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Thinking about Slavoj Zizek

Started by Cain, June 07, 2009, 01:40:19 PM

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Cain

I know I went on a Foucault junket a while back, and I honestly think that was very helpful in causing some ideas for me, as well as intellectually interesting.

However, I've been poring over a recent publication by Palgrave Macmillan, which tries to investigate the work of Zizek against the background of Foucault.  The book probably explains it better than I do:

QuoteBy unmasking reality as a contingent discursive fiction, we will argue, Foucauldian criticism has only deconstructed the world in different ways; the point, however, is to discern the Real in what seems to be a mere discursive construct, and to change it.

The book, then, is not an analysis of Zizek's views on Foucault, although we will take them into account, but an exploration of Zizek's work against the background of Foucault's. While the writings of both Zizek and Foucault have been subjected to close scrutiny from a variety of perspectives, there is no study mapping the psychoanalytically informed theory of the former against the poststructuralist theory of the latter. There are two good reasons to approach Zizek through Foucault. For one thing, the Foucauldian oeuvre is one of the most enlightening reference points for an exploration of Zizek's political philosophy, which is in many respects a 'post-poststructuralist' theory. Moreover, Foucault's writings have come to satisfy a widespread demand among leftist critics for a cogent theory for the now unipolar world at history's deplorable, yet inevitable end. Foucault-euphoria is symptomatic of a political constellation and an intellectual outlook which have been the primary targets of Zizek's criticism since the fall of Soviet Communism. They form the foil to his endeavour to reinstate critical theory in the field of radical politics. Three questions underlie our enquiry:

What consequences do Foucault's and Zizek's theorisations have for emancipatory politics today? How do they affect the way in which we experience social reality? To what extent do they help us to imagine, account for and effect political change?

I think the last two are the most important, for various reasons.

So with this thread, I'm going to drop in notes and little bits of commentary and see where it goes.  Anyone else should feel free to jump in.  Since I have most of Zizek's books on my hard drive, this shouldn't be too hard, though it may take up a lot of time.

Cain

Some quotes, to get this rolling:

Zizek: Beyond Foucault

Quotewhen a typical Cultural Studies theorist deals with a philosophical or psychoanalytical edifice, the analysis focuses exclusively on unearthing its hidden patriarchal, Eurocentric, identitarian, etc., 'bias', without even asking the ... question: OK, but what is the structure of the universe? How does the human psyche "really" work?

QuoteZizek conceptualises social reality as fissured and self-external, his wager being that reality itself is always-already based on some exclusion or inconsistency – reality, as we know it, is 'not all'. And it is here, in these very gaps and interstices in the social edifice, that Zizek believes critical thought has its proper place.

QuoteParaphrasing Marx, the step from Foucault to Zizek thus could be summarized as follows: by unmasking reality as contingent discursive fiction, poststructuralist criticism has only deconstructed the world in different ways. The point, however, is to identify the Real of what seems to be mere discursive fiction, and to change it.

QuoteAt the outset of his essay 'The Spectre of Ideology', which would probably qualify as his most consistent piece of writing on the subject, Zizek defines the term in question as the 'generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable' (Zizek, 1994b, 1). Such a definition introduces us to Zizek's psychoanalytic conceptualisation of ideology as a radically split domain, or rather an elusive kind of knowledge divided between its explicit manifestation (a rationally constructed and linguistically transparent set of ideas) and its uncanny 'appearance beyond appearance' (an unthinkable, unrepresentable and unmediatable nucleus of disavowed enjoyment). By claiming that ideology regulates the dialectical relationship between the above two orders (in Lacanian terms, between the order of the Symbolic and the order of the Real), Zizek also undermines the parameters of critical theory 'as we know it', for he shifts the object of critical analysis onto what has hitherto been regarded as the non-ideological field  par excellence: the obscure realm of enjoyment – which, however, is not to be mistaken with mere pleasure, as it stands for the excessive and fundamentally disturbing dimension of libido that Lacanian psychoanalysis knows as jouissance.

QuoteLet us take, for instance, the often-rehearsed Zizekian argument that in their different guises all totalitarian systems rely on an instance of fetishistic disavowal. Particularly in his early production, Zizek tackles the question of ideological efficacy in both Nazi-Fascism and Communism, frequently resorting to Octave Mannoni's formula on the contradictory nature of belief: 'Je sais bien, mais quand-même ...' [I know very well, but nevertheless ...] (see Mannoni, 1969). Zizek maintains that in totalitarian societies the power of ideology is, as a rule, reflected in the cynical attitude of the subjects, who know full well that the official ideological line ('the Jews are responsible for all evils'; 'the Communist Party represents the people') is false, and yet they stick to it as a matter of belief – since, as both Pascal and Althusser knew very well, belief has less to do with reason and knowledge than with habit  and senseless (from Zizek's standpoint: unconscious/traumatic) enjoyment.

