for democracy and why the Democratic-led congress may be even worse than the Republican-led one. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk!
Neobamacon
For those that still think Obama is an “ideal candidate,” check out this laundry list of cringe-inducing positions adopted by our democratic Patron Saint, carefully culled together by Bernard Chazelle over at A Tiny Revolution. To wit, he’s still way better than WALNUTS!, but he is no Pericles.
Get Disappointed By Someone New
In honor of Barack Obama’s rejection of campaign finance, support for FISA and, most recently, his denouncing the Supreme Court decision to reject the death penalty for child rape, linking to this bumper sticker by Edge of the American West seems like the only appropriate measure.
(All proceeds go to the Obama campaign.)
Obama vs. the Internet vs. FISA
Mike Soron has several perspicuous links and quotes regarding Obama’s regrettable support for the house’s update of the FISA bill, which grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms that aided the Bush administration in carrying out its unlawful domestic spying program. Although Obama has stated that he is against the measure to grant retroactive immunity, there’s still this gem:
Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.
Such a position is more than unfortunate, it is what one might call a travesty. Regardless of whether Obama is simply playing a game of appearances by trying to “act tough” to win over the petty bourgeois and lumpenproletariat that would likely not be willing to vote for him to begin with, his decision to support the updated FISA bill should alert his supporters that it’s not enough to put their faith and trust into such a candidate, even if he is far more progressive than a number of others. If anything, they should be ruthlessly critical, lest one wishes to justify one’s spinelessness as pragmatism.
From the Wall Street Journal, click here to view. To sum up: if you make less than $111,645 per year, you’ll be better off (in terms of after-tax income) under Obama. (Via Open Up.)
Obama Publishes His Version of Events…
Posted at 4:36 PMThe Obama campaign came out with a rumor debunking website today to combat the catcalls from the right and the leftover Clinton supporters (known to Ancient Romans as ‘the Gauls’).
The front page lists lies:
… and a helpful rebuttal:
Thing is, it doesn’t bother to argue or refute each point unless you click the little “Continue Reading” links, and even then you get things like this, which don’t really offer any facts in defense against the accusation. Maybe this kind of response is understandable as the accusations are hard to prove wrong, for example, disproving someone said something at some unspecific time, but if you’re just going to respond to “Michelle Obama said whitey” with “Michelle Obama didn’t say whitey,” why bother in the first place?
Hillary the Populist
Posted at 2:40 PM
One question that has bugged me over the past few months is, who exactly are Hillary’s supporters? I am, of course, not talking about the stereotypical aging “die hard” feminists who refuse to give up on their support for the first woman president. If this were the case, one would suspect that such a group would be dismayed by Hillary’s “conservative” appeal, as well as the reprehensible attacks on Michelle Obama. If, on the other hand, Hillary’s supporters are simply so-called “Reagan Democrats,” that is, white working-class voters (petit bourgeoisie), why do they not support John McCain? He is, arguably, the most hawkish on foreign policy out of all of the presidential candidates1, as well as the most “free market” orientated.
Jodi Dean has perspicuously pointed out how the term “elitist” (in reference to Barack Obama) has come to be a coded racial buzzword for “uppity” throughout the campaign. Now, of course, one can simply dismiss the (mis-)use of this term, as Barack Obama is, objectively speaking, the least wealthy, least “elitist” of the candidates (in comparison to the Clinton’s hundreds of millions of dollars and the McCain’s eight houses, corporate jet and ownership of numerous large corporations). But, as Dean emphasizes, the point is not so much a condemnation of wealth as it is a racist supposition that Obama has “risen above himself.”
On the other hand, it seems to me too easy to entirely dismiss those who accuse Obama of being “elitist” as racists, although websites such as Hillary is 44 do little to assuage my doubts in this regard. This, in my opinion, adheres too well to the Obama party-line and does little to confront the Clintonite counter-argument that decries Obama’s campaign as being sexist. Here we can see, in concrete form, a significant abstract-political problem associated with “post-[whatever]” identity politics.
I think that this electoral mystery is elucidated within Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, particularly in the paradoxically titled chapter, “Why Populism is Good Enough in Practice (But Not Good Enough in Theory),” in which Zizek critically negotiates with Ernesto Laclau’s recent change in theoretical position from radical democracy to populism. As I have yet to read any Laclau, I have to go entirely on Zizek’s account of his work, which is obviously a limitation, but one that I am not entirely concerned with in the scope of this post. According to Zizek, then, Laclau conceives of populism as
the Lacanian objet petit a of politics, the particular figure which stands for the universal dimension of the political, which is why it is “the royal road” to understanding the political… Populism is not a specific political movement, but the political at its purest: the “inflection” of the social space that can affect any political content.
