Category: the act

democracy

Slavoj Žižek “A Permanent Economic Emergency” New Left Review #64 July-August 2010, 85-95.

No “positive programmatic content to its demands, just a generalized refusal to compromise the existing welfare state.”

There’s another Europe, not the technocratic version the EU is pushing but “a re-politicized Europe, founded on a shared emancipatory project; the Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to the French and October Revolutions. This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy prey for free-floating international capital, which can play one state against the other. More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital.”

The left should not be afraid of provoking further a crisis, a collapse of the system, quoting Badiou: “mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre: better a disaster than a non-being; one has to take the risk of fidelity to an Event, even if the Event ends up in ‘obscure disaster’ or Mao, ‘Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.’

There is plenty of anti-capitalist criticism and also example of fat cats getting huge bonuses while their firms were saved by the public purse, pollution of the environment. However what doesn’t get asked in these radical analyses:

“what is as a rule not questioned is the liberal-democratic framework within which these excesses should be fought. The goal, explicit or implied, is to regulate capitalism—through the pressure of the media, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations—but never to question the liberal-democratic institutional mechanisms of the bourgeois state of law.

This remains the sacred cow, which even the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’—the Porto Allegre World Social Forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch.”  “Badiou was right in his claim that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire or exploitation, but democracy.”

It is the acceptance of ‘democratic mechanisms’ as the ultimate frame that prevents a radical transformation of capitalist relations.” To this end the debate about violence needs to be renewed. Violence is necessary for social change to happen, for radical emancipation to defeat the workings of the bourgeois state.

“It is here that Marx’s key insight remains valid, perhaps today more than ever. For Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere proper, as with the criteria the global financial institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgement on a country—does it have free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? The key to actual freedom resides rather in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed for effective improvement is not political reform, but a transformation in the social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, or about worker–management relations in a factory; all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by ‘extending’ democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain lie outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures can, of course, have a positive role to play. But they remain part of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie, whose purpose is to guarantee the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou was right in his claim that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire or exploitation, but democracy. It is the acceptance of ‘democratic mechanisms’ as the ultimate frame that prevents a radical transformation of capitalist relations. Closely linked to the necessary de-fetishization of ‘democratic institutions’ is the de-fetishization of their negative counter-part: violence. For example, Badiou recently proposed exercising ‘defensive violence’ by means of building free domains at a distance from state power, subtracted from its reign (like the early Solidarnosc in Poland), and only resisting by force state attempts to crush and re-appropriate these ‘liberated zones’. The problem with this formula is that it relies on a deeply problematic distinction between the ‘normal’ functioning of the state apparatus and the ‘excessive’ exercise of state violence. But the ABC of Marxist notions of class struggle is the thesis that ‘peaceful’ social life is itself an expression of the (temporary) victory of one class—the ruling one. From the standpoint of the subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of the state, as an apparatus of class domination, is a fact of violence. Similarly, Robespierre argued that regicide is not justified by proving the King had committed any specific crime: the very existence of the King is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people. In this strict sense, the use of force by the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is always ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept its violence as merely a matter of contingent excesses. The standard liberal motto—that it is sometimes necessary to resort to violence, but it is never legitimate—is not sufficient. From the radical-emancipatory perspective, one should turn it around: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate—since their very status is the result of violence—but never necessary: it is always a matter of strategic consideration whether to use force against the enemy or not.”

“In the current economic emergency, too, we are clearly not dealing with blind market processes but with highly organized, strategic interventions by states and financial institutions, intent on resolving the crisis on their own terms—and in such conditions, are not defensive counter-measures in order?”

And with a note of pained urgency Žižek writes:

What if, in truth, intellectuals lead basically safe and comfortable lives, and in order to justify their livelihoods, construct scenarios of radical catastrophe? For many, no doubt, if a revolution is taking place, it should occur at a safe distance—Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela—so that, while their hearts are warmed by thinking about faraway events, they can go on promoting their careers. But with the current collapse of properly functioning welfare states in the advanced-industrial economies, radical intellectuals may be now approaching a moment of truth when they must make such clarifications: they wanted real change—now they can have it.

The Act

This is why Lacan’s formula for overcoming an ideological impossibility is not ‘everything is possible’, but ‘the impossible happens’. The Lacanian impossible-real is not an a priori limitation, which needs to be realistically taken into account, but the domain of action.

An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible—an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies today’s global capitalism.

Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous. We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss, in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the new, just to keep the machinery going and maintain what was good in the old—education, healthcare, basic social services. In short, our situation is like what Stalin said about the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves. Or as Gramsci said, characterizing the epoch that began with the First World War,

‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.

subject of the drive and the universal

Rothenberg, Molly. The Excessive Subject. Malden, M.A. : Politiy Press, 2010.