QuoteThe same principle of 'totalitarian disavowal', Zizek frequently argues, is also in place in liberal Western societies, where the cynical distance we are encouraged to take from any form of traditional ideological belief effectively suggests that we are being caught in the system's ideological loop. The more we pride ourselves on being 'free thinkers in a free world', Zizek argues, the more we blindly submit ourselves to the merciless superegoic command ('Enjoy!') which binds us to the logic of the market. As with Hegel's 'Beautiful Soul', the display of purity turns out to be the measure of impurity, innocence the measure of evil. From this angle, the very notion of 'free will' (extensively exploited, for example, by modern advertising) might be said to function, today, as a supremely ideological formula, since it binds the subject precisely to that deterministic universe it seeks to escape. Zizek, however, does not deny the existence of free will. His understanding of the notion is predicated upon the German idealist account of the concept developed especially by Schelling. Against the philosophical cliché that there is no place for free will in German idealism, since the world operates according to laws that are ultimately inaccessible to us, Zizek argues that the idea of subjectivity constructed by the German idealists does endorse access to freedom of will – provided, however, that we conceive of this freedom as a traumatic encounter with an 'abyssal' choice that has no guarantee in the socio-symbolic order. Zizek's point is that free will implies the paradox of a frightful disconnection from the world, the horror of a psychotic confrontation with the radical negativity that ultimately defines the status of the subject.

LMNO

This is going to take a bit of time to fully process.

Cain

Welcome to the club.

Also, more:

QuoteWhat we get with artificial laughter on TV is precisely the externalisation of one of our most intimate and spontaneous feelings, a feeling normally associated with enjoyment. To what effect? The idea that someone else laughs in my place – or that I laugh by proxy, through another  - reproduces the fundamental logic of ideological interpellation, insofar as by distancing myself from my innermost enjoyment (laughter, belief, etc.) I am all the more caught in the ideological predicament. Canned laughter brings to light the formal mechanism of displacement upon which ideology relies: we are truly controlled by ideology the moment we start displacing belief onto someone/something else: for instance when, within a given socio-symbolic order, we believe that someone else, and not us, is the poor idiot caught in the loop of ideology (the 'subject supposed to believe'); or, more radically, that belief belongs in the big Other tout court.

QuoteDistance blinds us to the fact that, in ideology, belief is not necessarily a direct identification with a given set of ideas, but rather a reflexive mechanism that presupposes and foregrounds our choice not to believe (or, for that matter, to believe). In short: we believe that the big Other believes (not us), and therefore we contribute to the strengthening of the ideological machine. The point is that belief is the effect of (to put it with the title of one of Zizek's books) a parallax view: it is split between what we think we believe in and the disavowed belief that sustains this conscious belief. What counts for Zizek is this 'belief before belief', which essentially coincides with the belief that the big Other exists. The real question for critical theory, therefore, would be how to locate and disengage from this disavowed belief in belief.

Emphasis mine there.

QuoteZizek is aware of the fact that, if on the one hand the status of ideology in our postmodern times is founded upon the displacement of belief (liberal multiculturalism), on the other hand it is also clearly linked to forms of direct belief (fundamentalist populism). The difference between the two modes of identification is that the cynical liberal multiculturalist mocks the very notion of 'direct knowledge', whereas the fundamentalist accepts it 'at face value'. The common feature that makes these two modalities two sides of the same coin is the fact that they neglect 'the "absurd" act of decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of "reasons", in positive knowledge'

QuoteZizek in other words takes the old Marxist slogan that 'every rise of Fascism is a sign of a failed revolution' very seriously: his understanding of history is consistent with Walter Benjamin's, in as much as it regards a given historical failure or even catastrophe as indicative of the previous grounding 'openness' of a given socio-political constellation. From this viewpoint, the liberal leftist ideology of recognition of differences effectively works towards concealing the gap between the symbolic order and its founding inconsistency. This brings Zizek to conclude that we should 'dare to look for an ally in what often looks like the ultimate enemy of multi-culti liberalism: today's crucial "sites of resistance" against global capitalism are often deeply marked by religious fundamentalism'....What it means is not that we should simply side with fundamentalism against liberal multiculturalism, but instead that we need to acknowledge how fundamentalism allows us a clearer view of the crucial antagonism that lies behind and structures today's global ideological enterprise, where liberalism and fundamentalism become two sides of the same coin.

