Bowman

Culture Machine,Reviews

Slavoj iek (2005) Interrogating

the Real. Edited by Rex
Butler and Scott Stephens
London and
New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-7110-2
Paul
Bowman
iek is intellectually orgiastic. He
jumps from one paradigm to another: from Lacanian psychoanalysis to
base-superstructure
Marxism; from Heidegger to Hegel to hegemony.
'Eclectic' is how Ernesto Laclau characterizes
iek's approach in general

(Laclau, 2005). Laclau uses this term as a criticism, because to

his mind, iek's lack of
fidelity to one rigorously conceived
approach produces
inconsistencies and incoherence. Given Laclau's famous insistence
on the importance of 'logic' and 'rigour',

iek's promiscuity would

'logically' seem to mean that
iek's position is incoherent
and must fall apart. Judith Butler agrees
with Laclau on this (see
Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000).
But Ian Parker has suggested that there is no real inconsistency,

because iek's apparently

inconsistent approach to any and every topic is an effect of his
strategy of lining up and applying
different and discrete paradigms
to his subject matter, one at a time and one after another (Parker,
2004). In other words,
iek's
'position' isn't necessarily incoherent because it isn't 'one'
position. Moreover, because
iek deliberately doesn't look

for coherence or consistency, there may be little point expecting

him to be coherent or consistent himself. Consistently

inconsistent, he looks for any unique insight that can be garnered

through one of several old friends: the theoretical
perspectives he
finds in Hegel, Marx, and Lacan. Does this mean there is no
coherent iek, or no coherence
in iek -- or

indeed, no iekian coherence?

There is certainly always a question mark when it comes to
working out where iek is
'coming from', or indeed 'going', and
this is not helped by the
fact that iek's frenetic and
eclectic manner has been growing in pace and has become more and

more pronounced recently. But this new book, Interrogating the

Real, which is a selection of some of
iek's older to more
recent
works, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, will certainly
prove valuable for anyone wishing to work out
iek's
trajectory. Many of the
texts have appeared before, but this is unremarkable when it comes
to iek, given his tendency to

reproduce entire sections of essays and books in different

contexts. So, much of the content will be more or less familiar to
the
seasoned traveller. However, what will be of particular
interest to the genealogist of
iek's thought is the fact that
quite a few
of the essays contained here are earlier conference
paper versions of essays that were later refined and published. So
the
development of iek's
arguments will be explicitly traceable through this excellent
selection of well-chosen texts.
With this book, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens have certainly
gathered an exemplary and excellent collection of
iek's works.
Interrogating
the Real moves broadly chronologically, but in three discrete
thematic sections -- 'Lacanian Orientations',

'Philosophy Traversed by Psychoanalysis' and 'The Fantasy of

Ideology'. Each section contains several very good samples of
early
to more recent work. The editors have done a remarkable job of
choosing and organising the pieces -- so much so that

Interrogating the Real could almost pass as a coherent

monograph. Indeed, it is arguably much more coherent than many of

iek's actual
monographs, which tend to ramble and jump about like a
psychoanalytic session. But thanks to the editors'
judiciousness
and dexterity, the reader can discern clear connections and
developments from chapter to chapter, section to
section, and gain
a strong sense of the interconnections and developments of
iek's wildly proliferating
corpus.
The basis of iekian
interconnections and the logic of his thought, as is well known,
hinges around Hegel, Marx and Lacan.
These three perspectives
provide three matrices or 'machines' of his thought. What is
idiosyncratic to iek is, as
the early
essays in Interrogating the Real explain, his
perhaps indefensible tendency to regard these otherwise distinct
approaches as
reciprocally consolidating: to
iek's mind, Hegel provides the
philosophical justification for Marx and Lacan, and vice versa.

Each is linked by analogy or 'homology', and what each says in

their respective realm (philosophy, political economy and

psychoanalysis) is held to be equivalent to what the others say in

theirs. In other words, according to
iek, the Hegelian
master-slave
dialectic makes sense and can be translated directly into Marxian
(class antagonism) and Lacanian (sexuation
antagonism) terms, and
back again. Needless to say, this kind of perspective is
controversial. What's more, for the uninitiated
reader, one finds a
torrent of dense and diverse philosophical, political and
psychoanalytic argument which can seem
overwhelming. For other
readers, however, iek's
approach can seem so crude as to be crass.
This is the 'iek-effect': a
torrent of diversely ranging points, arguments, claims and
insights, from different angles, but as
quickly becomes apparent,
with a high degree of repetition. Repetition appears to be
everything and everywhere: repetition of
the same examples (derived
mainly from film, but also from 'high-culture' and considerations
of totalitarian power), the same
problematics (the decline of
'radical thought' in the west), the same interpretations (the
'need' for radical anticapitalist
revolution). In other words, you
could say: if you've read any
iek then you've heard it
all before. You can start just about
anywhere with
iek, dive straight in, and you
will find the same things, the same themes, the same questions and
the same
conclusions, over and over and over again: 'Is [insert
example] not precisely an exemplary example of the Real/return
of the
repressed in its inverted true form/universal class
antagonism/sexual difference/barred subject/ working of the Big
Other/objet
petit a/[delete as applicable]?'

