I cite

When is a Truth not a Truth?

When it has to be excessively enforced.

This is how Zizek responds to Stavrakakis's siding with Badiou on the matter of totalitarian danger.

Badiou warns of the totalitarian danger of enforcing a truth on a situation and ignoring the nameless or multiplicity of reality that resists subsumption under a truth-procedure. Zizek criticizes Badiou on this point on the grounds of an incompatibility between truth and excessive enforcement. He writes:

a Truth is never enforced, because the moment the fidelity to Truth functions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-event.

This doesn't strike me as convincing, particularly insofar as Truth is determined retroactively. For this determination to be made, ruthless enforcement may well be necessary. Perhaps the better way to put this is to say that 'excessive' has a termporal characteristic. What may seem excessive at one point is later determined to have been just right, even measured as a response. The indeterminacy here is unavoidable.

Zizek's example of Stalinism is particularly problematic. He says that the truth that was not a truth that Stalinism enforced was the vision of a centralized planned economy. This is a problem for a number of reasons.

First, about a hundred pages earlier, Zizek describes Stalinism in terms of its restoration of humanism and retreat from modernism (Pushkin over Akhmatova, socialist realism over rayonism etc). Isn't this retreat from the project of radically building a new socialist man, in turning human relations into machine relations, an indication of Stalinism's failure to remain faithful to a Truth?

Second, Zizek argues that it is wrong to think of Stalinism in terms of bureaucracy--it totally failed as a bureaucratic form, relying instead on violence, personal relations, irrationality, old nationalist sentiments, and the fantasy--and accompanying unfortunate attempts to realize this fantasy--that Stalin was personally involved in all sorts of decisions. So again, the truth of centralized planning was not enforced. In fact, it was incompatible with the official ideology.

Third, why is resistance to central economic planning a viable indicator that central economic planning is not a truth? In the end notes, Zizek admits that it isn't--there is a difference between resistance by the people and resistance by the enemy. And he qualifies the Stalinist example by explaining that it is not exactly that the people resisted, it was rather that they were inert. But his own account of the Stalinist period belies this claim: there were all sorts of different mobilizations of people alive and well in the Stalinist period, from Stakhanovites to organized anti-fascists in the camps, even to the lower cadres mobilized against the upper echelons of the party during the purges. And, even if one rejects this claim: what is the proper time frame? Given the goal of modernizing a backward peasant country and defending this country against capitalist encirclement, is ten years long enough? And what about WWII? Conversely, the post-Stalin period demonstrated in the US and the USSR the achievements of central economic planning--space program, computing.

Fourth, Zizek's claim that 'the resistance of reality against it [central economic planning] was a sign of its own falsity" relies on premises he normally rejects, primarily, the possibility of totalizing 'reality,' a presumption that reality is not the same as the big Other, the existence of the people, and the possibility of a people that is transparent to itself, that somehow knows the truth. All of these assumptions are ones that he has argued against. Is it not possible that fighting the inertia of the people is a central element of revolutionary activity, that revolution is the activity of creating a new people and that this is precisely where Stalinism failed?

Fifth, Zizek's retreat here is incompatible with his endorsement of terror.

Zizek fails to follow through on his own insights. He should claim that excessive enforcement is necessary--if one can't excessively enforce a truth then what can one excessively enforce? But it is not totalitarian. It is open, contingent, fallible. It cannot be totalized.

Defending a lost cause?

I've finally finished my initial read of In Defense of Lost Causes. I say initial because I'm working on a review essay that includes this and other books and because my first read is often poor. The first time I read On Belief I threw it across the room, gave my copy to Paul, and asked the series editor why in the world he published such a thing. A year later, I found the book interesting and helpful. (This reaction isn't unique. I do this a lot. Paul once insisted we include Schmitt on a seminar syllabus. I hadn't read him yet. When we got to Concept of the Political I found it totally unconvincing. What is the grounding for the claim regarding the fundamental place of the division between friend and enemy? How could anyone who's read Foucault buy such a thing? Two years later, I was convinced Schmitt is completely right. I've probably relayed this little storyikin before.)

Anyway, In Defense of Lost Causes answers Zizek's critics. It does on a trivial level: lots more footnotes. And it does so on more serious levels. He provides a more explicit political position--anti-anarchist, pro-state, pro-terror. He doesn't advocate a kind of Bartleby gesture of refusal (or preference). One way to read the book: as a revisiting/revising of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat (and thus as an accompaniment to PV's reworking of dialectical materialism; interestingly, in PV he also says something to the effect that a materialist history of revolutions would look for betrayed or lost ideals, for the emancipatory energies ultimately lost after the revolution--he provides this history in IDLC).

