The last guest (who invited her?)

So, I'm now, finally, belatedly, after everyone is tired of the whole thing, reading the discussion of Zizek's lame 300 piece. I'm glad that I highlighted discipline in my previous remarks. Daniel rejects Zizek's appeal to discipline. He writes:

Is there really nothing fascist about these values? Could a party that held discipline and the spirit of sacrifice as values - as opposed to simply strategic/organizational principles - really be called a leftist party?

K-Punk extends and glosses the point:

if capital accumulation is to be tackled, then presumably discipline and organization would have to play a significant part in any successful anti-capitalist struggle - but, precisely, as Daniel says, as strategic necessities rather than as 'values' in themselves.

I'm not convinced that a debate that relies on a distinction between values and strategic/organizational principles is interesting or productive--probably because it doesn't strike me as a good idea for a leftist party to have strategic/organizational principles that conflict with its values (I started thinking about this when I heard Jeremy Scahill talk about Blackwater. I wondered if I could hire Blackwater for the JRP. But, it struck me as a bad idea to pay capitalist mercenaries to fight a socialist revolution. I''m still wondering if I could hire Blackwater to train the cadres or if this still poses a conflict with the socialist values of the JRP).

I can think of leftist examples where discipline and organization are key values: environmentalism and ecological movements, forming and functioning in collectives, the Italian slow food movement. To think otherwise is to accept in advance rightist attacks on left as liberal, both in the neoliberal sense and in the sense of liberality and licentiousness.

But why shouldn't leftists value discipline and organization? The underlying presumption seems to be that there is something essentially left about a lack of discipline and disorganization. No wonder leftists suck politically.

I think K-Punk and Steve are wrong to suggest that Zizek makes 'hedonist permissivity' into the primary contemporary problem (that is, if they mean this as a general point; the actual piece isn't worth taking seriously). As Steve acknowledges, Zizek knows full well that the problem is with the neoliberal capitalism, that neoconservatism functions as a supplement that tries to guarantee capitalism without capitalism--much in the way that nationalism tries to provide breaks on the revolutionizing force of capitalism. It's hardly the case that Zizek repeats the conservative position: he treats the conservative/religious fundamentalist/nationalist response to neoliberal capitalist as the other side of a same coin. Neither K-punk nor Wendy Brown are making points that Zizek didn't already address in Tarrying with the Negative and The Ticklish Subject. In fact, in both books he emphasizes how authoritarianism becomes appealing precisely as a relief from the injunction to enjoy characteristic of the current ideological matrix.

I disagree further with Steve when he writes:

...Zizek displaces and misrecognizes both the motor force of capital accumulation, and the force of the Kantian categorical imperative. By identifying “hedonist permissivity” as the problem — when it is really just a product of the forces of capital accumulation — he in effect gives the exact same analysis of postmodern capitalsim as the fundamentalist Christian right does, and offers a pseudo-solution (discipline and the spirit of sacrifice) that, like theirs, only serves to preserve the world market system from its own disaggregating tendencies.

I already mentioned that Zizek does not identify 'hedonist permissivity' as the problem but rather locates the problem in Capital. Accordingly, he does not offer a pseudo-solution of discipline and sacrifice. As readers of Zizek constantly complain, Zizek never provides any solutions or recommendations, pseudo or otherwise. In fact, he is more likely to take the opposite position and say do nothing at all, stop all sorts of activity because precisely this activity sustains the system. While disciple and a spirit of sacrifice work as advice for something like a party--and I agree with this--when placed in the context of Zizek's work more generally, they seem more like objects jamming the machinery of enjoyment.

Comments

[love and terrorism]

I’m not sure of the relevance of your references to the essay under discussion, because there Zizek momentarily abandons his familiar observation regarding the superego injunction to ‘Enjoy!’ as converse to the Law, and relies on an opposition between discipline and hedonism. That essay doesn’t only argue that politics requires discipline, but establishes its own political-economy in which discipline is valued over hedonism.

At the same time as Zizek forgets the Law-superego argument that you describe, to do so he also abandons his consistent argument that theory must work to establish a privileged position as epistemological work that continually raises the political stakes of its objects. Instead, when the essay does more than describe the film as a potential anti-American allegory, Zizek applauds its nascent communism.

To offer this intervention, he decides that his essay will end in identity with the film’s Law-hedonism split, as he interprets it; before he contradicts his position regarding the Law-superego relation, he contradicts his meta-position regarding the demands of theory. This indicates that, even if he argues that the disciplined enforcement of normal values is politically imperative, for him theoretical practice is an exception.

[Joseph Kugelmass]

"But why shouldn't leftists value discipline and organization?"

They should. I agree with you about Zizek's value overall as a philosopher, and we agree that his review was lame. So let's not immediately lose sight of how deeply lame it is -- the problems with it are threefold.

1. Zizek is making basically the same points as Athenians like Plato, who thought disciplined Sparta was superior to debauched Athens. As a result, he's locating problems and solutions supposedly immanent to capital within a debate that preceded modern capitalism. That is why, to K-punk and others, the account of discipline appears strangely, perhaps worryingly, abstracted.

2. Second, the way he compares the cultures:

"And is Xerxes's court not depicted as a kind of multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise? Everyone participates in orgies there, different races, lesbians and gays, cripples, etc.? Are, then, Spartans, with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice, not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, as a matter of fact, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion?"

If we are looking at an actual image of paradise in a fictional work, complete with multiculturalism, then it is not susceptible to the same critique as that image being used to justify a real hell. It starts to be, by analogy, an actual paradise.

The idea that we have to choose between "discipline" and "orgies" is a ridiculous, Puritanical fever dream.

The Taliban were not a force of indigenous, disciplined men resisting debauched foreign invaders. They were a vicious totalitarian government that arose in the wake of two separate occupations, and years of international meddling. The US should not have invaded, but that's no reason to valorize the regime.

3. The fact that he tries to de-historicize Sparta:

"There is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, etc."

The 'even' is intentionally misleading. All of those things have to be subtracted for one to believe that Sparta was an admirable state, or that emancipation was its 'core,' or that it could have achieved such discipline without slavery and inequalities of class.