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.
Transcendental Revolution
No Useless Leniency:
How does Deleuze resist the problem Althusser courts – that of functionalism, in which the depth of ideological structuring appears to prevent any rupture with such a ‘system’? Deleuze argues that to perform this rupture requires the power to raise the false existent sociability to the level of a ‘transcendent exercise’ that can break this regime of commonsense. This ‘transcendental object’ is revolution as ‘the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social idea.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208)
Communism
Mike Johnduff at Countermemory:
On the left, things seem just as nuts. There is no theory of this spread and the resistance to it, except those promising ones of micro-loans. This leaves them with the specter of Lenin: communism has not died out there either. The idea of mobilization (Zizek) and the general idea that social-democracy is, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, a “compromise” (“Is Everything Political?”) is flawed.
Regardless, one thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter—one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it. The key is to see that it does not return into our thinking as a big massive homogenous thing: we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Frederic Jameson’s insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists, against the pragmatists (and one needs to apply this critique to the Lacanians and to the Nancy-type radicals too), that this is actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.
Violence and its Vicissitudes
Jodi Dean:
What Zizek omits, though, is the creative, productive dimension of resentment. It can create power relations invested in refusal (an acquaintance of mine once used the expression ‘anti-war profiteers’). Differently put, even heroic resentment can become ordinary and normalized, ultimately exhausting itself and rendering the heroic feeble and pathetic. The challenge, then, of heroic resentment is this very risk, this unavoidable uncertainty.
Zizek on Haiti: Democracy versus the People
Slavoj Zizek reviews Peter Hallward’s book on Haiti in the New Statesman:
As Aristide himself puts it: “It is better to be wrong with the people than to be right against the people.” Despite some all-too-obvious mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how “dictatorship of the proletariat” might look today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it always remained faithful to its “base”, to the crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not “representing” them but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our “postmodern” terms: the struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist-military elite in Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism which cannot be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic “agonistic pluralism”.
This is why Hallward’s outstanding book is not just about Haiti, but about what it means to be a “leftist” today: ask a leftist how he stands towards Aristide, and it will be immediately clear if he is a partisan of radical emancipation or merely a humanitarian liberal who wants “globalisation with a human face”.
(Via I cite.)
Slavoj Zizek Interview in The Guardian
Some really great responses. (Via I cite.)
Conditions of Receptivity
Dr. Sinthome:
At what point do certain statements, certain declarations, certain assertions, take on the capacity to resonate and produce effects in a receiver? What are the conditions for the possibility of being heard? … I became capable of receiving a message where before I was not. But how and under what conditions? Likewise, under what conditions do certain political positions and declarations begin to resonate within the social field? This question is at the very heart of social change and is not secondary or ancillary to questions of critique. For without adequately answering these questions, adequate strategies of producing change cannot be formulated. However, a glance at the history of political transformations also seems to indicate that while these shifts are cultural in character, they also seem to involve material transformations that problematize the cultural sphere, calling for new institutions, new group formations, new ways of feeling, new subjectivities, and new ways of living.
Judas!
Daniel Miller, writing for The Nation, has recently published a “scathing critique” of Slavoj Žižek in general and his latest book, In Defense of Lost Causes, in particular, pointing to his pyrrhic descent into madness as indicated by the undoubtedly Hegelian trifecta of Hitchens-esque contrarianism, left-wing militarism and, of course, the culminating integration with hyper-reflexive late-capitalist consumerism. Miller concludes his review with this bit of speculative reason:
Throughout In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek speaks recurrently, and in a sometimes disturbingly extravagant tone, of the “messianic” imperative of performing “a Leap of Faith” over the ravine of common sense in pursuit of “lost Causes, Causes that, from the space of sceptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy.” During such moments, it’s hard not to suspect that Žižek has finally gone mad.
As a student of advanced theory, I don’t find any of this problematic. On the contrary, Miller’s reaction to Žižek’s “Kehre” typifies the kind of idolatry that surrounds innumerable public figures when the ego catches a glimpse of its own auratic reflection only to find itself spurned and alienated in the solipsistic idiocy of its own narcissistic jouissance.
Perhaps this gives some credibility to Rex Butler’s otherwise annoyingly stupid and culturally inept comparison of Žižek to Bob Dylan, only insofar as both succeeded in alienating large portions of their audience at a certain world-historical juncture. If this is the case, then I fully welcome Žižek’s theological turn and his advertisements for the BBC and Abercrombie & Fitch. If Miller represents the kind of audience Žižek had formerly captivated, then I eagerly await the sleeveless leather shirts and aviators to come.
