Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana
From Frankfurt to Ljubljana:
Critical Theory from Adorno to Žižek
Benjamin Day
The various attempts to produce an amalgam of Freudian psychoanalysis and
Marxist critical theory did not fare well in the late twentieth century. The two
components of this heady mix assured that proponents were disliked equal-
ly by both poles of the Cold War ideological rift, and by most shades of gray
in between. It’s interesting then, that the explosion of literature from the
Slovene Lacanian school – which has overwhelmingly consisted in a steady
stream of books and articles from Slavoj Žižek, written faster than the rest
of us can read – coincided almost precisely with the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the beginning of American global hegemony. Interesting, I say,
because the Slovenes have indicated that within their framework of politi-
cized Lacanian theory, ‘the explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis and Marxist tradition detonates a dynamic freedom that enables us to
question the very presuppositions of the circuit of Capital’1 . The Slovene
Lacanians are perhaps the only proper ‘school’ of neomarxist thinkers to
emerge since Habermas built a following and, even then, the Slovenes are
much more coherent as a group in terms of their intellectual framework and
politics.
Žižek burst on the scene in 1989 with The Sublime Object of Ideology, and rapid-
ly became known for his frenetic yet beautifully written prose, general con-
trariness, and style of deploying the most abstract and difficult philosophical
apparatuses for the analysis of popular culture at its most mundane and
sometimes ridiculous. He is, plainly put, a pleasure to read. And this makes
him a rarity in the world of philosophy and political theory, with perhaps only
Peter Sloterdijk and a few others as company. Since the turn of the millenni-
um, Žižek’s works have also taken a decidedly political turn, focusing more
on contemporary political events, the state of Left intellectual analysis, the
daily workings of capitalism, and the hollow political effusions of liberal and
conservative apologists alike.
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The ‘basic’ Lacanian framework that the Slovenes have taken as their point of
departure puts them very close to the first generation Frankfurters. Much
closer, in fact, than second and third generation Frankfurt School theorists on
the one hand, and what is sometimes seen as a second legacy of the first gen-
eration – poststructuralism – on the other. However, the Slovenes have
politicized this framework in a manner that would be unrecognizable as a
Frankfurt School mode of critical theory. Gone, in particular, is the ‘aes-
thetic’ model for resistance, the fatalism of the critique of instrumental rea-
son, and the spectre of an administered world; gone also the uneasiness with
collective action or class politics that was characteristic of Adorno and
Horkheimer (less so of Marcuse in his later years), the emphasis on symbol-
ic modes of dissent, and most importantly the critique of society as a critique
of knowledge. I would like to try, in this paper, to show the points of con-
tact between Adorno and the Slovene Lacanians in their basic philosophical
framework, and how this similarity positions them in relation to later
Frankfurt School theorists as well as poststructuralists. And then, by focusing
on Žižek’s recent political writings, to see where they part company.
Positioning Negative Dialectics
The ‘negative’ in Adorno’s negative dialectics is expressed, over the course of
the book by the same name, through dozens of different concepts, many of
which are drawn from the ‘traditional’ edifices of canonical metaphysics,
ontology, and epistemology: subject and object, individual and individuality,
concept and thing, the ontological and the ontic, action and ego, essence and
appearance, and so on. But, in all these cases, Adorno is making multiple
passes with the same basic intellectual artillery, loosing them on a variety of
philosophical traditions and topics, more than he is making a variety of cri-
tiques. The lack of a traditional narrative structure in Negative Dialectics , the
pseudo-aphoristic style, can lend a false sense of disunity to the work – in
fact, it is single-mindedly focused, and all headings can be brought coherent-
ly under the book title.
The book’s overarching critique begins where Kant’s critique ends: with a
reality, or object-field composed of things-in-themselves, and the subject’s
perceptions or representations of them. The well-known aporia here is that
it becomes difficult to even speak of things-in-themselves, insofar as their
status could only become meaningful or non-fictional to the extent that they
are represented and placed within the conceptual framework of the subject’s
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mechanisms of understanding. And yet Kant refuses to jettison reference to
the things-in-themselves as operative elements in the critique of pure reason,
even while he appears simultaneously to deny these things an operative role
in the subject’s field of perception: the thing never appears, it only becomes
known.
There are two directions to proceed from here. One is in the direction of ide-
alism and poststructural theory, while the other passes through the first gen-
eration of the Frankfurt School and the Lacanian tradition. The idealist/post-
structuralist solution is to eliminate reference to the thing, the signified, or the
represented. Ontology is thus collapsed into epistemology, and questions of
‘what is’ are reduced to an immanent analysis of ‘what is apparent’. For
Hegel, this involves the idealist dialectics of experience and the experience of
experiencing (that is, the dissonance produced by the two perspectives of
consciousness and self-consciousness), while for poststructuralists it revolves
around the ’play of signifiers.’ But both before and after the linguistic turn,
the Kantian dilemma is here resolved by eliminating the referent, the bottom
tier of the classical two-tiered model (the ‘mirror of nature’), and attempting
to reconstruct philosophy on the basis of a single-tiered model, in which all
‘being’ is qualitatively similar.