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Bowman
The editors acknowledge
iek's repetition and try to
account for it, and their effort deserves some comment. For, I've
read
quite a few arguments about
iek's penchant for 'copy and
paste' -- in which he always indulges with gay abandon.
But none
come close to Butler and Stephens' argument. Being
generous, one could point to both the ingenuity and the polemical
zeal of
their argument. It basically works by claiming profundity
and disparaging all of the so-called 'wrong' readings of
iek (3-4),
with that
characteristic flourish much beloved of politicians, polemicists
and, it has to be said,
iekians: 'what so-and-so
fails
to see is this!' Being rather less generous
-- but rather more
iekian -- one
could simply call their account deeply
symptomatic, steeped in
denial and the delusions of overinvestment. For they argue:
In the texts selected here, and throughout his work as a whole,
one can find iek reversing his
position many
times. He writes, as has been noted, prolifically and
seemingly with little concern for consistency. It is as though
the
activity of writing itself is
iek's chief motivation, the
reason why he writes at all. This is reflected in the
very form of
his texts, where there is inevitably an unnecessary final chapter,
consisting of faits divers or
'related matters' added on,
after the main theoretical work of the book has been completed. In
fact, strangely
enough, what
iek actually wants us to see
is this very nothingness, this 'nothing-to-say' or 'empty speech'

that underlies his texts. Let us call it his theoretical

drive, or in more technical language a kind of
enunciation
without enunciated. (2)

Well, if this is what

iek wants us to see, then he
doesn't appear to be trying particularly hard. But, what is more,
this
account doesn't even get
iek off the theoretical hook
anyway. In fact, one could take this attempt to justify
iek's
eccentricities and
academic abuses as the harshest criticism of so explicitly
ostensibly politicised a writer as
iek. For, in his
Author's
Preface to Interrogating the Real,
iek distinguishes between
'desire' and 'drive' like this: 'let us imagine an
individual
trying to perform some simple manual task -- say,
grabbing an object that repeatedly eludes him: the moment he

changes his attitude, starts to find pleasure in just repeating the

failed task (squeezing the object, which again and again
eludes
him), he shifts from desire to drive' (10). This would make
iek's claims about politics
and revolution mere empty
chatter, mere drive, mere repetition
compulsion. The editors get closer to the point when they concede:
On the other hand, as one reads these texts -- and,
again, as has been noted -- we observe a tremendous

consistency of approach in
iek. He is, in his own words,
a 'dogmatic philosopher', who has remained strictly
faithful to his
great loves, Lacan and Hegel, from whom he has never wavered. More
than this, we get the
uncanny impression that, no matter what
iek writes about, however
far-fetched his examples, he always ends
up saying the same thing.
It is almost as though his is a predetermined system that follows
its own course,
despite obstacles or contingencies, personal events
in his life or world-historical upheavals. . ..
(2-3)

To be generous, iek does not

always end up saying the same thing. He always ends up
saying the same things (impossibility
of: sexual relation
and/or identity and/or reality-of-change-within-capitalism and/or
all-of-the-above). Accordingly, perhaps it
would be legitimate to
redirect and redeploy one of
iek's own favourite Hegelian
aphorisms about 'science' so as to suggest - precisely
because, 'as iek himself says,
[his work] is also a kind of impersonal "machine", a form of
objective, externalized
knowledge embodied in a neutral medium that
repeats itself endlessly' (3) -- that
iek's approach does not
think, that
perhaps iek's
approach does not allow for thinking as such, because it already
thinks it knows, in advance (Walsh, 2002). In
this regard,
iek is without a doubt the
current world champion of formalising and systematising. His
exclusive mode of
'fidelity to' Lacan, Hegel and Marx is
formalising and systematising their 'insights'. One need not be
Immanuel Kant to doubt
the legitimacy of this 'fidelity'. Not
really a post-structuralist,
iek is more of a
re-structuralist.
But, as problematic as all of this is, it is no simple
criticism. For in iek's cold
machinic yet cackling formalism lies his
brilliance, or at least
his utility. This is because his work functions a bit like
a kind of Lacan, Hegel, Marx, and Miscellaneous
Clever Stuff
for Dummies. Or, rather, as a very culturally-specific,
advanced-level refresher- or crash-course in 'All That Stuff'
that
contemporary academics are still expected to know about but
probably haven't -- how shall I put it? --
finished reading
yet. This function is not quite the same
as his intended function of 'holding the place'
(iek, 2000), of keeping
political and
philosophical radicalism on the agenda. In fact, the
function that I am suggesting
iek may serve today would
equal the
abomination and monstrous double of his intended function
(except to the extent that it would allow him to 'hegemonise' the