The Big Parallax
Posted at 5:26 PMI recently watched Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as the pertinacious reporter Joe Frady who begins to unravel a conspiracy surrounding the deaths of several people who, like himself, had witnessed the assassination of a popular RFK-esque politician three years prior. His inquiry takes him far down the rabbit’s hole, so to speak, where he finds the nebulous, but no doubt sinister, deeds of the Parallax Corporation, a corporation ostensibly designed to seek out and hire maladjusted individuals whose psychological profiles earn them the unique privilege of carrying out high-profile assassinations.
The film is undoubtedly steeped in the post-Watergate zeitgeist of conspiracy, scandal, and suspicion, comparable in many ways to Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, although I prefer Parallax for a number of reasons. But it would be wrong to not give due weight to the tumultuous events of the 1960s as well, which indelibly leave their mark on the film in the form of retrospection, subtly cued by the time-jump employed by the director. Thus, rather than immersing the viewer in the chaos of assassination, the film creates a “temporal parallax” by re-reading, as it were, the milieu of the 1960s from the frame of the 1970s: the “parallax gap,” produced by the minimal difference between the event as it was experienced and as it appears in retrospect, creates the effect of a stain, that of an unsolved crime, left upon the lap of hapless Joe.
What drew me to the film originally was the fact that it happened to share the same name of Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus,” but which conspicuously and, most likely, intentionally bears no mention of Pakula’s film. In Zizek’s Parallax View, “parallax” is defined as
the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese, the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot,” that which is “in the object more than object itself,” the point from which the object itself returns the gaze.1
So where in the film do we get “parallax”? Perhaps by breaking the film down into its various constituent elements gives us a clear idea. There are three main actors: Joe Frady, the Parallax Corporation and the Senate. The object of inquiry, of course, is the assassination. At first glance, then, it would appear that the parallax is produced by the two antagonists of the film, Joe and the Parallax corporation, yet this doesn’t produce any change in the object, nor does it imply any sort of mediation between subject and object. Perhaps, then, parallax designates the very refraction of each of the various constituent elements in the film. First, there is the case of the Parallax corporation itself: when Joe visits Parallax, it does not appear ominous at all, neither from the outside nor from within, at least any more so than a typical corporation. It is only the fact that Joe approaches Parallax as Joe qua potential assassin that the truly sinister dimension of Parallax emerges. In this instance, the object itself is the Parallax Corporation, and its ontological status is affected by Joe’s change in subjective position. There is also the obvious parallax produced by Joe prior to his knowledge of the conspiracy and Joe after he becomes aware of its true nature: in the case of the former, the assassination appears to be just a disparate act of a crazy man, but afterwards it becomes clear that the assassination is part of a much wider conspiracy involving the Parallax corporation.
Yet these solutions don’t potentially tell us anything new about the film. A far more interesting effect is produced by comparing Joe as he apprehends his activity as an investigator to his concrete activity after his undertaking the Parallax indoctrination montage.
Joe thinks he is a journalist trying to uncover the mystery of the Parallax corporation, a kind of noumenal entity that seems to exist outside the boundaries of normal everyday society, reflected in the eerie darkness of their video-viewing room. Yet, in striking similarity to Glenn Ford’s character in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, Joe’s concrete actions in pursuing his investigation produce the desired consequences of the Parallax corporation itself. In a strangely Hegelian way, he carries out the very mission he intended to prevent and expose, and thus the parallax object is Joe himself, Joe as fractured by Joe qua his subjective stance and his objective status as an agent of the Parallax corporation thinking he is simply acting in a duplicitous manner. This may explain why, after his viewing of the indoctrination montage, we no longer receive much, if any, dialogue from Joe.
Yet one variable remains unaccounted for: the Senate. The Senate appears twice in the film, each time marking an assassination: once at the beginning and once at the end. The Senate is clearly the dimension of the big Other, the symbolic Law that quilts a given signifying chain in establishing knowledge as subordinate to the Master. The Senate qua big Other decide what the events “meant,” thereby lending them a certain fixity acquired through the propagation of Master-Signifiers. After the assassination, numerous stories are told about what happened, how and why: perhaps it was an inside job, or maybe it was perpetrated by a foreign country, or maybe it was simply a freak accident. All of these stories have the potential of acquiring the status of “knowledge,” but only insofar as they are subordinated to a Master-Signifier that secures the stability of their meaning: this is the job of the Senate qua big Other.
