Zizek in NYT: Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth

Thanks to "Ron-Ron" for pointing out Zizek's editorial in today's NYT.

ONE of the pop heroes of the Iraq war was undoubtedly Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, the unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in his daily press conferences during the invasion, heroically denied even the most evident facts and stuck to the Iraqi line. Even with American tanks only a few hundred yards from his office, he continued to claim that the televised shots of tanks on the Baghdad streets were just Hollywood special effects.

In his very performance as an excessive caricature, Mr. Sahhaf thereby revealed the hidden truth of the ''normal'' reporting: there were no refined spins in his comments, just a plain denial. There was something refreshingly liberating about his interventions, which displayed a striving to be liberated from the hold of facts and thus of the need to spin away their unpleasant aspects: his stance was, ''Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?''

Furthermore, sometimes, he even struck a strange truth -- when confronted with claims that Americans were in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped back: ''They are not in control of anything -- they don't even control themselves!''

What, exactly, do they not control? Back in 1979, in her essay ''Dictatorship and Double Standards,'' published in Commentary, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick elaborated the distinction between ''authoritarian'' and ''totalitarian'' regimes. This concept served as the justification of the American policy of collaborating with right-wing dictators while treating Communist regimes much more harshly: authoritarian dictators are pragmatic rulers who care about their power and wealth and are indifferent toward ideological issues, even if they pay lip service to some big cause; in contrast, totalitarian leaders are selfless fanatics who believe in their ideology and are ready to put everything at stake for their ideals.

Her point was that, while one can deal with authoritarian rulers who react rationally and predictably to material and military threats, totalitarian leaders are much more dangerous and have to be directly confronted.

The irony is that this distinction encapsulates perfectly what went wrong with the United States occupation of Iraq: Saddam Hussein was a corrupt authoritarian dictator striving to keep his hold on power and guided by brutal pragmatic considerations (which led him to collaborate with the United States in the 1980s). The ultimate proof of his regime's secular nature is the fact that in the Iraqi elections of October 2002 -- in which Saddam Hussein got a 100 percent endorsement, and thus overdid the best Stalinist results of 99.95 percent -- the campaign song played again and again on all the state media was Whitney Houston's ''I Will Always Love You.''

One outcome of the American invasion is that it has generated a much more uncompromising ''fundamentalist'' politico-ideological constellation in Iraq. This has led to a predominance of the pro-Iranian political forces there -- the intervention basically delivered Iraq to Iranian influence. One can imagine how, if President Bush were to be court-martialed by a Stalinist judge, he would be instantly condemned as an ''Iranian agent.'' The violent outbursts of the recent Bush politics are thus not exercises in power, but rather exercises in panic.

Recall the old story about the factory worker suspected of stealing: every evening, when he was leaving work, the wheelbarrow he rolled in front of him was carefully inspected, but the guards could not find anything, it was always empty. Finally, they got the point: what the worker was stealing were the wheelbarrows themselves.

This is the trick being attempted by those who claim today, ''But the world is nonetheless better off without Saddam!'' They forget to factor into the account the effects of the very military intervention against him. Yes, the world is better without Saddam Hussein -- but is it better if we include into the overall picture the ideological and political effects of this very occupation?

The United States as a global policeman -- why not? The post-cold-war situation effectively called for some global power to fill the void. The problem resides elsewhere: recall the common perception of the United States as a new Roman Empire. The problem with today's America is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not one. That is, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act like a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if the guiding vision of recent American politics is a weird reversal of the well-known motto of the ecologists -- act globally, think locally.

After 9/11, the United States was given the opportunity to realize what kind of world it was part of. It might have used the opportunity -- but it did not, instead opting to reassert its traditional ideological commitments: out with the responsibility and guilt with respect to the impoverished third world -- we are the victims now!

Apropos of the Hague tribunal, the British writer Timothy Garton Ash pathetically claimed: ''No Fuhrer or Duce, no Pinochet, Amin or Pol Pot, should ever again feel themselves protected from the reach of international law by the palace gates of sovereignty.'' One should simply take note of what is missing in this series of names which, apart from the standard couple of Hitler and Mussolini, contains three third world dictators: where is at least one name from the major powers who might sleep a bit uneasily?

Or, closer to the standard list of the bad guys, why was there little talk of delivering Saddam Hussein or, say, Manuel Noriega to The Hague? Why was the only trial against Mr. Noriega for drug trafficking, rather than for his murderous abuses as a dictator? Was it because he would have disclosed his past ties with the C.I.A.?

