In Cardiff

I'm in Cardiff. I had expected it to be cool and rainy. Instead, it's warm and sunny. Very warm, actually. I'm struggling with the time difference. My hosts, Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi, have a couple of books coming out soon, a terrific book on Zizek and Foucault that will appear with Palgrave and an edited volume that includes chapters based on papers given at the Zizek conference held here last fall.

Tomorrow, I'll give a talk, 'Zizek against Democracy.' As I've been preparing it, I've been rereading his introduction to the Robespierre book. I was taken, again, by his notion of the retroactive determination of contingency into hegemony. It applies well to the so-called American left (or at least to the left Democrats and progressives) after the 2000 election. The left turned Bush's election into a sign, a fact, the truth, the inevitability of conservative hegemony. We read it as the truth of the country--despite the fact Gore won the popular vote and the outcome of the election was decided by the Court. Reading the country as one giant red state, when it was not, we wallowed in our misery, our doom. We were convinced that the country was conservative, fundamentalist, that all our nightmares were true. We turned what was not simply a contingent election but what was in fact a split election into the fact of conservatism. And, ever since, all of us on academic or typing side of the left have wailed and analyzed and explained and interpreted this deep truth of the US. We retroactively determined what the election meant and what it means for the country.

Why did we do this? Why did the US left, in addition to rolling over and pissing on itself rather that taking to the streets after the decision in Bush v. Gore, why did we read the Bush victory as inevitable, as the fact of the country, as the truth of American conservatism?

Was it our own Clinton fatigue? Were we feeling guilty over our own complicity in the failure to secure universal health coverage? Were we feeling guilty over our own acquiescence to and enjoyment of the Lewinsky business? Did we feel like we deserved to be punished? Did we believe, deep down and perhaps in a way that we could not acknowledge, that Clinton proved to us that we could not lead? That the left was really a bunch of liberals, both economically and in terms of liberality and licentiousness?

Did we lack faith in Gore or was it actually a lack in ourselves? Was our guilt, in fact, hiding our unwillingness to take responsibility for the neoliberalization of the economy, for what Clinton did to welfare, for the way we cut lose the poor in our dotcom enthusiasm?

In our guilt, did we retroactively determine the meaning of Bush, the election, and the conservativism of the country so that we, too, could be victims, so that we could have a little relief from a sense of responsibility? After all, the previous 30 or so years of left politics had focused primarily on identity politics, wouldn't it just be easier to give a great big old embrace to our status as victims, as outsiders? Anyone who has been on a college or university campus in the last 30 years knows how comfortable and ready the victim position is. For some of us, It's our trump card, our badge, the justification for our ongoing anger and rage...despite the fact that we have tenure. We can displace our guilt toward our own security onto a heightened anger at what we are missing, at what we don't have--the respect we want, the recognition we deserve, the perks and the audiences and rewards for all we've done.

Left academics have chosen identity politics as a way of hiding or deflecting our own accountability for our lifestyles as well as for the professionalization of left politics in and as academic politics. Our primary weapon: political correctness. We wield this as if we could have tenure and respect, security and radicality, without cost, without remainder, without responsibility. Sometimes we hate it when the right calls us on it; but, we can also use their anger to justify ourselves politically: 'see, we really are victims.'

If depoliticization means anything at all, and I'm not sure it does, then it is precisely this spineless retreat into cowardice, this complete unwillingness to fight for or claim power, a retreat and unwillingness that I am marking here with the 2000 election. Ever since, there has been a collective shame on the part of the left, a shame not simply at the way we've exposed our weakness but also a shame toward our collective disavowal of the fact that the right was not as powerful as we made it out to be. We retreated and cowered before a weak opponent; our shame indicates our opponent's weakness and vulnerability, not our own. We gave in and up before those we could have defeated. And actually did.

I find lately that I don't think I've ever understood Zizek's claim that the depoliticized economy is the disavowed fundamental fantasy of today's postmodern politics. I think that I have tended to overlook the element of fantasy, pointing out the obvious: but the economy is politicized! Perhaps the depoliticized economy is that disavowed fantasy that has enabled our acquiescence to neoliberal hegemony without a fight. Our fantasy is that it is not political, that it is inevitable, that there is nothing we can do about it. Our underlying fantasy is that the economy just goes on. And this fantasy, that really, it's not a matter of justice when it comes to the economy, is what enables us to go along with all our multicultural protest. The fantasy of the depoliticized economy is what hides and enables our shame and our guilt.