QuoteIf we go back to the notion of belief, Zizek's often repeats that full identification with the ideological machine is guaranteed to at least disturb its functioning. This logic is demonstrated very clearly in the passage of The Plague of Fantasies where Zizek considers three films about military life: MASH, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Full Metal Jacket.  Zizek argues that contrary to standard interpretations, MASH and An Officer, attempting to challenge the logic of military life through either irony (MASH) or sentiment (An Officer), actually end up legitimating its pressure, since they remain blind to the fact that 'an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it'. Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, on the other hand, resists the temptation to 'humanise' or simply mock the military machine. While in the first part of the film we are shown how mindless military drilling is accompanied by obscene enjoyment (hard discipline coupled with humiliating rituals), in the second part we get the truth about the attitude of ironic distance: the soldier who throughout the film had seemed humane and intelligent enough to dis-identify with military life, eventually shoots a wounded Vietcong girl, thus unwittingly demonstrating how, on him, military ideology has fully succeeded. Zizek often applies a similar reading to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, where Kurtz (Marlon Brando) is the perfect soldier who, through over-identification with the military system, turns into the excess that has to be eliminated: 'The ultimate horizon of Apocalypse Now is this insight into how Power generates its own excess, which it has to annihilate in an operation which has to imitate what it fights (Willard's mission to kill Kurtz is non-existent for the official record – "It has never happened", as the general who briefs Willard points out'.

Cain

#4
QuoteTo Zizek, for example, the common mistake of the standard approach of traditional ideology critique to Fascism lies in considering its 'irrational' hubris as non-ideological. Rather, he claims that the opposite is true: what secures the consistency of Fascism as an ideological construct is always its (more or less clandestine) reliance on a kernel of enjoyment that is generally perceived by the people as a more authentic way to connect with reality.

QuoteThe term ideology thus becomes redundant, Zizek argues, for what counts in critical analysis is that every ideological stance we assume is always-already parasitised by an intricate network of discursive devices whose function is to structure our point of view in advance, silently bestowing an appearance of necessity upon it.

QuoteIn discourse analysis one always starts from the presupposition that it is impossible 'to draw a clear line of demarcation between ideology and actual reality', which in turn prompts the conclusion that 'the only non-ideological position is to renounce the very notion of extra-ideological reality and accept that all we are dealing with are symbolic fictions, the plurality of discursive universes, never "reality"'. In Zizek's view, this boils down to nothing but a 'slick "postmodern" solution' (Zizek, 1994b, 17), a stratagem which, in fact, ends up favouring the proliferation of ideology. Thus, key to his critique is the question of externality: while the traditional positing of a conceptually viable space outside ideology is delusive, the negation of externality tout court is also defective, for it thwarts the articulation of radical political projects. Moving beyond traditional critical theory (where ideology deforms 'true' reality) and discourse analysis (where ideology is turned into an all-encompassing discursive practice), Zizek identifies a third model, whereby a place outside ideology is possible, but 'it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality' (Zizek, 1994b, 17). What is situated beyond the ideological can never be retrieved as a rational paradigm, and for this very reason (because it relates to a non-discursive core) it is ideology at its purest.

QuoteHowever, what is, in concrete terms, ideological fantasy, and how exactly does it work? Commenting on the events that followed the violent impact of hurricane Katrina on New Orleans (summer 2005), Zizek aims precisely to unmask the workings of ideological fantasy (see Zizek, 2005b). He starts his analysis by considering the way in which the media dealt with the tragic natural occurrence and its aftermath. We all remember, he argues, how television and newspapers reported, in what seemed to be a legitimately indignated tone, the explosion of rape and looting allegedly perpetrated by gangs of blacks throughout the inundated city of New Orleans. However, later inquiries demonstrated that, in the large majority of cases, these 'orgies of violence' did not occur: non-verified rumours were simply reported as facts by the media (some looting did occur after the storm passed, but violence never reached the horrifying peaks broadcast by the media). The reality of poor blacks, abandoned and left without means to survive was thus transformed, as if by the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter, into the spectre of blacks exploding violently, of tourists robbed and killed on streets that had slid into anarchy, of the Superdome ruled by gangs raping women and children. The first point to make is that these reports were words that had a precise political effect: they generated fears. The second and most interesting point made by Zizek, however, takes the whole discussion on to a different level. Is it enough to blame the media because they exaggerated the evidence in order to create massive panic amongst the people, thus helping the cause of the neo-conservative and the populist right? Zizek argues that even if all the reports had proven to be factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be racist, since what deep down motivated these stories was not factual evidence, but a racist prejudice originating precisely in ideological fantasy: in the diabolical determination to displace social antagonism onto the question of race, thus fulfilling the repressed scenario that blacks are in truth violent barbarians unable to behave in a civilised way. In a similar manner, Zizek contends, even if some rich Jews in early 1930s Germany had really exploited German workers, seduced their daughters and dominated the popular press, Nazis' anti-Semitism would still have been an emphatically 'untrue', pathological ideological condition.