I don't quite get why, exactly, Zizek ends by giving Badiou the last word. He simply endorses Badiou's egalitarian justice, terror, voluntarism, and trust in the people. And yet there is also a point where Zizek endorses Deleuze against Badiou: on repetition (repetition of/as drive) as the form of the emergence of the new. I also am a bit skeptical about slumdwellers as a new universal class (this is my paraphrase, not his) insofar as this strikes me as too reminiscent of Marcuse's turn to the third world/anti-colonial struggles. This ties in with my skepticism toward Zizek's view of inclusion/exclusion as the fundamental antagonism today (he inserts this essay from Lacan Ink in the last section of the book).

A correction to a previous post: Zizek does mention (in one small paragraph) a parallax gap and the parallax Real in the first hundred or so pages of In Defense of Lost Causes. I suppose I would have expected (this infelicitous construction reflects my doubts as well as my tangle of wishes that Zizek would write what I want him to write, a tangle that does little to shield my own inability to write what I want me to write) something like a politics or political theory that would follow more directly from his discussion of parallax (also lost over the last few books, appearing last in either Puppet or On Belief, I think, is a complex account he once gave of each element of the RIS complex appearing in the mode of the others such that one has something like nine different version--there's a knot if there ever was one). But perhaps the fact that it's not direct is an indication of its presence, its presence in a distorted form, its shaping of the arguments: there is no innocent position or right answer; every possibility is wrong when approached from a different angle. This slides very easily into a superegoic politics: no matter what you do, you are wrong. Bartleby escapes this by doing nothing; Lenin accepts the absence of ground, justification, roadmap, historical determination.

Does the lost parallax need defending?

Something odd about In Defense of Lost Causes is the lack of appearance of the idea of a parallax gap. True, Zizek does refer to his version of the Real in contrast to Lacan's. And he mentions gaps. But the central concept of his magnum opus does not appear as such in his most recent book. Why?

Is he jettisoning the concept as a theoretical dead end? Bartleby only appears briefly, in the context of critiques of Hardt and Negri and Badiou. (I still have a hundred pages to go, so maybe there is more here than a glace at the index indicates).

Or is the parallax gap the horizon or frame of the current book? So he Zizek actually putting the notion to work, having already provided for it a theoretical elaboration?

Answering the question might also entail grappling with repetition as such in Zizek's writing. What does he repeat and why? He seems primarily to repeat examples and demonstrations. He sometimes lets concepts drop that haven't quite worked (the notion of the maternal superego appears only once or twice, I think in Looking Awry). And it could be that he repeats theoretical discussions only as he works them out. Once he has his answer, once the theoretical point is thoroughly established, then he doesn't need to return to it. It is already part of the working theoretical system. But this can make matters pretty complicated: he drops what doesn't work and he drops what works.

Lars and the Real Community

We watched Lars and the Real Girl last night. I completely loved it.

I'm reading In Defense of Lost Causes. The second chapter has some wonderful readings of movies and Kafka letters. The basic idea involves the core Oedipal drama, a narrative that persists underneath all sorts of other stories. One of the strongest and most detailed discussions is of Frankenstein and the French Revolution. It's straightforward, so I won't summarize it here. It interests me, though, because of the way Lars and the Real Girl can't be reduced to an obvious familial drama but instead only works as an account of a supportive community, or more specifically, of the supports that community provides, the community on which people's identities depend.

The familial drama: Lars enters into a delusional psychosis. The triggering factors include the death of his father, the return of his brother after years of being away, Lars' consequent feeling like a stranger in his own home and his moving to the garage, the pregnancy of his sister-in-law (Lars' mother died giving birth to Lars), and the arrival of a new woman at work who stirs up suppressed feelings of desire. Lars orders a sex doll, Bianca, and treats her as his girlfriend. But he doesn't have sex with her. Because both he and Bianca are religious, Bianca sleeps in the room that was his mother's in the house now occupied by his brother and sister-in-law.

The charm of the movie consists in the willingness of the entire town to take Lars' delusion absolutely seriously. He takes Bianca to church, to a party. Bianca gets a job modeling for a local store. She volunteers at the hospital reading to children. She's elected to the school board. She is more than an object for Lars. She is an object for the entire community. So it's not simply that Lars displaces all sorts of feelings and desires onto Bianca. Rather, the community gives her a place. It lets her take a place and in this taking place to enable Lars to see that there is a place for him. More than a domestic drama about guilt and reconciliation, psychosis and recovery, the film is an allegory for the Symbolic as a providing place and meaning.