The bureaucratic stamp that provides knowledge with its ontological status, on the one hand, appears at first to be totalizing, but is in fact barred, incomplete, and marked by a certain lack that appears as a distortion. This appearance of distortion, however, is inherent to the parallax object itself: while the Master’s knowledge gives the illusion of fixity and stability to meaning, there is always the shadowy double, the “dark side of the Moon,” so to speak, that resists signification. This is the angle from which Joe proceeds in his inquiry, but gets caught up in the game and is eventually duped by the Parallax corporation as a result of not taking into account his own subjective position.
The uncanny effect produced by the disjunction between Joe’s unrelenting quest to uncover the truth against the Master’s Law and its shadowy, obscene counterpart in the frightening libidinal space of the Parallax corporation, echoes the aesthetics of classic film noir and its predecessor, German Expressionism. What gives The Parallax View its unique flavor, one that, not without coincidence, marks the historical-cinematic break between the era of classic and neo-film noir, is the undermining of Joe’s very subjective position. Moreover, Pakula’s use of negative shots (a hallmark of film noir), particularly of Joe in his apartment after he has faked his own death and is “officially” no longer among “the living”—shots which evoke those of Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo—, depict nothing other than the formal emptiness of the Cartesian cogito, the overwhelming excess and mad doubting that expels everything from the interiority of its being. Pakula’s depiction of this constant doubting, this “night of the world” inherent to the subject, marks the film’s truly radical dimension.
The Ambiguous Legacy of ‘68
A new article by Slavoj Zizek in In These Times. For those that have kept up with Zizek’s recent editorials or have read In Defense of Lost Causes, the majority of this is excerpts and summary.
Zizek on Philosophy
A series of three articles written by Zizek on philosophy, examining the relationship between Spinoza-Kant-Hegel, Deleuze-Derrida-Lacan and, lastly, Badiou. I thought this was especially well-put, as its an insight that many come to experience at a University, but never really consider as a problem outside of the way “Philosophy” departments are run:
This theory of the four “conditions” of philosophy allows us to approach in a new way the old problem of the “role” of philosophy. Often, other disciplines take over (at least part of) the “normal” role of philosophy… in US today - in the conditions of the predominance of cognitivism and brain studies in philosophy departments -, most of “Continental Philosophy” takes place in Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, English, French and German departments… What if, then, there is no “normal role”? What if it is exceptions themselves which retroactively create the illusion of the “norm” they allegedly violate? What if not only, in philosophy, exception is the rule, but also philosophy - the need for the authentic philosophical thought - arises precisely in those moments when (other) parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their “proper role”? What if the “proper” space for philosophy ARE these very gaps and interstices opened up by the “pathological” displacements in the social edifice? Along these lines, the first great merit of Badiou is that, for the first time, he systematically deployed the four modes of this reference of philosophy (to science, art, politics, and love).
(Via Naught Thought.)
No Shangri-La Part II
Awhile ago I posted a link to a letter written into the LRB by Slavoj Žižek entitled, “No Shangri-La,” in which Žižek criticizes the Western media and the Tibetan solidarity campaign for portraying a distorted and quixotic picture of pre-1949 Tibet, a vision Žižek argues is essentially libidinal (you can find his other Tibet-related pieces here and here). This caused something of an academic kerfuffle, with numerous scholars accusing Žižek of simply parroting the PRC’s propaganda (see Shego Jinpa, the University of Michigan’s Donald Lopez and Michel Thibaud, who somehow uses this as an opportunity to accuse Žižek of being a closet-Zionist).
To make what could otherwise be a long and somewhat unimportant story short, Žižek has written a short follow up letter to the LRB, available here. Needless to say, I’m sure the two Agent Coopers are very sad. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
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. ↩
No Shangri-La
Zizek on the Tibet/China Question:
What if the promised second stage, the democracy that follows the authoritarian vale of tears, never arrives? This, perhaps, is what is so unsettling about China today: the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past – of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, took place from the 16th to the 18th century – but a sign of our future? What if the combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle to it?
I recommend reading the entire letter.
(Via The Weblog.)
Zizek on Democracy Now!
Slavoj Zizek:
This may amuse you. It’s going to—when I was asked by a academic journal to say if I were to hold the power for one day as president, what—and I would have kind of absolute power to introduce a law, what law that would have been? My immediate answer was not as some humanist suggested, since United States at least thinks they are a global empire, so let every adult in the world be allowed to vote; my advice would be the opposite one: let’s everybody in the world, except US citizens, be allowed to vote and elect the American government. I think it would have been much better for you, even, because we all outside the United States would project our desires into how you should be.
(Via I Cite.)