Along these lines, Zizek argues that populism can be conceived of as the “overlapping of the universal with part of its own particular content,” found within Hegel’s notion of “oppositional determination” (gegensätzliche Bestimmung). Zizek continues by stating that
populism occurs when a series of particular “democratic” demands (for better social security, health services, lower taxes, against war, and so on) is enchained in a series of equivalences, and this enchainment produces “the people” as the universal political subject… and all different particular struggles and antagonisms appear as parts of a global antagonistic struggle between “us” (the people) and “them.”
Thus, Zizek (and, ostensibly, Laclau) conceive of populism, at the most basic level, to be (1) transcendental-formal (as opposed to ontic) and (2) composed of a chain of equivalences that constitute a universal political dimension (“the people”). Finally, this avenue opens up a dichotomy between “us” and “them” (along Schmittian lines of public “friend” and “foe”). Yet, crucial here is that
The field of politics is thus caught in an irreducible tension between “empty” and “floating” signifiers: some particular signifiers start to function as “empty,” directly embodying the universal dimension, incorporating into the chain of equivalences which they totalize a large number of “floating” signifiers. Laclau mobilizes this gap between the “ontological” need for a populist protest vote (conditioned by the fact that the hegemonic power discourse cannot incorporate a series of popular demands) and the contingent ontic content to which this vote gets attached…
Perhaps, given this formula, one should do the unthinkable and take Hillary’s statements that she is the “populist candidate,” not as a cynical political ploy, but literally. Regardless of her objective status (in terms of wealth, class position, and numerous political positions), her “ontic content,” her status as a “populist candidate,” is purely contingent, the result of a formal necessity at the level of the direct expression of the chain of equivalences that constitute “the people.” Consequently, one should not read anything into her candidacy as such. Instead, one should concentrate on the problem at the theoretical level. As Zizek concludes, populism is limited by an ideological mystification, the attempt to suture the inherent antagonism (within society) by transubstantiating it into an external one (hence, “us” vs. “them”).
Yet Obama’s campaign is hardly without its own limitations. On the topic of Chantal Mouffe’s “democratic paradox,” Zizek notes that the “main threat to democracy in today’s democratic countries resides in… the death of the political through the ‘commodification’ of politics.
What is at stake here is not primarily the way politicians are packaged and sold as merchandise at elections; a much deeper problem is that elections themselves are conceived along the lines of buying a commodity (power, in this case): they involve a competition between different merchandise-parties, and our votes are like money which buys the government we want. What gets lost in such a view of politics as just another service we buy is politics as a shared public debate of issues and decisions that concern us all.
The reduction of politics to ontic commodities (the way a politician or party might be “branded” or commodified) and the ontological political-being-as-commodification (the function of the political relegated to that of the commodity-form) points to the vacuousness of contemporary so-called “post-ideological” politics that Obama (at least in part) exemplifies.2 It not only reduces “change” to a mere life-style commodity, but it also concedes to the economic-reductionist view of politics as “just another service” to be provided (hence the status of “change,” like that of money, as a pure “empty signifier”). This view thereby obscures the “real change” that politics, at its core, is able to achieve: that of making possible what, retroactively, seemed impossible; changing the entire coordinates of social reality.
Yet, in the opposition between the vacuous post-modern “commodification” of politics and populist ideological mystification, one should, perhaps unexpectedly, support the former. As one may notice, the above paragraph is incredibly cliché, a very stereotypical critique of the “commodification” of daily life, the reduction of things into brand names, etc. Hence, post-modern politics takes on the status of a fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well (that everything, including politics, is commodified), but nevertheless…” Thus, while populism obscures the objective status antagonism located within fetishistic disavowal through the reification of antagonism into an external Other (“them”), in contrast to “the people,” post-modern politics allows one to begin the project of genuine emancipatory politics by locating the fetishistic object, the object at the center of libidinal cathexis that allows for one to avoid subjectively assuming what one objectively knows.
- At the very least, this is the image that he has attempted to cultivate, although, as the L.A. Times has pointed out, his foreign policy record is, at best, mixed ↩
- As a caveat I will say that Obama’s rhetorical abilities and devotional fans are, in fact, a positive contradiction to this thesis. ↩