Of course, Bianca has to die. As Lars gets better, becomes more integrated, acquires a sense of place, learns more about what it is to be man (a lesson which has to do with accepting responsibility and which he demonstrates having learned in a wonderful scene where he performs CPR on a strangled teddy bear), Bianca becomes ill and eventually dies (she might even drown, but this wasn't clear to me). There is a funeral for her and priest remarks, without irony, that she has been loved, that she has contributed, and that she was truly helpful and unique.

Bianca was Real. A Real object for everyone. The gap or space she opened, occupied, and left as an object enacts subject as lack in the structure, the Real of the subject. The drama of the film, then, concerns the Symbolic order of the community providing a place when one of its members feels itself displaced (in one scene, as Lars' brother and sister-in-law go to the church to ask that its members help out and make Bianca feel welcome--the psychologist has advised them to go along with Lars' delusion--as one member voices aversion to treating a sex doll like a person and to socializing with a psychotic, another reminds them that they all are close to people with idiosyncracies and disorders; it's as if she reminds them all that even as deviance and transgression are the underside of the community, they are nonetheless part of the community; perhaps once could say that she is not so naive as to disavow the 'nightly law' but instead recognizes its inseparability from the bonds of sociality; or maybe it's better to say that all nights or all nightly laws are not the same; they can be differentiated, acknowledged, or disavowed in different ways).

Some theory friends (I'm thinking about Jane Bennett here) draw from Latour to extend and develop the agenic properties of objects. At times, that theoretical orientation seems at odds with a Lacanian one. I've wondered, though, if the Lacanian object might suggest more possibilities for convergence or intersection than often seems to be the case. Here, the material object Bianca animated relationships, friendships, opportunities to help, support, be together, speak, and eat that had otherwise seemed less alive. And she did this not simply as an object onto which fantasies or delusions were projected but as a material object and as a Real object. Her materiality incited various physical events (she weighed 125 pounds so dressing and bathing and moving her wasn't easy). And her insistence as a gap/lack and as an excess inscribed or reminded everyone of the prior inscription of a place in the community for Lars.

The very big Other

I'm frustrated with In Defense of Lost Causes. Zizek writes:

the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism--digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.

and

The task of radical politics is therefore not to denounce the inadequacy of every small other to stand in for the big Other (such a 'critique' only reinforces the big Other's hold over us) but to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to untie the social bond the big Other sustains. Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever.

These passages come from a section of the first chapter. One of the general ideas, I think, is Zizek's oft-repeated account of the claustrophobia that results from the decline of the symbolic, the loss of a space of appearances wherein something stands for something more than itself. The only way these particular passages make sense to me, then, is if one assumes a very different notion of the big Other to be at work. We could call it the very big Other or the psychotic big Other, designating thereby the monstrous imaginary other that merges with the Real when the paternal function is foreclosed. So long as no small other can appear as more than what it is, so long as it remains simply itself in its idiotic empiricality, we remain mired in immanence, seriality, strings and strings of S2.

The cyberspace example, though, doesn't work. Rejecting characterizations of contemporary media that emphasize the suspension of social ties, Zizek writes:

in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself; this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.

Can the codes and connections enabling networked communications be understood as a form of the big Other? I don't think so. Not if the big Other is indistinguishable from the Symbolic. Part of the pleasure of digital media is the sense that what one does or sees or writes doesn't register to the big Other, that it connects or enables snippets of intensity without 'counting;' shoot, even 'counting' doesn't quite count (the big Other doesn't know how many returns I get when I google my name). It makes more sense to think of the internet in terms of the merging of the imaginary and the Real, the Real networks and transactions, the matrix, combined with what we imagine these networks and transactions to be for us. So it could be the very big Other, the scary, necessary, and now inextricables codes and protocols we can't quite escape.

What could it mean for Zizek to say that the true job of untying social ties is ahead of us? that the task of radical politics is "to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to unite the social bond the big Other sustains"? It has to involve some version of seeing or experiencing the ties as representing something else.  Perhaps it means that another has to be able to appear as symbolizing something more; so we have to relinguish our human ties to enable the appearance of inhuman ones.

Return to drives

I shouldn't be surprised that Zizek has already observed Laclau's failure to distinguish between desire and drive. The posts or detailed work I did on it will come in handy at some; I'll be able to use it somewhere. And it's not like the conceptual tools I applied in working out my little criticism of Laclau weren't developed by Zizek anyway. Still, confronting my utter unoriginality is still not the highlight of my morning.