Whereas idealism and poststructuralism appropriate Kant’s relegation of the
Thing to an inoperative, functionless mystification and reject Kant’s clinging
to the Thing on the basis of pure reason, Adorno and Lacan begin with the
opposite appropriation: it was correct for Kant to ‘cling to the Thing’ even after
it had been radically emptied of all the categories of perception. However,
they reject the idealist moment in Kant, which seals off human experience to
anything but the pre-digested, already understood, already somehow
‘processed’ data of human perception, ideas, and concepts. It is precisely the
role of the Thing to intrude on human experience as an undigested inter-
vention – the Thing thus appears as a moment of non-understanding, of disrup-
tion in our conceptual framework, of nonidentity since it is not immediately rec-
ognizable or categorizable. The Thing appears to us as a ‘something’, but we
are not sure exactly what it is. It is not really a void or black hole that some-
how mystically resists the apparatuses of perception, but the Thing is a
moment of things we do understand and perceive – it is the moment when
our understanding of a thing seems to fail and become inadequate, when the
object of our knowledge misbehaves.
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What I’ve been calling here the Thing appears as external to the symbolic unity
of perception and understanding – in that, at least, initially, it fails to fit with-
in that symbolic grid; but it is at the same time radically internal, since it is the
thing itself we are trying to understand that is misbehaving, and so it is incumbent
upon us to adjust our understanding, to change our way of looking, such that
it does make sense. As Adorno put it, ‘What is, is more than it is. This ‘more’
is not imposed upon it but remains immanent to it, as that which has been
pushed out of it. In that sense, the nonidentical would be the thing’s own
identity against its identifications’ (Adorno, 1973:161). Or, as he puts it else-
where, this dialectical keeping-oneself-open to the possible independence of
the object from our understanding of it, is almost more positivistic than positivism
(Adorno, 1973:141). This parallels the notion of ‘extimacy’ introduced by
Lacan and used by the Slovenes to get at this very point: that this moment of
the thing rebelling, as it were, against our identifications of it by not quite fit-
ting into the place we have made for it in a symbolic and conceptual frame-
work, is both ‘external’ and yet ‘intimate’ to the framework itself.
This theme comes out clearly in one of Adorno’s passes at defining ‘dialec-
tics’: ‘The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects
do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder… [Contradiction]
indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust
the thing conceived’ (Adorno, 1973:5). It is what he is getting at in raising the
themes of the nonconceptual and nonidentity: ‘Dialectics is the consistent
sense of nonidentity’ (Adorno, 1973:5). The same trope is at work in
Adorno’s rehabilitation of Husserl’s doctrine of essence perception – ‘What
this amounts to is that the essence [as opposed to the appearance] is totally
alien to the consciousness that grasps it’ (Adorno, 1973:167).
The Kantian Thing comes to play, in Adorno’s and Lacan’s systems, the role
of the agent of change. Adorno replaces the Kantian hierarchization of reason
with the figure of the constellation of concepts, concepts that are all horizon-
tally interrelated and defined in relation to one another (Adorno, 1973:162ff).
This is an operation performed at the level of consciousness that almost per-
fectly correlates with the poststructural reformulation of the language system
– Saussure, minus the ‘mirror’ world of objects. However, unlike in post-
structuralism, for Adorno and Lacan there is no ‘play’ without the ‘extimate’
intervention of the Thing – the nonidentical, the nonconceptual, the alien
essence of the object. When our understanding of the world fails us at some
point, we are forced to change the very tropes and narratives and concepts we
use to understand the world in general, in order to ‘make sense’ of the misbe-
having object (Adorno, 1973:166).
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This dialectical relationship between understanding and the world is termed
negative, since the intervention of the ‘objective’ world always takes the form
of a lack, and is thus not pedagogical in the sense that it doesn’t instruct us
in a new mode of thinking: it merely challenges us and demands that we think
differently in a way that makes more sense of the world. Wherever the world
is not allowed to have its say – where the ‘complaints’ of objects and the con-
tradictions within our attempt to conceptually understand that world are
smoothed over – intellectual progress is undermined. ‘Wherever,’ Adorno writes,
‘judgment is too subjective at the present historical stage, the subject, as a
rule, will automatically parrot the consensus omniu’ (Adorno, 1973:170). This,
then, becomes the basis for Adorno’s (very strange) version of the defense of
modernity, as well as his critical theory: he politicizes the process of individ-
ual dissent, of nonidentitarian thinking that refuses to fit into existing cate-
gories of understanding, and also the process whereby the world of objects is
individualized, and allowed to break free of the categories we have imposed
upon them.
