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Zizek
Zizek
Undoubtedly, one of the great cultural experiences of last year was Martin
Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home, which chronicles Bob Dylan’s
career from his arrival in New York in 1961 to his decision to abandon live
music some 5 years later. Of course, the real subject of the film is the
astonishing development of Dylan’s musical expression, from his early cover
versions of other singers to his unique fusion of folk and rock. It is a trajectory
he pursued in the face of an absolute resistance from the audience that had
grown up listening to his early protest songs. One of the events the film
depicts is Dylan’s now famous concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in
1966, during which he turns to his backing band after crises of “Judas!” from
one of the aggrieved folk purists in the audience and says simply: “Play fuckin’
loud”. The offended fans are then shown denouncing Dylan while they leave
during the show. And, in truth, it is excruciating to watch the attempts by
various groups at the time to appropriate Dylan – from his ex-lover Joan Baez
to the announcer at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival who exhorts the crowd
with “Take him, he’s yours!” Instead, against the idea that he was a simple
protest singer who sang about topical issues, Dylan has always insisted that
all of his songs were protest songs. Against any identifiable genre of music,
he argues for the moral necessity to keep on breaking with his audience in
order to take them outside the usual expectations of what a “folk” song is, of
what a “protest” song could be.
More than this, Zizek is accused in Dean’s essay not only of not providing the
meaning of the French riots to us, but also to the rioters themselves. In the
most traditional conception of philosophy, he is expected to speak for others,
bears a responsibility for “articulating the violence”. But the real point here is
that, if these riots are to constitute a real “event”, they must provide their own
meaning. And it is the failure of the rioters to do this, to make of what
happened an event, that Zizek indicates by the simple “mathemic” repetition
of his previous work (mostly passages of Ticklish Subject) in response to
them.3 The riots do not provide an occasion for new thought; they merely play
out an existing impasse. But, again, it is just this – this lack of any wider
meaning, the present inability of the rioters, of all of us, to formulate an
authentic utopian moment, to make of what happened a “universal” – that
Zizek attempts to think in his refusal to clutch at “solutions”, to suggest
possible alternatives, to issue philosophical nostrums from some higher place,
not “mired in the situation”. Perhaps the only true equivalent to Zizek’s
authentic ethical stance here, his refusal to offer placebos, his taking of the
time to think, strangely enough, was the response of French President
Jacques Chirac, who several days after the riots – and he too was criticised
for his delay – put forward an equally mathemic decree: “The French State will
not concede to the rioters”. We sense behind his words here, as with Zizek, a
frank admission that the riots did not constitute an authentic event, that the
only true crisis (for Capital) will be that of Capital itself…
Zizek plays out this impasse between the Left and the Right in his article by
comparing the riots in Paris with the hurricane in New Orleans, which
occurred just a little while afterwards. For each of these events seems to cast
a judgement on the other, bring out the limits of the prevailing ideological
explanations within which they are understood. With regard to the French
riots, what Zizek calls American “wild capitalism” operates as an implicit
critique of the stifling nature of traditional French society. The riots broke out
not only in response to the inability of the French State to integrate
immigrants, unlike the American “melting pot”, but also in response to the lack
of want or risk, again unlike the clear distinction between success and failure
in the “American dream”. And yet, on the other hand, the chaos that broke out
in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the inability of the world’s richest country to
look after its poorest citizens, is able to be seen, from the vantage point of
France, as the failure of unchecked capitalism to produce a functional civic
society. Like the supposed beat of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world
that causes a storm on the other, the United States’ failure to govern in Iraq
comes back as the collapse of public order in New Orleans. And, again, just
as Zizek does not choose between Leftist and Rightist explanations of the
riots, so he does not choose between French corporatism and American
capitalism. It is rather the lack of choice between them, the fact that to choose
one is already to choose the other, that he wants to think. Or, as he says –
once more introducing the difficulty of narrating or making sense of our
current situation – “It is meaningless to debate which reaction is worse: they
are both worse”.