In In Defense of Lost Causes, Zizek writes:

Laclau should be criticized here for confounding desire (sustained by fantasy) with drive (one of whose definitions is also "that which remains of desire after its subject traverses the fantasy"): for him, we are condemned to searching for impossible fullness. Drive--in which we directly enjoy lack itself--simply does not appear on his horizon.

Can global capitalist democracy have a human face?

At first glance, the question 'is global capitalist democracy with a human face enough?' doesn't help much to open up thinking about the dilemmas of the present. One way to approach its limits and maybe put it to work is by breaking the implicit claims apart, word by word.

Global: since the global is not the world or even a world insofar as antagonism is Real, the question begins with the fantasy of a totality, a fantasy that the next term, capitalist, either reinforces as ideology or ruptures as Real. Thus, the next term

Capitalist: already contradicts and calls into question the first as well as the second, unless

Democracy: remains but an empty signifier.  After all, there isn't an institution for a global democracy; democracy and capitalism are incompatible; democracy isn't global in its theory or practice.

Human: is rather shocking in contexts of homo sacer, the critique of human rights, and the ongoing critical engagements with the anthropomorphic machine. In fact, it's so counter to Zizek's anti-humanism (what kind of neighbor is the human neighbor, anyway?) that it seems part of a phrase constructed for radio (tertiary orality?), especially when we recall his critical responses to Levinas's

Face.

And

Enough: for what? For a slogan? A platform? An aspiration? Ideological formations combine dissonant and even contradictory ideas. We could then imagine left responses to the question (or, differently put, the implied left enunciating position): "yes, that's enough for us!"  We could be so fortunate to live in such a wonderful world!

Is it enough because its impossibility sustains desire? enough because the ideal lets us keep enjoying: global! capitalist! democracy! these are all the best goodies! the political equivalent of a chocolate chocolate chip cookie (why the combination of chocolates?). Those who are left out, excluded from or deprived of any of the three, have something to fight for. The obvious incompatibility and emptiness is surefire protection against Laclau-inspired critique. Or maybe the slogan, global capitalist democracy with a human face!, is a slogan for the multitude (and a lot easier to swallow than the joy of being communist!).

Zizek on Democracy Now (part 2): is global capitalist democracy with a human face enough?

Link: Democracy Now! | World Renowned Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the Iraq War, the Bush Presidency, the War on Terror & More.

      For me, that protest was part of what I see as the main failure. But it’s not a subjective failure. It’s in the situation of modern left, which all too often for me adopts this rather comfortable moralizing position of we condemn, we criticize, but like we can’t do anything more, so this safe moralizing position, which is why, as I like to emphasize, I was in Great Britain, in United Kingdom in that point. And what did strike me is how, after the big protests, both sides appeared satisfied in a strange way. The organizers of demonstrators made their point: you see the majority is behind us, people oppose war, we made our point. But silently, they knew they didn’t stop the war, nothing. Blair government, the other side, was also satisfied. You see what an open society is: even when a country goes to war, we can—and again, the best answer, I think, was provided unintentionally by George Bush when he visited at that time UK. I remember, when asked by journalists, “How do you comment on big protests against you?” he said, “I totally support them, because, you see, that’s why we are going to Iraq, so that things like this, massive protest against the government, so that things like this could happen only—will happen also in Iraq.” So, of course, this was either a bad joke or hypocrisy or whatever you want. But there is a truth in it. Everyone, in a way, all the sides, felt satisfied. And this is what often worries me, this—how should I put it?—secret, symbiotic relationship. Those in power like a certain type of moralistic protest, which does nothing.

      And again, I think that even—of course, everybody likes them Zapatistas in Mexico—that even Zapatistas fell a little bit into that trap. At the beginning, they were a little bit of a serious threat. Then when their—this famous anonymous leader, Subcomandante Marcos, then he made the choice of playing this, how should I call it, moral authority, you know, and at that point making comments on what is wrong in Mexican society. From that point on, everybody loves him now, you know? Everybody—oh, yes, he’s our moral consciousness, and so on and so on.

      But again, I’m not simply reproaching the left for it, because, how to put it, of course now then there is the cruel question: but what can the left do? What can you effectively do? So I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing this. I’m just saying—what I’m saying is basically one simple thing. I repeat it in all my talks, and so on. It’s fashionable to make fun of Fukuyama, End of History, but even the majority of today’s left is effectively, if I may make an adverb, Fukuyamaists. Basically, isn’t it that most of us leftists silently believe capitalism is here to stay, parliamentary democracy is what we [inaudible], so the problem is simply how to make it work better? Our ultimate horizon is, again, in the same way as we were talking about socialism with a human face, global capitalist democracy with a human face. And for me, the key question is, is this enough?