But to understand this politicization of a highly theoretical edifice, we need
to turn to the subject. The same ambiguity that pervades Kant’s account of
the object also enters his ethics in the shape of a subject that, in order to
function as an agent - in order to will and thus to act freely – must necessar-
ily be impenetrable to self-reflection. It is not possible for the subject to
‘know itself’ in the same way that the thing-in-itself is directly unperceivable:
only as the subject manifests itself to itself, does it become known – and then it
is filtered, as perception of the thing is, through the mesh of the categories
and an interpretive framework.
Within this dichotomous structure of the subject, Kant denigrates non-rule-
based agency by insisting that the subject acts ‘freely’ only when it is guided
by the generalizable imperatives of reason – if it acts merely on impulse, or
desire, or some other motivation, the will must be seen as externally deter-
mined. Only reason is a motivating principle ‘interior,’ as it were, to subjec-
tivity. So it is only when the ego – the collection of beliefs and commitments,
understandings and conceptual constellations that constitute one’s ‘self’ –
accords with the dictates of reason, that it is truly free, and that actions taken
on the basis of this ‘I’ can be seen as uncoerced. The problem here for
Adorno is the insistence on rule-based agency – the notion that when the sub-
ject acts, it must act from some set of rules or principles, and that its freedom
hinges on what sort of rules the agent is acting out. This assumes that the
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subject, when it acts, is ultimately merely a mechanical extension of the ego – that
whatever the ego’s beliefs, preferences, or conceptual system dictate in a given
situation, will guide the subject’s act. Like the unknowable object that asserts
itself negatively against the concepts and ideas that we have tried to cover it
with, the unknowable subject also asserts itself negatively against the ego and dis-
rupts the stable web of beliefs and understandings of which it consists.
Indeed, the agent of the subject is distinguishable from the ego, and it is the
unruly agent – an agent that is internal to the ego, and yet refuses to merely
act its principles out mechanically, whatever those principles are, that is the
crucial agent for self-change. Or, in other words, just as our whole understanding
of the world can be altered by the negative intervention of the object, our
understanding of who we are is also disrupted by what we think and do, which
spills over the constraints of our ‘former self.’
Adorno writes that ‘Thinking men and artists have not infrequently described
a sense of not quite being there, of not playing along, a feeling as if they were
not themselves at all, but a kind of spectator… the ability to keep one’s dis-
tance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human
part’ (Adorno, 1973:363). And this perspective of the spectator implies the
work of the subject-agent disrupting the placid functioning of the subject-
ego: when suddenly, we look at who we are and what we believe in or under-
stand, and say to ourselves ‘this is not me, this is not the real me’ – the subject-
agent negatively intervenes, protesting ‘extimately.’ In Adorno’s vocabulary,
this agent-subject is referred to as ‘the impulse that precedes the ego’
(Adorno, 1973:221ff), and it is only in this impulse – the negative moment
of spontaneity, disrupting the mechanical functioning of the ego-complex –
that constitutes the moment of freedom for the subject, since it is in this moment
that the subject is able to intervene in its own self-development and become,
as it were, more ‘true to itself’ (just as an openness towards the otherness of
the object is a way of being true to the world).
And so, again, Adorno maintains a Kantian two-tiered structure of the
unknowable subject-agent that negatively intervenes in the life of an inte-
grated, ‘positive’ subject-ego which tries to ‘cover’ the actions of the agent.
He maintains this structure against idealists, who deploy a single-tier structure
without any space for the negative, as it is understood by Adorno, and that
structures the subject (or the ego, since the ‘subject’ proper dies in this flat-
tening) under a uniform, immanent logic of the dialectic of consciousness
with itself (or the play of signifiers for poststructuralists). This is the basis
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for Adorno’s political critique of idealism. Because these flattening gestures
attempt to reduce freedom to a set of rules, they repress the negative, and
thereby repress the very agent of change through which freedom actually
expresses itself. Because, for Adorno, the negative moment is the agent of
change:
If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangi-
ble implication is that if thinking is to be true – if it is to be true today,
in any case – it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not
measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the out-
set in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS
liked to drown out the screams of its victims (Adorno, 1973:265).
What is at issue here is Adorno’s case against the reification of thought. This
can be combated only by unleashing the element of spontaneity of the sub-
ject, as well as the ability of the object to assert its ‘primacy.’ In a striking pas-
sage alluding to this spontaneous, ‘unknowable’ (unpredictable) underside of
the subject, Adorno writes that:
The individual cannot be deduced from thought, yet the core of indi-
viduality would be comparable to those utterly individuated works of
art which spurn all schemata and whose analysis will rediscover uni-
versal moments in their extreme individuation – a participation in typ-
icality that is hidden from the participants themselves (Adorno,
1973:162).