university scene -- and

iek certainly regards academia
as a battle for hegemony in the realm of ideas). Nevertheless,

perhaps in the future, his work will turn out to have functioned as
a kind of 'vanishing mediator' of all of that clever stuff that

academics were still expected to know in the nineties of the old

and the 'noughties' of the new millennium, but that they didn't

actually have enough time to read, for the simple reason that
reading is one not entirely 'academic' casualty of today's

intensification of exploitation.
Ironically, for any who may already be so exploited and rushed
off their feet that they haven't even got the time to read
iek,
the editors have
generously included a iek
Glossary. This is particularly amusing because one of the editors'
arguments in
the Introduction is that
'iek's real point is that
no philosophical Truth can ever exist apart from its
exemplification, its
enunciation' (4). One wonders immediately,
then, about the status of this glossary as exemplification or
enunciation. For, its
presence seems so contradictory that I'd like
to believe that the glossary was added to this collection under
extreme duress
and solely at the demand of the publishers.
(Publishers always want reassurances that books they contract will
sell to first year
undergraduates, mythical 'interested general
readers', high school kids, their friends, parents, grandparents,
pets, and so on - the more the better, obviously.) It
is not just that the collection of essays and the supplementary
glossary reciprocally obviate
the need for, and work of, each
other. It is that if 'iek's
real point is that no philosophical Truth can ever exist
apart from its
exemplification, its enunciation', then, we have
this exemplification or enunciation in the form it takes in
iek's essays

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Bowman
themselves on the
one hand, closely followed by the different, putatively
example/enunciation-free form it takes in the
glossary, on the
other! Which is the right one? Which is which? What does the fact
that both do actually exist mean?
So, on the one hand, the glossary of terms about truth
free-from/only-in-and-as-its very moment of exemplification seems

problematic in relation to the collection of essays themselves. And

on the other hand, the editors' argument that tries to justify

iek's relentless repetition of

the same examples and conclusions over and over again seems to
suffer from a kind of 'kettlelogic'. Basically, this argument
contains a significant degree of virement, or conceptual
drift and, I suspect, 'function-creep'.
That is to say, the
argument that tries to justify
iek's endless repetition of
the same examples and the same conclusions
rests on a claim that
iek does this because of the
allegedly inevitable, perpetual distortion of truth
in examples, truths that
are only ever present in their
distorted exemplifications. If this is so, then one might
expect iek's examples and
conclusions
to change; one might expect something of an excess of
examples and conclusions, rather than the conspicuously suspect

limited selection that we keep finding.

But surely, this can all just be referred back to the
iekian response to the
Laclauian and Butlerian types of criticism about

iek's apparent lack of

consistency, coherence and eclecticism with which we began. Namely,
there are different notions of
coherence and consistency at play
here. Vis--vis different approaches, every
different approach is a foreign country -- they
do
things differently there.
Nevertheless, this still suggests a further critical question:
When it comes to 'doing', why do this? For, once one has
any
concept of what iek means
by 'the Real' -- basically, impossibility
itself -- the question arising in the face of
Interrogating
the Real becomes: but why would you
want to interrogate that, of all (non)things? What would
be the point of it? It could be
read as an empty exercise
of 'drive' in a way that takes us back to the editors' arguments
about iek having
'nothing-tosay or [the]
empty speech that underlies
[iek's] texts'.
Perhaps this 'emptiness' says more about
iek's Lacan than it does
about iek's point. For,
when it comes to iek's
point -so to speak, the point of
iek -- namely, his
much-remarked political investments and orientations and his
rejection of
'postmodern resignation', this would, taken at face
value, apparently trump his enjoyment of 'empty' psychobabble.
Indeed, to
my mind, it is in
iek's articulation of the
psychoanalytic to the political field as a way to think about
'radicalising' political
projects that his project does try to
add something, to 'change it'. As he argues in
'Revisioning "Lacanian" Social Criticism':
'The fundamental wager
of psychoanalysis is that there exists such a knowledge which
produces effects in the Real, that we
can "undo things (symptoms)
with words". The whole point of psychoanalytic treatment is that is
operates exclusively at the
level of "knowledge" (words), yet has
effects in the Real of bodily symptoms' (303).
Now this, I think, remains thoroughly interesting, doubtless not
only to me but also to iek's
many readers. However, my
contention is that the nuts and bolts of
the socially-inflected Lacanian criticism that
iek has spent so much of his
efforts
enumerating are ultimately of less significance
-- both theoretically/academically and
practically/politically -- than such
seminal critical
works on political theory as 'Beyond Discourse Analysis'. This
essay, which was first presented as a response to
Laclau and
Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985), and first printed in one of Laclau's following
books
(Laclau, 1990), is rightly present in Interrogating the
Real. Its presence there makes the book worth acquiring for
this
essay alone, if you do not already have the Laclau volume.
For, this short text is perhaps
iek's finest. It is a response
to Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and
an
engagement with political theory and contemporary academic
intellectual and political concerns, one that remains valid and