And there is perhaps one other way in which we might think the French riots
and Hurricane Katrina as involved in a form of “infinite judgement” on each
other, each providing what the other is lacking. In one way, as we have seen,
it is easy to understand the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina as natural,
outside of meaning, but Zizek insists that it is of course cultural, the effect of
human rather than divine intervention. But, equally – and this is where it is
inadequate to suggest that Zizek merely repeats his own prior formulae, does
not attempt to think the specificity of the new situation – even though it is
tempting to argue that underlying the French riots is a cultural difference
between Muslims and others, and therefore a meaningful one, Zizek’s point is
that this difference has become naturalised today, something that is seen to
precede ideology and the constructedness of human identity. (This is Zizek’s
idea in quoting the well-known passage from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about
Nothing in which Dogsberry reverses the usual conception of what is ours
naturally and what we can acquire by choice and hard work.) But again here
this impasse, this inability to distinguish between nature and culture, the way
each keeps turning into the other, hints at something “deeper”, for Zizek’s
argument, as throughout, is that what allows this exchange between nature
and culture, what ensures that to choose one is to choose the other, is Capital
itself. It is Capital that produces this structure of “forced choice”, in which we
can choose only one of two alternatives, which are nevertheless both
inadequate, not enough – and what Zizek is trying to do in posing this choice
as such is to embody his insight that Capital today is our Real, that which, as
with the “sexual relationship”, always brings about (at least) two failed
responses as attempts to resolve it.7 In other words, as with the “sexual
relationship” – and this confirms the ultimate consistency of those two
approaches of Zizek we have examined here: either to begin with the
antinomies produced by the meaningless Real of capitalism or with an
assertion of this meaninglessness and then seeking to deduce its antinomies
– Capital as Real both produces this structure of two opposed choices that
are both inadequate and is only seen through (the failure of) these two
choices.8
Hegel’s exact point here is that it is not simply that we immerse a pre-existing
or preconstituted “substance” into some representational medium in order to
break it down into its constituted parts, like some alchemical analysis. (It is
just this that he objects to in Spinoza in the section from which we have
quoted.) It is also that we can only grasp this “substance” through the
contradictory effects it generates within representation, its irreducibility to any
non-dialectical form of logic. It is this Hegel makes clear in a passage that
follows on almost immediately from the one above:
The originality of the cause is sublated in the effect, where it makes itself into
a positedness. But this does not mean that the cause has vanished, so that
only the effect would be actual. For this positedness is just as immediately
sublated; it is rather the inward self-reflection of the cause, or its originality: it
is only in the effect that the cause is actual, and is [truly] cause.10
Notes:
1 See Letter of Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 2-3 November 1882, in Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992, p. 356.
2 It is notable that this refusal to supply a “meaning” also characterises Jean Baudrillard’s
response to the first Gulf War, which is for him as well a certain “non-event”. As he writes:
“This war liberates an exponential mass of stupidity, not the particular stupidity of war, which
is considerable, but the professional and functional stupidity of those who pontificate in
perpetual commentary on the event: all the Bouvards and Pécuchets for hire, the would-be
raiders of the lost image, the CNN types and all the master singers of strategy and
information” (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Sydney: Power Publishing, 1995, p. 51).
3 It is perhaps more complicated than this, for Zizek must say something in order to produce
the silence that allows reflection. This structure of the at once “too soon” and “too late” is
something we spoke about in our ‘Introduction’ to Interrogating the Real in terms of the
relationship between enunciation and enunciated. We cannot have one without the other: the
pure mathemic enunciated can only be seen through (the failure of) enunciation, while the
“empty speech” of pure enunciation is already only a mathemic enunciated. And this structure
of the “too soon” and the “too late” is also close to that of the “event” (see on this the
discussion of the “politics of prescription” in the section ‘Do We Still Have a World?’ of Zizek’s
forthcoming The Parallax View).
4 Or to take this back a step, Zizek constantly remarks throughout ‘Politically Incorrect
Reflections’ that the rioters want “recognition”, seek “visibility”, wish to “create a problem, to
signal that they are a problem that cannot any longer be ignored”, but this is evident only to
an attention that is able to re-mark this without seeking to turn it into something else. It is only
someone who does not immediately attempt a solution who can truly comprehend what is at
stake in the riots, the authentic question they raise (and thus the only answer that is possible).
5 That is, for all of the “mathemic” nature of Zizek’s response to the French riots – the way he
sees them, as did Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire, as strictly the repetition of a “class
struggle” that has occurred before – he is also surprisingly responsive to the specifics of
events and the occasion they provide for thought. Amongst the particularities of the riots and
the way they are not amenable to the usual Leftist bromides that would present them “in
terms of a global argument against the police and policing, against the brutal response to the
poor that is the necessary correlative of neoliberal economic struggle”: the protestors were
not “living on the edge of starvation, reduced to survival level”; their protests did not indicate a
rejection of the French State, but a desire to be “included” in it; insofar as they could be
considered Islamic in inspiration (although one of the first buildings attacked was a mosque,
which led religious authorities to condemn them), they were fuelled not by a sense of the
inferiority of the West but by a sense of its superiority, which is why “our condescending
politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more
furious and fuels their ressentiment”. And it is again for all of these reasons that Zizek does
not “whine about the failure of the rioters to articulate a positive vision”, for the very “meaning”
of the riots, what they have to tell us, is that they have no obvious meaning, do not fall into the
usual political narratives or explanations.
6 Instead, we might say, the real distinction between Right and Left resides in how they
differently treat this symptom: for the Right, its identification is a preliminary to getting rid of it,
so that it can assume power; for the Left, its identification is preliminary to admitting that it can
never be got rid of, so that it can never achieve power under the current circumstances.
7 This is the real point to Zizek’s humorous evocation of the “forced choice” in Did Somebody
Say Totalitarianism? in terms of the selection between Republican or Democrat, Nutra-Sweet
or High & Low, Leno or Letterman and Coke or Pepsi (pp. 240-1). Both options are
inadequate, having to be “supplemented” by the other; both are attempted solutions to the
impasse of Capital. It would be necessary, in other words, to read Zizek’s remarks on Coke in
Totalitarianism? along with his earlier discussion of Coke as objet petit a in Fragile Absolute
(pp. 21-4).
8 This is properly what is meant by the “parallax view”: not two views on to the same thing, as
in Nietzschean perspectivism, but any view and that void for which it stands in, as in the
“alternation” between Night and Day in Hegel (For They Know Not What They Do, p. 22).
10 Ibid, p. 228.