This captures the way in which Adorno’s ethics and aesthetics provide mod-
els for one another, but it also brings out the modernist streak in what at first
glance appears as a very anti-modernist fracturing of all of the
Enlightenment’s aspirations for the prospects of knowledge of the world and
of ourselves. The primacy of the object or the spontaneity of the will are not
merely random, troublesome negative interventions in the life of our ideas,
concepts, and identifications – they are expressions of resistance to a con-
ceptual violence that has been done against them, violence done by failed
attempts to cover the object with its representation, or to cover the subject
with the edifice of a limiting ego. The fact that they resist violence, and make
claims of ontological and ethical primacy against the symbolic frameworks
they disrupt, makes them universal and not merely particularistic or relativistic
moments.
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Over to Ljubljana
In a 1993 article in Qui Parle, the Slovene Lacanian Mladen Dolar2 launched a
critique of Althusser’s notion of ‘interpellation’ as constitutive of subjectivi-
ty that strongly parallels Adorno’s critique of idealism, and formed an impor-
tant basis for later writings by the Slovene school. The theory of interpella-
tion holds that subjects are constituted primarily through an act of recognition
– an individual becomes a social subject when s/he recognizes his/her place
in a social system, famously illustrated by Althusser in the act of responding
to the hail of a police officer, acknowledging that one is the subject being
addressed. The consequences of this are dire for the possibility of what we
might term an “autonomous” subject – one that is to some degree self-con-
stituting. If subjectivity can only emerge in socially constituted “subject posi-
tions” that are waiting, as it were, for the subject, then the “ideological sub-
ject [is] the only kind of subject there is” (Dolar, 1993:76). Even if one
knows what this position is, it is not escapable, except through retreat into
another socially-constituted subject position:
The extraordinary implication of this view is that the theoretician who
sees through this ideological mechanism [of one’s subject position]
cannot himself escape it – in his non-scientific existence, he is as much
of an (ideological) subject as anybody else, the illusion being constitu-
tive for any kind of subjectivity and thus ineluctable (Dolar, 1993:76).
But there is a problem with the notion that subjects are always the subjects of
and thus subject to a pre-given social-symbolic structure:
[T]his sudden passage [from individual to interpellated subject] is
never complete – the clean cut always produces a remainder. To put it
in the simplest way, there is a part of the individual that cannot suc-
cessfully pass into the subject, an element of ‘pre-ideological’ and ‘pre-
subjective’ materia prima that comes to haunt subjectivity once it is
constituted as such. A part of external materiality remains that cannot
be successfully integrated in the interior… Psychoanalysis does not
deny the cut, it only adds a remainder. The clean cut is always
unclean…( Dolar, 1993:76).
But, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is this remainder – a term that Adorno
also uses – that is fundamental for subjectivity, and not the interpellated ‘sub-
ject position’ of an individual. ‘For Althusser, the subject is what makes ide-
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ology work; for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails’
(Dolar, 1993:78). As was the case for Adorno, this failure of interpellation to
completely ‘cover’ the subject, finds its expression in a remainder that
‘haunts’ subjectivity through negative interventions. As Dolar puts it, ‘For Lacan,
however, the subject emerges only at the point of a non-recognition: all the
formations of the unconscious have this in common, they are accompanied
by a ‘this is not me,’ ‘I was not there,’ although they are produced by the sub-
ject’ (Dolar, 1993:80). This negation should remind us of Adorno’s position
of the ‘spectator,’ seeing ourselves from without and somehow negating our-
selves, thought thinking against itself. As Žižek writes:
In psychoanalytic terms, this failure of interpellation is what hysteria is
about; for this reason, the subject as such is, in a way, hysterical. That
is to say: what is hysteria if not the stance of the permanent question-
ing of one’s symbolic identity, of the identity conferred on me by the
big Other: ‘You say I am (a mother, a whore, a teacher…) but am I real-
ly what you say I am? (Žižek, 2000:115).
Dolar’s article marks the beginning of what I would term the ‘second ideol-
ogy debate’3 . The first ideology debate centers around the Marxian critique
of ideology, and the question of whether all positions are essentially ideo-
logical, or whether a ‘scientific’ analysis can allow one to escape a somehow
pre-interested, ‘biased’ approach. This debate has a direct parallel in the ques-
tion of the pervasiveness of rhetoric, and whether the old Platonic charge of
Sophism is legitimate or if we are not all, fundamentally, rhetorical speakers.
The second ideology debate, however, starts from an acceptance by both
sides that subject positions are all ideological – that no position can escape ide-
ology through scientism or an objective stance. The new question, then, is
Adorno’s, although it is now often transposed from the realm of conscious-
ness to that of language: is the subject as an agent merely bound to act out
the imperatives of its ego-position in a social-symbolic network, or at best to
reposition itself within a pre-given language and social horizon, or is the sub-
ject possessed of an agency capable of intervening – out of nowhere, as it
would appear – in its own subject position in relation to the social world? In
other words, is there space for an extra-ego or extra-ideological ‘spectator’ riding
on the back of the constituted subject, capable of resisting interpellation?