As long as we are fixated — as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics — on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence.

Molly isn’t big on ‘subject of desire’
For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire.  Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred (176).

In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” — that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic subjective dimension.

The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity.  Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).

Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible.  The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects (177).

subject of desire

Žižek proposes as the properly political subject an “acephalous subject who assumes the position of the object” (Organs Without Bodies `76).

In this move from desire to drive, he fundamentally alters the picture of a political subject as one who calculates an intervention to bring about the future it desires. 

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.”  That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political — the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity — as based on promise or calculation.

The objet a, the excessive part of the subject, is “the subject’s stand-in within the order of objectivity” (Organs w/o Bodies 175).  When the subject identifies directly with this excess, it becomes genuinely rebolutionary because it gains access to the register of the Real, the object.  How?

According to Žižek, the identification with the object de-personalizes the subject, instituting a gap between its subjectivated individuation (all the little preferences and properties that make up our social identities) and its subject-ness, the “pure” subject that emerges as a function of the drive. (176).

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought.  Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

Laclau subject formation

if the subject were a mere subject position within the structure, the latter would be fully closed and there would be no contingency at all … [Radical contingency is possible only] if the structure is not fully reconciled with itself, if it is inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision. There acts are, precisely, what constitute the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure. Because this will has no place of constitution external to the structure but is the result of the failure of the structure to constitute itself, it can be formed only through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification are thinkable only as a result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of the latter. Contingency is shown in this way: as the inherent distance of the structure from itself.

Laclau, Emancipation(s) 1996: 92.

Taken from: Jason Glynos and David Howarth,
Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory.


Routledge, 2007 pp. 128-129.

rickert affective modalities

Affective modalities for integrating language and world: fantasy jouissance desire (46)

For Lacan and Žižek, reality is formulated as “the Real,” those things that are foreclosed from the symbolic and that return as errors, gaps, and misrecognitions.  In plainest terms this means that language fails to capture the Real; the Real always exceeds what can be conveyed by means of the symbolic.

rickert acts of enjoyment

Rickert, Thomas. Acts of Enjoyment.

However as Torfing explains in New Theories of Discourse, there is a difference between conceiving the social as a totality that always falls short of closure and conceiving it as something already fundamentally split or fissured that we try and fail to conceive as a totality (Torfing 52)(45).

This is the point at which Žižek parts company with Laclau and Mouffe. While he retains notions such as chains of signifiers and a discursive field open to rearticulations, he theorizes the discursive field in terms of a fundamental fissure, not simply as something nontotalizable.

From Žižek’s perspective, the social is better understood in terms of a fundamental antagonism that prevents any closure, rather than as a Derridean field of signifiers whose incompleteness stems from the signifier’s free play in the absence of any organizing, totalizing center.  It is thus a question of whether substitution or antagonism is primary in the operations of discourse. (45)

feldner masochism liberation

In Žižek’s Lacanian terms, the emergence of pure subjectivity coincides with an ‘experience of radical self-degradation’ whereby I, the subject, am emptied ‘of all substantial content, of all symbolic support which could confer a modicum of dignity on me’.  The reason why such a (humiliating and potentially perverse) position of self-degradation is to be assumed, Žižek argues, is that within a disciplinary relationship (between ‘master and servant’), self-beating is, in its deepest configuration, nothing but the staging of the other’s secret fantasy; as such, this staging allows for the suspension of the disciplinary efficacy of the relationship by bringing to light the obscene supplement which secretly cements it. Žižek’s central point is that the obscene supplement ultimately cements the position of the servant: what self-beating uncovers is ‘the servant’s masochistic libidinal attachment to his master’, so as ‘the true goal of this beating is to beat out that in me which attaches me to the master’ (Revolution at the Gates, 252)

Why is masochism the first necessary step towards liberation?

When a subject stages a masochistic scenario and says ‘I am a priori guilty, and therefore I want to be punished!’, it is the
law that, in effect, reveals its impotence and frustration, since its universalistic foundations are exposed as merely functional to the superego command (‘Enjoy!’).

If a subject does not need the law to punish him, for he can do it himself outside the remit of the law, the latter inevitably loses its coercive character and exhibits its fundamental lack of purpose, its being anchored in jouissance. The masochist, therefore, teases out and identifies with the libidinal (fundafundamentally irrational and self-destructive) kernel of the law itself. 119

Feldner

Vighi, Fabio and Heiko Feldner. Žižek Beyond Foucault. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.  Print.

act proper (radical agency)

performative activity within a hegemonic structure

What qualifies a free act, according to Žižek, is an intervention whereby “I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself’ (Žižek, On Belief 2001c, 121).

For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of … a momentary ‘suspension of the big Other’, of the socio-symbolic network that guarantees the subject’s identity: an authentic act occurs only when the subject risks a gesture that is no longer ‘covered up’ by the big Other (Žižek, 1993, Tarrying with the Negative 262-4).