Comments

[patrick j. mullins]

Well, you've got a lot of emotion about it, so I haven't any reason not to respect someone's guilt; although I am highly suspicious of my own lack of guilt, about which I plan to do precisely nothing except maintain and increase...

But on this I might veer off--

'Ever since, there has been a collective shame on the part of the left, a shame not simply at the way we've exposed our weakness but also a shame toward our collective disavowal of the fact that the right was not as powerful as we made it out to be.'

But they were as powerful as they were made out to be--it's just it was temporary, and you're stuck with hated democracy and voting rights as the reason they were proved not to be omnipotent. The years 2004-2006 were especially thrilling in their frightening fundamentalism, blood-drenched and terrifying at all times--but for me, only because I wasn't sure what was going on with Voting Machine Rackets. I still think that 2006 is the line for me: Voting Machine Fraud Success would have meant the end, and I thought the Bushies could do it. They are proved to be incompetent by their failure to implement Voting Machine Fraud for themselves in 2006. I now even doubt that they really could catch Bin Laden. Things I've recently read about the FBI, NSA and CIA have proved to me that these agencies are not anywhere near as powerful as I thought, although part of this was my own ignorance--I hadn't read enough. They've fucked up so many times it can't even be believed, even had to have Aldrich Ames sent to them by Registered Mail before they'd agree that it might not be wise to let him continue turning over U.S. spies. Even the White House started getting really good at rendering CIA almost inoperative in those years. So I think they were extremely powerful, just not omnipotent. As long as they were not put in check, they went on partying like there was no tomorrow. Not conceding that things have changed because of being annoyed that the Dems couldn't keep sending back the Iraq spending bill over and over without a veto-overturning majority hasn't really changed anything, has it?

'We retreated and cowered before a weak opponent; our shame indicates our opponent's weakness and vulnerability, not our own. We gave in and up before those we could have defeated.'

What good would have 'taking to the streets' really done due to Rehnquist's attempted destruction of the entire world? A few days to assuage future guilt? If Rhenquist was the 'rule of law', we didn't defeat them just because Gore got the popular vote. Bush won the election, because he got the electoral votes--whether by chicanery or what-have-you is beside the point ultimately. Who says Gore shouldn't have been less gentlemanly? If he wanted protests, he might have so indicated.

'And actually did.'

Still no, I think, but I see what you're talking about. The last years of Clinton's reign are a little more easily forgotten or mimimized than they should be because they weren't as bad as Bush, not by a long shot. The most outrageous thing Clinton did was that quickie Iraq bombing when the impeachment vote was coming up--and he made himself into a buffoon, because it only gave him one extra day. But there was an atmosphere of decadence at the end of his reign--pardons galore-- that had a lot to do with Gore not winning a lot more easily--a lot of Gore's defeat is Clinton's fault. I agree that everything got worn down so that people weren't able to get enthusiastic about imagining all the villainies about to come up, though. There wasn't enough passionate conviction, although it really was just Rehnquist.

[Richard]

"Perhaps the depoliticized economy is that disavowed fantasy that has enabled our acquiescence to neoliberal hegemony without a fight."

I think this is crucial, and true about capitalism generally. Capitalism purports to remove the economy from the political realm. We are seduced by the notion that capitalism is "natural", and thus further seduced by the idea that the de-politicization of the economy is not only how things are, but how they ought to be (even while ignoring the very real ways in which the economy IS political).

I think this kind of block, along with your previous point in an earlier post about how the left "enjoys" the fruits of capitalism/neo-liberalism, goes a long way towards explaining the left's inability move.

With respect to the 2000 election somehow proving to the left that the US was in fact this big conservative monster, perhaps you're right. But it's important, I think, not to forget that Bush wasn't exactly doing so hot till 9/11. The liberal response to that may have proven the left's worse fears more than even the election had.

[Bob Allen]

Excellent insights into the nature of capitalism. When we talk of the left's collective guilt and shame, we shouldn't forget that Clinton was not a leftist and that participation in the electoral process of bourgeois democracy in itself is a capitulation to the right. Does this add to the sense of shame, knowing the game is rigged and yet playing it anyway?