In a similar way, Saddam Hussein's regime was an abominable authoritarian state, guilty of many crimes, mostly toward its own people. However, one should note the strange but key fact that, when the United States representatives and the Iraqi prosecutors were enumerating his evil deeds, they systematically omitted what was undoubtedly his greatest crime in terms of human suffering and of violating international justice: his invasion of Iran. Why? Because the United States and the majority of foreign states were actively helping Iraq in this aggression.

And now the United States is continuing, through other means, this greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the Iranian government. This is the price you have to pay when the struggle against the enemies is the struggle against the evil ghosts in your own closet: you don't even control yourself.

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

Do any other major papers so often publish columns by academics? Aside from Zizek, we hear fairly regularly from Stanley Fish, plus I remember columns by Judith Butler, Mark C. Taylor, etc. -- perhaps someday we will hear from Jodi Dean as well.

[pebird]

This is a great example of why the criticism of Z repeating himself rings hollow.

What an incredible editorial (in the NYT no less)!!

Yet, here are the same jokes, old references and repetitions, with a just a few twists that create such power.

"One can imagine how, if President Bush were to be court-martialed by a Stalinist judge, he would be instantly condemned as an 'Iranian agent.''

I guess Pelosi definitely won't impeach Bush now - who wants to be a known as a Stalinist judge?

[Kenneth Rufo]

"This is a great example of why the criticism of Z repeating himself rings hollow."

Good point - I think this one example totally disproves the so-called problems that caused complaints in all those other instances.

[Bob Allen]

Even the language we use to describe these situations is rife with simulation: "I Will Always Love You" appeared before me on a Hee Haw seventies rerun (that show a quintessential simulacra of Americana contrived by Canadians) sung by platinum coiffed Dolly Parton. Whitney as Dolly's double, Hussein stands in for Stalin, Bush as a new Reagan...it's all very Baudrillardian...

[Jodi]

PE Bird--I agree with you (and can't get the sense of Ken's tone). There is always something that doesn't ring true for me in dismissals of Zizek that focus on style, whether they emphasize repetition, pop culture, exaggeration, or his examples. Not only do such dismissals fail to undertake the hard task of engaging the arguments, but they also fail to consider the ways the examples etc function in a given context. Putting the same story, example, in different contexts brings out different meanings.

[Adam Kotsko]

One could also note the practical aspect -- sure, there's the circle of readers who read everything, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who will only ever read one or two Zizek articles.

I do find the strident defense of his repetition somewhat odd, though.

[Amish Lovelock]

Then there is the practical aspect of the Zizek who cannot write everything and who can only ever write a certain number of articles and books.

[Ken]

It seems to me -- especially after seeing the recent NYTimes essay on Iraq -- that Zizek's style is precisely what merits observation, study, celebration, and even hope. That is, he has nothing new or particularly interesting to say about the Iraq horror here (hence its appearance in the NYTimes which likes recirculation of themes as long the themes are their own). And, frankly, I doubt Zizek's ability ever to tell me anything about Iraq in particular that better informed and better experienced people could. But I can't help be fascinated and drawn into his style. And I think it would be great if he draw others into his style -- the wild funny juxtapositions of high and low, the (still) foreign "Stalinist" insights, etc. Style matters. Many if not most of my friends rely in their everyday thinking in what could be called Lettermanesque irony, a way of thought established over years of being saturated with this version of American satire -- at best an utlimately quietist form of satire. And this is their core response to almost anything -- even the most horrific event. In other words, "style" seeps into the head and becomes thought. If Zizek's style alone could seep into more head that in itself would be promisingly disruptive. The Daily Show is doing this in part -- moving from the comic to the serious. Zizek does this from the serious to the comic.

[Kenneth Rufo]

I was bing sarcastic, only because while I liked the NYT piece, I find the claim that this good essay provides grounds for dismissing the critiques of his self-plagiarism/repetition en masse to be silly. It's a good piece, well-written, and persuasive, if not particularly novel. I thought pebird was making a bit more of it than waranted, that's all.

As for the old stories in new wineskins, it's perfectly legit to argue that he's making different claims given the different contexts. But for a guy who makes contradictory claims in different contexts, I'm not so compelled by that. And considering the man's sustained critique of capitalism, I find the critique of his repetition as an enabler of his own profit to be at least plausible. At the end of the day, I don't really care one way or the other - if he wants to repeat, great, if not, splediferous, I just think that this NYT piece doesn't provide evidence for pebird's assertion, hence my somewhat parodic affirmation.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Oh, and my apologies if I derailed the thread.