Within Lacan’s framework, this remainder is a manifestation of ‘the Real.’
Lacan is using here the traditional modernist hierarchy of Real-Symbolic-
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Imaginary, but emptying out the ‘Real’ (Kant’s thing-in-itself and ethical sub-
ject) into a negative traumatic kernel, disrupting the Symbolic representations
of the Thing or the Subject. The Slovenes will speak, then, of the Subject and
the Thing as ‘Real.’
Žižek’s Political Project
The administered world hypothesis and the postulation of reified thought
were, in an important sense, the Frankfurters’ explanation for the lack of rev-
olutionary consciousness among the working class – or really, among any
social group – under advanced capitalism. Although much of Marx’s edifice
was jettisoned, clearly social reification and the institutions through which it
was supported provided the critical theorists’ explanation for why a popula-
tion can be oppressed, seemingly without the desire to cast off their own
chains. So a critique of ideology, a critical theory that would shatter the paci-
fying effects of reified thought, was considered a prerequisite for political
action. Efforts at creating spaces for nonidentitarian and nonconceptual
thought, however, tended to descend more and more into obscurity and artis-
tic abstraction. In describing the alliance that developed between critical the-
ory and avant-garde literature, for example, Marcuse wrote that they were
both bound by:
… the effort to break the power of facts [that is, the pre-given, the ide-
ological] over the word, and to speak a language which is not the lan-
guage of those who establish, enforce and benefit from the facts. As
the power of the given facts tends to become totalitarian, to absorb all
opposition and to define the entire universe of discourse, the effort to
speak the language of contradiction appears increasingly irrational,
obscure, artificial… Dialectic and poetic language meet… on common
ground.
The common element is the search for an ‘authentic language’ – the
language of negation as the Great Refusal to accept the rules of a game
in which the dice are loaded. The absent must be made present
because the greater part of the truth is in that which is absent
(Marcuse, 1960:447-448).
And so the effort to unwind an oppressive ideology, to internally blow apart
reifying consciousness, became a matter of trying to introduce elements into
language, popular discourse, and culture that would be totally inassimilable –
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except through the sweeping reconstitution of those languages, discourses,
and cultures themselves. Like the work of the surrealists or dadaists, for
example, critical theory wanted to produce the negative moment – the use of
thought and language against thinking and speaking, against themselves – in
such a way that the oppressive ‘constellations’ confronting these negations
would have to be reconfigured in order to take them into account, or suffer
their intrusions as a remainder, ‘haunting’ the social subject. Needless to say,
this sort of dissent was not so difficult to integrate into hegemonic structures
as it turned out, and the Frankfurt theorists – especially Marcuse – turned
more and more to a ‘totally administered world’ hypothesis, and despaired
even of their own ability to introduce negative moments into their social life
and surroundings.
The Slovene Lacanians have not become associated with these sorts of cul-
tural sabotage tactics, for a number of reasons. Firstly, there has been a rejec-
tion of the notion that ‘social critique is a critique of knowledge’ (Adorno,
1969:503). This rejection was based in no small part on the experience of
Slovenes under ‘really existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe, and the descent
of ‘official’ communist ideology into a sort of ritual that had to be observed,
but that no one really believed in – perhaps the most famous expression of
this condition being Vaclav Havel’s greengrocer (Havel et al, 1985). Such a
situation problematizes the notion that individuals’ subjection to an oppres-
sive social system is somehow bound up with their interpellation by a perva-
sive ideological framework, or their inability to think their own possibilities of
freedom. On the contrary, everybody knew the hollowness of the official ide-
ology, the meaninglessness of the ideological rituals – not even high ranking
party officials could be considered sincere in this respect, yet the rituals were
performed nonetheless, and ideology continued to maintain a performative effi-
cacy, without the saturation of consciousness. Soviet-style communism ulti-
mately became a church with followers but no believers.
What could a ‘critique of knowledge’ possibly hope to accomplish in such a
situation? Would it open up a space for nonidentitarian thinking? Allow
objects – the meaningless rituals, or the greengrocer’s ‘Workers of the World,
Unite!’ sign – to speak for themselves? The critique of knowledge here had
already been accomplished, but it was not sufficient to generate a ‘revolutionary
consciousness,’ or undermine the performative efficacy of the official ideol-
ogy. The ‘Philosophy of “As If”’ – as it was coined in a book by Vaihinger,
and picked up by dissidents in the Eastern bloc – represented a different type
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of ideology, one whereby we needn’t believe, but only act as if we did – like
Pascal’s injunction to find faith in God by merely performing the rituals of
prayer. This ‘as if’ ideology finds its corollary under the conditions of
Western capitalism in Sloterdijk’s ‘cynical reason’. We know that the television
commercial is attempting to persuade us to buy its product: even the com-
mercial itself is often self-referentially aware of its own instrumental logic,
and yet it recognizes that we will buy the product anyway, and we do. Merely
thinking against a commercialist, instrumental logic is not enough here.
