{"id":4451,"date":"2009-11-02T21:41:44","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T01:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=4451"},"modified":"2012-02-21T00:14:23","modified_gmt":"2012-02-21T05:14:23","slug":"zizek-democracy-elections-are-not-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/11\/02\/zizek-democracy-elections-are-not-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017di\u017eek democracy elections are not truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce<\/em>. New York: Verso, 2009.\u00a0 Print.<\/p>\n

In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king-but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true? (134)<\/p>\n

Trotsky was thus right in his basic reproach to parliamentary democracy, which was not that it gives too much power to the uneducated masses, but, paradoxically, that it passivizes the masses, leaving the initiative with the apparatus of state power (in contrast to the ”soviets” in which the working classes directly mobilize themselves and exert power).<\/p>\n

What we refer to as the “crisis of democracy” occurs not, therefore, when people stop believing in their own power, but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they experience the anxiety accompanying the recognition that “the (true) throne is empty:’ that the decision is now really theirs. This is why in “free elections” there is always a minimal aspect of politeness: those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to give them power-in a way which mirrors the logic of a gesture meant to be refused. (135)<\/p>\n

To put it in the terms of the Will: representative democracy in its very notion involves a passivization of the popular Will, its transformation into non-willing-willing is transferred onto an agent which re-presents the people and wills on its account. Whenever one is accused of undermining democracy, one’s answer should thus be a paraphrase of the reply given by Marx and Engels to a similar reproach (that communism undermines the family, property, freedom, etc.) in The Communist Manifesto<\/em>: the ruling order is itself already doing all the undermining necessary. In the same way that (market) freedom is un freedom for those who sell their labor-power, in the same way that the family is undermined by the bourgeois family as legalized prostitution, democracy is undermined by the parliamentary form with its concomitant passivization of the large majority, as well as by the growing executive power implied by the increasingly influential
\nlogic of the emergency state.<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 \u017di\u017eek goes after Laclau and Mouffe here<\/p>\n

For if democracy means representation, it is first of all the representation of the general system that bears its forms. In other words : electoral democracy is only representative in so far as it is first of all the consensual representation of capitalism<\/strong>, or of what today has been renamed the “market economy. ” This is its underlying corruption . . . [Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy]<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One should take these lines in the strictest transcendental sense: at the empirical level, of course, multi-party liberal democracy “represents”mirrors, registers, measures-the quantitative dispersal of different opinions, what people think about the proposed programs of the parties and about their candidates, and so on; however, prior to this empirical level, and in a much more radical “transcendental” sense, multi-party liberal democracy “represents”- instantiates-a certain
\nvision of society, politics, and the role of the individuals within it.<\/p>\n

Liberal democracy<\/strong> “represents” a very precise vision of social life in which politics is organized by parties which compete through elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus, and so on and so forth. One should always be aware that this “transcendental frame” is never neutral<\/strong> \u2014it privileges certain values and practises. This non-neutrality becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people really want or think-an inability signaled by anomalous phenomena such as the UK elections of 2005 when, in spite of the growing unpopularity of Tony Blair (who was regularly voted the most unpopular person in the UK), there was no way for this discontent to find a politically effective expression. <\/strong>Something was obviously very wrong here \u2014it was not that people “did not know what they wanted” but rather that cynical resignation prevented them from acting upon it, so that the result was a weird gap between what people thought and how they acted (voted) .<\/p>\n

Plato, in his critique of democracy, was fully aware o f this second form of corruption, and his critique is also clearly discernible in the Jacobin privileging of Virtue: in democracy, in the sense of the representation of and negotiation between a plurality of private interests, there is no place for Virtue.<\/p>\n

This is why, in a proletarian revolution, democracy has to be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat<\/strong>. There is no reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth<\/strong> \u2014on the contrary, as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let us take an example which is surely not problematic: France in 1940 . Even Jacques Duclos, second in charge of the French Communist Party, admitted in a private conversation that if at that point free elections had been held in France, Marshal Petain would have won with 90 percent of the votes. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused capitulation to Germany and claimed that only he, not the Vichy regime, spoke on behalf of the true France (not only on behalf of the “majority of the French” ! ) , what he was saying was deeply true even if “democratically” speaking it was not only without legitimization, but was clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of French people. There can be democratic elections which enact an event of Truth \u2014elections in which, against sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily “awakens” and votes against the hegemonyof ideological opinion. However, the very exceptional nature of such an occurrence proves that elections as such are not a medium of Truth.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are increasingly being reduced to empty ritualized shells, and in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation they both enjoy a high level of popular support (over 60 percent in
\nthe polls) . No wonder they are personal friends: both have a tendency towards occasion al “spontaneous” scandalous outbursts (which, at least in the case of Putin, are well-prepared in advance so that they fit the Russian “national character”)\u00a0 (138).<\/p>\n

From Profit to Rent<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whence this resurgence of direct, non-democratic authority? Above and beyond any cultural factors involved, there is an inner necessity for this resurgence in the very logic of contemporary capitalism<\/strong>. That is to say, the central problem we are facing today is how the predominance (or even hegemonic role) of “intellectual labor” within late capitalism affects Marx’s basic scheme of the separation of labor from its objective conditions, and of the revolution as the subjective re-appropriation of those conditions.<\/p>\n

In spheres like the World Wide Web, production, exchange and consumption are inextricably intertwined, potentially even identified: my product is immediately communicated to and consumed by another.<\/p>\n

Marx’s classic notion of commodity fetishism in which “relations between people” assume the form of “relations between things” has thus to be radically re-thought: in ‘immaterial labor’; “relations between people” are “not so much hidden beneath the veneer of objectivity, but are themselves the very material of our everyday exploitation,” so we cannot any longer talk about “reification” in the classic Lukacsian sense. <\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Far from being invisible, social relationality in its very fluidity is directly the object of marketing and exchange: in “cultural capitalism;’ one no longer sells (and buys) objects which “bring” cultural or emotional experiences, one directly sells ( and buys) such experiences.<\/p>\n

What if, in it, the invisible “relations between [immaterial] things [of Capital] appear as direct relations between people”?<\/p>\n

Here, more than ever, it is crucial to remember the lesson of the Marxist dialectic of fetishization: the “reification” of relations between people (the fact that they assume the form of phantasmagorical “relations between things”) is always redoubled by the apparently opposite process, by the false “personalization” (“psychologization” ) of what are effectively objective social processes. Already in the 1930s, the first generation of Frankfurt School theoreticians drew attention to how \u2014 at the very moment when global market relations began to exert their full domination, making the individual producer’s success or failure dependent on market cycles totally beyond his control the notion of a charismatic “business genius” reasserted itself in the “spontaneous capitalist ideology:’ attributing the success or failure of a businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quai he possessed. And does not the same hold true even more so today, as the abstraction of the market relations that govern our lives is pushed to an extreme point? The bookshops are overflowing with psychological manuals advising us on how to succeed, how to outdo our partner or competitor \u2014 in short, treating success as being dependent on the proper “attitude:’<\/p>\n

So,in a way, one is tempted to turn Marx’s formula on its head: under contemporary capitalism, the objective market “relations between things” tend to assume the phantasmagorical form of pseudo-personalized “relations between people:’<\/strong> And Hardt and Negri seem to fall into this trap: what they celebrate as the direct “production of life” is a structural illusion of this type. (142)
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009.\u00a0 Print. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king-but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why … Continue reading “\u017di\u017eek democracy elections are not truth”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,18,20],"tags":[140],"class_list":["post-4451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-laclau","category-political","category-zizek","tag-tragedyfarce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4451"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8798,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451\/revisions\/8798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}