I do think it's a good piece, though I still wonder about the impeachment argument, as I can never tell what level it's supposed to be operating - the affirmation of the rule of law, ethics/morality, political comity, political partisanship, utopian imaginary, etc...

[Adam Kotsko]

I must confess that I'm not convinced that his repetition of stories in different contexts *actually does* bring out different meanings, in practice. I can see how it *could*, but I'm not sure it actually *does.*

[pebird]

I received The Borrowed Kettle from my daughter for a Christmas present, and I started reading it last night. I started laughing as I realized that I had re-read most of the preface in the NYT article posted by Jodi. It does make for fast reading, since you've read of it before (and before and ...).

I started thinking about art - pictures and pieces I like - I look at them over and over again - the same picture, different context (web, museum, magazine) and I starting thinking about the impact of repetition.

Now the repetition I engage in is consumptive - I choose to reinscribe the object over and over again, trying to get that elusive piece somewhere in my mind for whatever reason is motivating me/my unconscious.

The artist does the same thing - going over and over a theme trying to figure out what rings true and when that is exhausted moves on.

Maybe I don't get it as quickly as others do, but I need the repetition to drill into me a different way of seeing the world. I was (sorry to say) in advertising/branding at one time - there is no better example of how to use repetition to motivate and influence.

I think of the necessity of ritual, ceremony and sacrament - in our culture those are profane at best and destructive most of the time. So when a philosopher/politcal writer doesn't care when academics call him a xerox machine and continually repurposes his work to make a point, I think that calls for some respect.

[Dr X]

"'style' seeps into the head and becomes thought. If Zizek's style alone could seep into more heads that in itself would be promisingly disruptive."

Great observation.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

'The artist does the same thing - going over and over a theme trying to figure out what rings true and when that is exhausted moves on.'

The artist sometimes does this, but this hasn't been the tendency as such for decades.

'So when a philosopher/politcal writer doesn't care when academics call him a xerox machine and continually repurposes his work to make a point, I think that calls for some respect.'

People who don't care about public opinion always deserve respect. Maybe Zizek doesn't care if academics call him a 'xerox machine', but there's plenty of other public opinion he does care about. In any case, even if he's a philosopher, he's no artist.

[Adam Kotsko]

In the Middle Ages, opinion columnists often simply quoted well-known authorities, keeping their own statements to a minimum. It's only in the period of German Romanticism that political pundits were really evaluated according to the singular irruptions of their originality.....

Another route we could go is to claim that it's some kind of cultural thing from Slovenia that's making him repeat himself so much.

This could backfire, however, if Zizek's notoriety starts making people seek out information about Slovenian culture (which I am not familiar with -- so maybe it actually does include a penchant for repeating things).

[Jodi]

I agree with PE Bird--we are surrounded by repetition in advertising and what passes for politics in the msm. Zizek's repetitions can have an insighting/inciting motivating effect.

[McKenzie Wark]

On Zizek's style, see Fred Jameson's review in the London Review of Books. Maybe its not so much the repetition of actual passages of which one tires (a kind of auto-detournement) as the repetition of the same hegelese three-step as the form of every argument.

[john buell]

I am interested in Adam's comment about other papers besides the NY Times publishing pieces by academic writers like Zizek. I am struck by how few academic writers, especially those who might loosely be labeled "postmodern" or "deconstructionist" (not my preferred term) are published in such traditional left publicatikons as The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, or The American Propsect. I remember on Judith Butler piece in The Nation, but the range and depth of critical thought in these left publications is pretty discouraging. My friend and mentor Bill Connolly was once asked to do a piece for them on the limits of secular liberalism. In my admittedly biased estimation, he did an excellent and provocative piece, only to see the editors then reject it. I have been told, second hand, that Wendy Brown had a similar experience. What a commentary if the NY Times is more intellectually venturesome than some of the most hallowed left publications.

[Jodi]

John--good point. I didn't know about Bill and Wendy. Unfortunately, it isn't surprising. The Nation has a long history of hostility toward anything that smacks of postmodernism.

[CR]

The antipathy toward the "theoretical" left in the NYC left-journo world is terrifyingly strong. Actually steps over the line into yuckiness, dragging the politics itself away from sanity, from time to time. Not that they've read a single line of any of it. Or, when they do, the outcome is often worse than if they hadn't at all.

They are a dispiriting group, the Nation-type folk. By and large, anyway...

(And what I really wonder about - or wondered about when I used to peripherially and only spousally move about in some of these circuits - was whether the true allergy wasn't so much to "difficult" writing, which is what they always said of course, as toward marxism/socialism - even left political idealism in general... Seriously!)