Indeed, the commercial logic has already done the hard work and under-
mined itself – we are merely asked to laugh along with the system. As Žižek
put it: ‘this is how we are believers today – we make fun of our beliefs, while
continuing to practice them, that is, to rely on them as the underlying struc-
ture of our daily practices’ (Žižek, 2002:71). This is a far shot from the
Culture Industry of the early Frankfurt School, and one that simply can’t be
blasted via a social critique that is a critique of knowledge.
What ideological system allows us to act out social norms we no longer
believe in? Žižek argues that social systems needn’t be considered legitimate
when they are supported by effective fetishes. A fetish is a form of ideology
that doesn’t frame the whole world for us in such a way that we choose to
interact with it in such and such a manner. It is rather some attachment we
have, some object or practice that enables us to carry on participating in social prac-
tices we no longer necessarily believe in. The fetish doesn’t tell us how the world is,
but it convinces us that it is what is really important, and thus offers a sort of
compensation for our involvement in what would otherwise be traumatic rit-
uals. It is the ideology of fetishes, Žižek believes, that constitutes the major
mode of ideological formation today.
This process is similar to that of falling in love: ‘in love, one privileges, focus-
es on, a finite temporal object which ‘means more than anything else’’ (Žižek,
2001:151). And so, the critique of ideology takes a different turn from the
critique of knowledge: philosophy’s task can no longer be the creation of
space for nonidentitarian thinking, but rather the critique of ideological
fetishes that facilitate the false consciousness of ‘as if,’ or cynical attitudes
towards our substantial social involvements. One needn’t instruct people in
the follies of a praxis they already don’t believe in, but rather, to undermine
the various crutches used to prop up the performative lives of hollowed ide-
ologies.
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Although this form of ideology critique sets the Lacanians apart from early
Frankfurt frameworks of political analysis, they are similar in that they privi-
lege the role of mass culture as generative of ideological control (in the case
of Adorno) or ideological pacification (in the case of Žižek). This has been
the basis for Žižek’s extensive writings on popular culture as political critique.
He has said that:
We can no longer, as we did in the good old times, (if they were real-
ly good) oppose the economy and culture. They are so intertwined
not only through the commercialization of culture but also the cultur-
alization of the economy. Political analysis today cannot bypass mass
culture. For me, the basic ideological attitudes are not found in big
picture philosophical statements, but instead in lifeworld practices -
how do you behave, how do you react - which aren’t only reflected in
mass culture, but which are, up to a point, even generated in mass cul-
ture. Mass culture is the central ideological battlefield today (Žižek,
2002).
We could take critique of ‘ideological pacification’ here literally, as the critique
of ideological pacifiers and their functions in maintaining oppressive social and
economic relations. Just as when an infant is crying, because it is distraught
over some lack or discomfort – dirty diapers, hunger, wanting attention, etc.
– parents will stick a pacifier in the infant’s mouth, a fetish that will so engross
the child’s attention that s/he will forget about those other ‘real’ needs or
wants; like the distraught infant, mass culture offers up certain pacifiers as
compensation for social actors’ exploitation, subjugation, or marginalization
in social life. “Yes,” we are told, “life is hard, but that portion of your life in
which you are oppressed is not what is really important or fulfiling – SUCK
ON THIS INSTEAD.” The pacifier is, in Lacanian terms, the objet petit a, or
the object that becomes secretly the foundation for a way of relating global-
ly to our whole world. In other words, it is a particular object that becomes
invested with a universal significance for the whole sweep of daily life, much
of which “in reality” has nothing to do with our fetish object.
Some examples of the ideological pacifiers that Žižek has turned on are:
Western Buddhism – the new age meditation and religious rituals offered by the
new culture industry for those feeling burnt out at work or frustrated in their
personal life, offering a road to “inner” calm and contentment, and which
secretly promises greater success in the worlds of work and personal relations
(Žižek, 2001b:12; 2003); the fetishism of democratic institutions – whereby
Page 13 Studies in Social and Political Thought
Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana
movements myopically focusing on democratization, in the sense of remov-
ing corruption from the electoral process, cover over deeper social antago-
nisms and pave the way for the appropriation of such anti-corruption initia-
tives by populist Right factions (Žižek, 2002:32-33); anti-Semitism, which
imbues the object of the Jew with the character of a diabolical scapegoat
through which all other social evils somehow make sense – from economic fail-
ures to social instabilities to the state of contemporary art (Žižek, 2001:150),
or the terrorist, which came to fill a very similar role in the West after the
September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, and which constitutes
what Žižek considers the ultimate form of fetishism – the dematerialized fetish,
the object whose apparent absence is the ultimate proof of its pervasive pres-
ence and significance for the whole social system, necessitating a state of per-
petual ‘paranoic warfare’ in areas not ‘really’ connected meaningfully to ter-
rorism, but caught up nonetheless in the all-encompassing ideology of the
terrorism-fetish (Žižek, 2001b:36-37).