Here is a crucial quote that pretty much sums up their (Butler and Žižek) respective differences, (okay its pretty condensed)

… only the Real allows us to truly resignify the Symbolic. (110)

Žižek maintains that for all Butler’s radicality, she remains caught up in a resistance at the level of the symbolic, that is, at the level of signification. Judy Butler’s work doesn’t touch the Real.

A quote by Žižek from the book:

we cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other’s suffering and pain, has first to be broken in a gesture of taking the risk and reaching directly out to the suffering other — a gesture which, since it shatters the very kernel of our identity, cannot fail to appear extremely violent. (Žižek, Revolotion at the Gates 2002a, 252)

Žižek there is no big Other

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009.  Print.

… the task is “merely” to stop the train of history which, left to its own course, leads to a precipice. (Communism is thus not the light at the end of the tunnel, that is, the happy final outcome of a long and arduous struggle — if anything, the light at the end of the tunnel is rather that of another train approaching us at full speed.)

This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of “divine violence” would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress. In other words, one has to learn fully to accept that there is no big Other

The moment the “big Other” falls, the Leader can no longer claim a privileged relationship to Knowledge — he becomes an idiot like everyone else. (152)

Žižek postmodern

one should nonetheless admit that, when Jean-Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, elevated the term from simply naming certain new artistic tendencies (especialy in writing and architecture) to designating a new historical epoch, there was an element of authentic nomination in his act. “Postmodernism” now effectively functioned as a new Master-Signifier introducing a new order of intelligibility into the confused multiplicity of historical experience.

At the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called “cultural capitalism” : we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful. This triad cannot but evoke the Lacanian triad RSI: the Real of direct utility (good healthy food, the quality of a car, etc.), the Symbolic of the status (I buy a certain car to signal my status-the Thorstein Veblen perspective), the Imaginary of pleasurable and meaningful experience.

This is how capitalism, at the level of consumption, integrated the legacy of’68, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters. A recent Hilton Hotels publicity campaign consists of a simple claim: “Travel doesn’t only get us from place A to place B. It should also make us a better person:’ Only a decade ago, could one have imagined such an ad appearing? Is this not also the reason we buy organic food? Who really believes that half-rotten and overpriced “organic” apples are really healthier than the non-organic varieties? The point is that, in buying them, we are not merely buying and consuming, we are simultaneously doing something meaningful, showing our capacity for care and our global awareness, participating in a collective project . . . (54)

The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, resenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism-a new libertarian spirit epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Bil Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream (56).

On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: “Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200:’ The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refUSing to fully enjoy your stay . . . The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst!” (You can, because you must ! ) ; it relies on a “You must, because you can ! ” That is to say, the superego aspect of today’s “nonrepressive” hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go right to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance.

This drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory sequence of 1968 had exhausted its potential.  At this critical point (the mid-1970s), the only option left was a direct, brutal, passage a l’acte, a push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (the RAF in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, etc., whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses have become totally immersed in the capitalist ideological morass, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, and only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence- l’action directe-will awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (oriental mysticism) (58).

What all three shared was the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real. This shift from political engagement to the post-political Real is perhaps best exemplified by the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, that arch-renegade, whose works range from early masterpieces like Prima della rivoluzione to late aestheticist-spiritualist self-indulgences such as the abominable Little Buddha. This span achieved full circle with The Dreamers, Bertolucci’s late film about Paris ’68, in which a couple of French students (a brother and sister) befriend a young American student during the whirlwind of the events. By the film’s end, however, the friends have split up, after the French students become caught up in the political violence, while the American remains faithful to the message of love and emotional liberation (59).

Jean-Claude Milner is keenly aware of how the establishment succeeded in undoing all threatening consequences of 1968 by way of incorporating the so-called “spirit of ’68” and thereby turning it against the real core of the revolt. The demands for new rights (which would have meant a true redistribution of power) were granted, but merely in the guise of “permissions” -the “permissive society” being precisely one which broadens the scope of what subjects are allowed to do without actually giving them any additional power:

“Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission . . . . A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn’t diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn’t augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes his life easier, which is not nothing”

This is how it goes with the right to divorce, abortion, gay marriage, and so on and so forth- these are all permissions masked as rights; they do not change in any way the distribution of powers. Such was the effect of the “spirit of ’68”: it “effectively contributed to making life easier. This is a lot, but it is not everything. Because it didn’t encroach upon powers.” Therein resides “the secret of the tranquility which has ruled in France over the last forty years”

While May ’68 aimed at total (and totally politicized) activity, the “spirit of ’68” transposed this into a depoliticized pseudo-activity (new lifestyles, etc. ), the very form of social passivity (60).