Zizek, don't just write something...

Reading Slavoj Zizek today is, unfortunately, an exercise in repetition. Like many established figures on the left, Zizek recycles his material. Sometimes this self-plagarism can be interesting, watching him redeploy old anecdotes and jokes to make philosophical points can even be enlightening. At other times, however, Zizek would do well to obey his own injunction and think rather than act. His essay for In These Times which was published three days ago is a case in point. While one can understand the pressure to comment on something as significant as the terrorist attacks in Paris, this is an instance when he ought to have overcome or resisted the market pressures that come to bear on celebrity level public intellectuals.

That said, reading his essay critically is useful.

Zizek begins his essay by describing the preoccupations of the left over the last year. He says we started the year with our eyes on “radical emancipatory movements” such as Syriza, but as the months rolled by our attention shifted to the more reformist and humanitarian topic of the Syrian refugees. What has happened now, according to Zizek, is that both these topics have been usurped by the war on terror.

What this first characterization gets wrong can be understood best by looking to Syriza and by questioning whether or not it was ever justifiable to consider Alex Tsipras' party to be a force for “radical emancipation.” In fact, what was obvious from the start was that Syriza was simply not going to emancipate Greece either from the economic crisis or from the system of capitalist production and exploitation that had set up the terms for the crisis. What the left was invested in, what we were preoccupied by, was not a movement for emancipation, but rather a movement aimed at ameliorating the consequence of remaining within the bounds of not only capitalism, but also the Eurozone. What the left saw, quite accurately, was how few options Syriza had, and what we hoped for was not emancipation but better terms for bailouts that were, one way or another, inevitable.

The left preoccupation with Syriza then was, in reality, not very much different from the left's later preoccupation with the refugee crisis with one significant difference, namely the left's identification with Syriza leaders and Greek voters. Syriza was of the “left,” it was a party that shared our collective values but, outside of Greece, calls for better terms were based on humanitarian concern rather than any collective emancipatory ambition. After all, the true aim at that moment was to mitigate the suffering of the Greek people.

Zizek goes on to outline who most benefits from the terrorist attacks in Paris, and he rightly points out that the real winners are the reactionary forces in Europe and the Middle East. Where he goes off the rails is in his recommendations.

He suggests that we bring class struggle back, which is a call that one can't help but cheer. But, as Zizek points out, such easy agreement is exactly a moment of ideology "at its purest."

In a recent lecture given at the Graduate Center of CUNY the cultural critic Frederic Jameson proposed that the American left should look for a new anti-capitalist (as opposed to revolutionary) subject, and while his ultimate proposal, that US leftists should look to the institutions of the American Armed Forces as a vehicle of “dual power” is troubling on its face, the fundamental error in Jameson's thinking is not so apparent. What Jameson has done is dream up a solution for a problem that does not, in fact, exist. Or, to put it another way, Jameson has defined “capitalism” here in strictly political terms. He has, in fact, completely left out what might be thought of as capitalism proper or the realm of economics.

What Jameson imagines is that the US military can be a vehicle for the expression and the enactment of the popular will and that the US military can oppose the political State which is run by hand servants of the rich. Let us grant him this. It is possible to imagine, if exceedingly unlikely, that such a circumstance might come to pass, but what is not recognized is how little such an eventuality would change things.

What Jameson imagines is that the military can step in and direct the operations of society directly, that it can be the force that sets the terms for our daily activities. And while we might be tempted to protest that this is the dream of Fascism, an assertion that is perhaps not very far from the truth, what is more pertinent is that no political power of any sort, whether it be a military dictatorship or a democratic state, could truly manage such a feat.

As Marx pointed out in his critique of Hegel in the German Ideology, “The political state everywhere needs the guarantee of spheres lying outside it.”

Returning to Zizek's essay it's significant that, while he cites Jameson's suggestion, he himself is far less daring than Jameson. While Jameson argued that the military might be a force for the population to exert direct political control over and above the capitalist rulers, Zizek only points to Jameson in order to suggest that we might need to use some discipline and impose rules in order to manage the refugee crisis.

The suggestion is no more radical when Zizek makes it than when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres made it, and while it might very well be a rational and correct proposal, it is merely the kind of proposal a technician or manager would make. That is, restricting the movement of refugees in an egalitarian way (limiting the rich and poor Syrians alike as they seek asylum in order to produce a rational outcome) might be adequate for the handling of the emergency, but this in no way addresses the underlying causes of the Syrian crisis nor the threat from ISIS. His suggestion that Europe impose a minimum set of norms that includes religious freedom is a case of knocking on an open door as these norms are already imposed by law and practice.

Zizek's comments on Eurocentrism and the left's distaste for critiques of Islam are nonsequiturs in this context, and stand or fall on their own merits, but his suggestion for food distribution is perhaps the most ambitious aspect of his essay. Zizek says that we need to invent new forms of large-scale collective action and this is a reassertion of the need for a command economy that will, magically, be able to overcome the demands made on it by capitalist production.

Zizek states that neither the market nor the state can be trusted to handle the problem of food distribution, and rightly suggests that local populations cannot and should not be made to be self-sufficient either. What should manage the problem, what system can we turn to? According to Zizek we need a new, better, more powerful and disciplined version of the State. We need a State that can transcend capitalism without breaking from it.

What Zizek is offering us is an ideological vision of a State without capitalism and a global society without an economy. To put it in Zizekian terms, he and Jameson are promising us a decaffeinated solution, offering us a chocolate laxative.

And so on, and so on...

Categories:

0 comments on this article

This thread has been closed from taking new comments.