All of these fetishes impose a Denkverbot (a prohibition on thought) regard-
ing social relations of oppression: don’t complain about capitalist exploita-
tion when what is really important is the war on terror, which internal politi-
cal strife will merely undermine; by demanding social equality, you are mere-
ly playing into the hands of Jewish conspirators; what is really wrong in your
life is not your shitty job or your low income, it is rather the lack of inner
tranquility and self-confidence that can bring presence of mind regardless of
your ‘external’ circumstances. The Denkverbot is not so much a prohibition
on thought, as it is an ideological privileging of the fetish object, such that it
appears offensive to act or speak against other social evils while the fetish still
looms (or comforts).
The fetish-denkverbot structure of ideology lends itself to a common func-
tion in political life: it undermines the legitimacy of collective action on a
social scale. It is specifically the shaping of our collective destiny, the redress
of social evils through mobilization, that is prohibited by the demands of the
fetish. And so it is in this sense that Žižek charges postmodernists and crit-
ical theorists alike with perpetuating the ideology of late capitalism.
In both postmodernism and critical theory, the philosophical category of
‘totality’ becomes transcribed onto the political category of ‘totalitarianism.’
And so, as we’ve seen with Adorno above, the predominance of any logic
comes to be seen as socially despotic, leading postmodernists into a defense
Studies in Social and Political Thought Page 14
Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana
of ‘micropolitics’ and critical theorists into an aesthetic model of individua-
tion (anti-identitarianism, nonconceptual thought, etc.). In both cases, col-
lective action is condemned to the extent that it becomes social since any
moves towards totality, any generalization of a logic of social action, is seen
as undermining pluralism and foreclosing social-symbolic contingency and
openness (Žižek, 2001:6-7). In short, postmodernism and critical theory tend
to devolve the emancipatory project towards the level of the individual subject: for
Adorno, the emancipatory project is fundamentally individual, and resistance
to the ‘tyranny of the concept’ must be placed in the hands of the individual
for it to reflect the free expression of the agent. And for postmodern
thinkers, the
radical political practice itself is conceived of as an unending process
which can destabilize, displace, and so on, the power structure, with-
out ever being able to undermine it effectively – the ultimate goal of a
radical politics is gradually to displace the limit of social exclusions,
empowering the excluded agents (sexual and ethnic minorities) by cre-
ating marginal spaces in which they can articulate and question their
identity (Žižek, 2002:100-101).
And so, with the injunction against metanarratives, micro-actions and sym-
bolic interventions – expressive politics asserting the social equality of mar-
ginalized groups – are the only fundamentally non-oppressive emancipatory
struggles. And although class and economic modes of exploitation are some-
times listed among a plurality of other lines of social contention, this oblig-
atory gesture is uniformly followed by close analyses of identity politics, leav-
ing issues of class to the side:
[W]hile this standard postmodern Leftist narrative of the passage from
‘essentialist’ Marxism, with the proletariat as the unique Historical
Subject, the privileging of economic class struggle, and so on, to the
postmodern irreducible plurality of struggles undoubtedly describes an
actual historical process, its proponents, as a rule, leave out the resig-
nation at its heart – the acceptance of capitalism as ‘the only game in
town’, the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the existing
capitalist liberal regime. This point was already made very precisely in
Wendy Brown’s perspicuous observation that ‘the political purchase
of contemporary American identity politics would seem to be
achieved in part through a certain renaturalization of capitalism’
(Žižek, 2000:95).
Page 15 Studies in Social and Political Thought
Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana
And so capitalism comes, in the postmodern position, to take on all of the
characteristics of a denkverboten field of inquiry – fully acknowledged in
theory, but ignored in practice. And what’s more, identity politics appears as
the fetish supporting this Denkverbot, in relation to which class struggle is
not complementary, but rather detrimental – getting in the way of what is
really important (the fetish):
So: in so far as postmodern politics involves a ‘[t]heoretical retreat
from the problem of domination within capitalism’, it is here, in this
silent suspension of class analysis, that we are dealing with an exem-
plary case of the mechanism of ideological displacement: when class
antagonism is disavowed, when its key structuring role is suspended,
‘other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate
weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced
by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicized
marking’ (Žižek, 2000:97)4.
Žižek has defended ‘fundamentalism’ on the grounds that true fundamental-
ism – fundamentalism that is sure of and committed to its position – is not
desperately envious of, or afraid of the performative efficacy of Other
beliefs. True fundamentalism is embodied more by Amish communities
than, say, Muslim terrorist networks. Žižek sees postmodernists’ and critical
theorists’ fear of fundamentalism as reflecting an unwillingness to take sides, and
moreover, reflecting a position of privilege from which one can afford to belit-
tle the desperate taking-of-sides of those who truly must fight for their own
survival (cf. Žižek, 2003; 2002:77-78).