Some readers of Zizek (Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, to mention a couple) read Zizek as accepting global capitalism. I disagree. I think that 'ultimate horizon' refers to our setting, what limits left politics and left thought today (in good old Hegelian terms, philosophy is its time comprehended in thought). For years Zizek has pointed out how many left academics live and how our actions reflect our belief: those of us who are tenured have retirement accounts; we may own some kind of property like a house or condominium; we have health insurance; we worry about our kids' education etc. Of course, there are activists who are not sheltered in the academy. At this point in the US, though, it's safe to say that they have not yet produced a major crack in the ideological edifice in which the left remains encased. We know, but nevertheless...

 

How much is too much?

This is an old topic, much trodden in these parts. But, I'm finally getting around to writing a review that was due 18 months ago (it has now become a review essay) and so I'm returning to old themes. Why, why, why do 'critics' attack Zizek for writing too much? An essay in one book I'm reviewing treats the amount of his writing as a symptom. What amount is symptomatic? When does quantity equal pathology? Is a journalist who publishes weekly or twice weekly or thrice weekly somehow diseased? Are all bloggers suffering from pathology? (The answer to this might be yes without that indicating that might larger point is wrong). Who decides on the number that becomes 'too much'?  In law, Cass Sunstein publishes a couple of books a year. Is he ill? What about Stephen King? Did Derrida suffer from the same malady? I suspect that the accusation of 'too much' is raised by people who don't publish enough, who are worried that they might look bad, like they are lazy, like they should be doing more.

Copjec, Laclau, and Zizek (fourth in a series on drive)

Laclau claims that his notion of partiality converges with with the psychoanalytic notion of a partial object, that is a partiality functioning as a totality. Indeed, his critique of Zizek hinges on this point:

what Zizek is ignoring is the whole logic of the objet petit a, which as I argued above, is identical to the hegemonic logic. That the object is 'elevated to the dignity of the Thing' is what Zizek seems to exclude as a political possibility. The alternative he presents is: either we have access to the Thing as such, or we have pure partialities not linked by any totalizing effect. I think that  a Lacanian such as Zizek should know better.

It seems to me that Laclau is relying on a one-sided reading of Copjec here. Her account of drive depicts the object not as elevated to the dignity of the Thing at all. We could say that it is noThing, nothing at all, and drive is the circuit around this nothing that becomes something because of the circuit.

I tried to express something like this idea in my discussion of drive in Publicity's Secret. There I consider the way the secret becomes the scoop in communicative capitalism. Some stupid, trivial bit of information becomes something by being construed as revealed--diet secrets of the stars! What's there to care about in Britney Spear's latest traffic accident? Nothing. No Thing. There is no there there. But there is the circulation of drive around this nothing that makes it something, that makes it deliver something extra, something that is in it more than itself.

Laclau's mistake, I think, is to construe the partial object in terms of totalizing effects that make it represent an absent fullness. Britney's driving problems don't stand in for anything. They deliver jouissance on their own. Thus, Copjec reads Lacan as proposing

that sublimation ought to be thought not as the substitution of a culturally valorized object for one that is immediately gratifying sexually, but as a changing of the object itself.

Out of nothing (no Thing) the drive creates an object

a thing in the very place where unified jouissance, das Ding, is absent . . .

Later she writes:

It is as if the very function of the drive were this continuous opening up of small fractures between things. . . . The drive continues to circle the object because the latter is never identical to itself, is split from itself. . . . It is not only the object of the drive that is split from itself; the subject, too, is fractures through the drive's repetitions.

At this point, I fail to see any totalizing effects here, unless totalizing is the same as fragmenting. Perhaps another way to say this is that Laclau posits a hidden S1 underneath the S2.

So Laclau's critique of Zizek on this point is not persuasive. Zizek does not presume the possibility of a new convergence with the lost maternal thing (which would be impossible since this is a retrospective assumption anyway, as Laclau acknowledges). Like Laclau (but contra Laclau's charge) he allows for the elevation of a contingent object to the dignity of a Thing.  But he recognizes as well the work of the drive in politics in terms of partialities with no totalizing effects, partialities that are nothings that deliver, affectively charged nothings in place where there is no unified jouissance or imagined fullness.

I know full well that Britney's traffic dilemmas are nothing. That's why I enjoy them.

Laclau might be right on one point: Zizek accuses him of resignation. It could be more accurate to say that what Laclau engages in is sublimation, the sublimation of revolutionary energies. This sublimation, then, is democratic drive or the sublimation of political desire into democracy. Democracy