important today. Admittedly, however, it has increasingly come to

appear that the 'Beyond' referred to in the title 'Beyond
Discourse
Analysis' may well be a bit of a dead-end, at least when it comes
to politics if not to scholarship. But, as an
account
of the theoretical significance of Laclau and Mouffe's
'post-Marxist' discourse theory, 'Beyond Discourse Analysis' is
hard to
beat.
Unfortunately, for iek, the
real value of Laclau and Mouffe consists in the extent to which
their approach can be taken in
Lacanian and not their own
'post-Marxist' terms. As we see in the first sentences of
'Beyond Discourse Analysis',
iek wants
to refute the
post-structuralist readings of Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy, and to affirm an ultimately
Lacanian
approach to ideological social and political studies. This is a
deeply problematic move. But it is one which has defined
the entire
subsequent development of Laclau and
iek's relationship. It has
taken the form, first of all, of an argument about
whether and the
extent to which one might ever be able to develop an ultimately
Lacanian approach to ideological social and
political studies.
This may seem on the one hand to be an obscure, arbitrary or
inconsequential matter, particularly to those less than familiar

with Laclau and Mouffe's work (but also to those quite familiar
with it). Yet, on the other hand, any who read 'Beyond
Discourse
Analysis' for the first time are likely to find it relentlessly
fast and theoretically formidable. One might ask how to
make sense
of this apparent mismatch, or indeed how to make sense of 'Beyond
Discourse Analysis' per se. As regards the
latter
question, the editors of Interrogating the Real have very
helpfully prepared the ground and set the scene for any first

reading of it, so that its argument might more easily make sense.
They have done so by including essays that can be read as
'primers'
that prepare one for 'Beyond Discourse Analysis'. As
iek puts it in one of these
preceding pieces:
Is . . .the ultimate Marxian parallax not the one
between economy and politics, between the 'critique of political

economy' with its logic of commodities and the political struggle

with its logic of antagonism? Both logics are
'transcendental', not
merely ontico-empirical, and they are both irreducible to each
other. . .

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Bowman
The 'political' critique of Marxism
(the claim that, when one reduces politics for a 'formal'
expression of some underlying
'objective' socio-economic process,
one loses the openness and contingency constitutive of the
political field proper) should
thus be supplemented by its obverse:
the field of the economy is in its very form irreducible
to politics -- this level of the form
of
economy (of economy as the determining form of the social)
is what French 'political post-Marxists' miss when they reduce

economy to one of the positive social spheres. (242, 243)

This is the other key dimension of the argument between
iek and Laclau. It may
initially seem trivial, like the question of
'Lacanian' versus
'post-Marxist' approaches, but it is actually the argument between
iek and post-structuralism or
postMarxism in general. It is an antagonism that is all about the
theoretical status of 'antagonism'. The significance of it may seem

secondary. But, it is not to be understood as a localised dispute.

This is because it is, in fact, in a nutshell, the dispute
between
iek and what he pejoratively
construes as the entire 'postmodernist/ poststructuralist/
deconstructionist/ cultural
studies/ discourse analysis' tendencies
in the contemporary university. In other words, it is
iek's argument with me and,

more than likely -- if you have managed to read this

far through this review -- with you.

References
Butler, J., Laclau, E., &
iek, S. (2000)
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on
the Left. London:
Verso.
Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on The Revolution of Our
Time. London: Verso.
Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London:
Verso.
Laclau, E, & Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London:
Verso.
Parker, I. (2004) Slavoj
iek: A Critical
Introduction. London: Pluto Press.
Walsh, M. (2002) 'Slavoj
iek (1949 -)', The
Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory.
Wolfreys, J. (ed.),
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Paul
Bowman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural
Studies at Roehampton University, London, UK. He is editor of

Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics, Practice

(Pluto Press, 2003), author of Post-Marxism versus Cultural
Studies:
Politics, Theory and Intervention (Edinburgh
University Press, 2007) and co-editor of The Truth of
iek (Continuum, 2007).

Formerly an editor of the journal Parallax, he has also

published widely in books and such journals as Culture
Machine,
Strategies, Parallax and
Contemporary Politics.

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