We see this liberal rejection of a fundamentalist taking-sides as aligned with
the Frankfurt School’s glorification of spontaneity, and its rejection of disci-
pline as inherently oppressive (Žižek, 2002:76-77). For Žižek, ideology
serves primarily to undermine collective action, whereas for Adorno ideology
undermines truly individual action. Žižek’s collective action would have to be seen
from Adorno’s framework as just another ideology, not in any way necessar-
ily bringing to fruition human spontaneity or creating space for individual,
nonidentitarian interventions in the changing course of social life. Whereas
for Žižek this sort of so-called emancipatory activity – grounded in the sub-
ject and revolving around an aesthetic model that equates acts of self-expres-
sion with acts of freedom – reflects an already privileged position, and serves
also as a prohibition on collectively actualizing non-oppressive social relations
(Žižek, 2001:93).
Studies in Social and Political Thought Page 16
Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana
Žižek proposes what he terms a Politics of Truth, which is precluded by micro-
identity, or aesthetic-expressive politics. The idea is closely related to the ‘Act’
in Lacanian psychoanalysis:
An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what
appears to be ‘possible’ – it redefines the very contours of what is pos-
sible (an act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe,
appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its conditions so that it cre-
ates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility) (Žižek,
2000:121).
The act is Real, and on the face of it very much like Adorno’s ‘impulse before
the ego.’ From the perspective of the actor, the act can never ‘make sense’ –
it appears impossible, or doomed to failure, and only actually doing it suc-
cessfully can be sufficient to change the framework within which the act ini-
tially appeared nonsensical (to retroactively create the conditions of its pos-
sibility). This acting out of the impossible, then, is a sort of Kierkegaardian
leap: it is the Truth-Event (the event that is not just true, but generates its own
truth by proving itself in action).
The bounds of necessity, like those of possibility, are circumscribed within a
social-symbolic order, and so Truth-Events will always appear excessive –
temporarily suspending goal-oriented instrumental activity – until they have
succeeded in undermining that very order such that they appear, retroactive-
ly, to make sense and to have been necessary, and their impossible goals pos-
sible.
The Truth-Event for Žižek is made possible by the opening up of historical
opportunities that create a space for collective action on a social scale – it is
the task of a politics of truth to seize these opportunities. Even though we
must necessarily be uncertain as to what will come of our efforts, we assume
the duty to act and the responsibility for the consequences of acting. We can
see how this turn frees Lacanian politics from the somewhat hopeless task of
individual efforts to subvert the Culture Industry through aesthetic acting-out
(a Culture Industry that it seems can in fact tolerate almost any form of act-
ing-out):
Page 17 Studies in Social and Political Thought
Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana
For a long time… sexual libertarians thought that monogamous sexu-
al repression was necessary for the survival of capitalism – now we
know that capitalists can not only tolerate but even actively incite and
exploit forms of ‘perverse’ sexuality. The conclusion to be drawn is
not, however, that capitalism has the endless ability to integrate, and
thus cut off, the subversive edge of all particular demands – the ques-
tion of timing, of ‘seizing the moment’, is crucial here. A certain par-
ticular demand possesses, at a certain moment, a global detonating
power; it functions as a metaphorical stand-in for the global revolu-
tion: if we insist on it unconditionally, the system will explode; if, how-
ever, we wait too long, the metaphorical short circuit between this par-
ticular demand and global overthrow is dissolved, and the System can,
with sneering hypocritical satisfaction, make the gesture of ‘You want-
ed this? Now you’ve got it!’, without anything really radical happen-
ing (Žižek, 2001:117).
This seizing of the moment is exemplified above all for Žižek, by Lenin. It
is not the administrative or policy-making Lenin that Žižek turns to – not his
positions, per se, for example on collectivization, industrialization, political or
industrial organization, and the like. It is rather that “a true Leninist is not
afraid to pass to the act, to assume all the consequences, unpleasant as they may
be, of realizing his political project” (Žižek, 2001b:4). Historical opportuni-
ties open the system up for certain demands to spark collective action. Such
a collective remaking of the social order is seen as ‘totalitarian’ or oppressive
by postmodern and early critical theory politics, but lies at the center of
Žižek’s politics – a politics that is also, ultimately, an ethics of social action.
He urges not reenacting, but rather:
repeating, in the present world-wide conditions, the Leninist gesture of
initiating a political project that would undermine the totality of the
global liberal-capitalist world order, and, furthermore, a project that
would unabashedly assert itself as acting on behalf of truth, as inter-
vening in the present global situation from the standpoint of its
repressed truth (Žižek, 2001b:4-5).
Benjamin Day graduated with distinction from the Social and Political Thought MA
at the University of Sussex in 2003, and is now studying for a PhD at the School of
Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Studies in Social and Political Thought Page 18
Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana Day: From Frankfurt to Ljubljana
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