QuoteHere we have, therefore, a lucid exemplification of the role of ideological fantasy: not that of creating a false conflict out of some tragic event, but that of replacing the true source of conflictuality with a false one.

LMNO

I need to spend an evening alone with some of this stuff.  It deserves full attention.

Cain

#6
There are two main issues with reading Zizek:

1) he usually manages to pack more information and depth into a paragraph than some writers can do with a book, and
2) to get anything more than a surface understanding, some knowledge of Lacanian psychoanalysis, postmodernism and Hegel is useful.

Hopefully more of what I will quote will help clarify some of the key concepts.

Cain

QuoteZizek is well-known for his firmly critical stance on multiculturalism. However, put this way such a statement inevitably lends itself to dangerous misunderstandings, and therefore needs to be developed beyond its crude meaning. First and foremost, we must stress that Zizek is not against the principle of multiculturalism qua normative set of prescriptive measures; he is rather against what we might call 'the ideology of multiculturalism', insofar as this cultural ideology plays a dominant role in today's Western liberal–democratic order. The main line of Zizek's attack is easily summarised: multiculturalism represents, in truth, the cultural backbone of Western (US in primis) upper-middle class capitalist ideology, and as such it should not be elevated into the ultimate horizon of our political engagement. Essentially, to him today's multiculturalism works as a blackmail. By accepting this blackmail and devoting excessive importance to questions involving sexuality, gender, race, cultural tolerance, etc. (as reflected in the academic fortunes of cultural studies), the left is effectively loosing sight of the real stakes of the struggle. Multiculturalism substantially implies the endorsement of the current framework of global capitalism with its political supplement (liberal democracy) as the non plus ultra of our social constellation. Against this persuasion, Zizek claims that one should simply break with the multiculturalist taboo by disturbing its mantra of political correctness, even though this may result in allegations of racism or chauvinism.

QuoteBut there is a further twist to Zizek's analysis. Insofar as it plays a proper ideological role, the multiculturalist stance also necessarily relies upon its own dose of disavowed fantasy. Zizek never tires of repeating that, far from attaining universal validity, multiculturalism is a split domain where the very explicit message is sustained by a secret kernel of fundamentally obscene fantasies. The moment we, enlightened Western multiculturalists, defend the discourse of tolerance towards race and gender, for example, we cannot avoid generating, simultaneously, secret obscene fantasies that silently contradict the explicit message.

[...]

Effectively, today's multiculturalism hinges on the following contradiction: 'We are tolerant, but if you are not tolerant like us (if you do not accept the normative structure of our discourse) you are a primitive ape who does not deserve to live in our world.' What should be emphasised is the libidinal investment accompanying the second, normally disavowed part of the sentence.

QuoteIn short, multiculturalism as ideology obscures the only truly progressive position that the left should occupy: the politicisation of class. The reference to class permits us to grasp the fundamental dialectical nature of ideology, in as much as the explicit ideological sphere hegemonised by conflicting discourses (say, today's liberal democratic consensus) is always-already sustained by the intractable Real of class struggle, which therefore is, from a political angle, the very kernel of ideology, i.e. ideology at its purest. What must not be missed in Zizek's account is that ideology functions as a dialectical device where its positive, historically changeable and describable content (Fascism, Socialism, Liberalism, etc., i.e. ideology in the plural) is always anchored in some disavowed kernel of traumatic negativity, a non-symbolisable and ultimately trans-historical notion of antagonism that Lacanian psychoanalysis defines as 'the Real of jouissance', i.e. non-discursive enjoyment. Strictly speaking, class struggle  is political  jouissance, and as such it remains 'impossible', which means – against the 'surrogate impossibility' of spectrality – that it can only emerge as a violent deflagration, an incendiary materialisation of the Real. Despite the strong emphasis on class, and the conviction that the anti-capitalist struggle should still play the central role in any leftist engagement, Zizek is careful not to turn the working class into a fetish. When he refers to class he does not necessarily mean proletariat, since he is aware that this term has under- gone a radical transformation in today's socio-political constellation.

QuotePostmodern ideology forces upon us what Zizek calls a 'portfolio subjectivity' (Zizek and Daly, 2004, 148), whereby radical insecurity about job, salary and identity is sold as a new and exhilarating form of freedom, when instead it silently legitimises the exploitative potential within contemporary capitalism – the ultimate point being, of course, that our awareness of the trick played on us by postmodern ideology does not necessarily lead to our disenfranchising from it, since what ties us to the ideological injunction is nothing but 'blind enjoyment'.

QuoteThe originality of Zizek's anti-capitalism is rooted in his understanding of political struggle: 'politics is, in its very notion, the field of intractable antagonistic struggle' (Zizek, 2002a, 268). This means that a political intervention always and by definition 'disturbs' the demarcation line between the field of legitimate agonistic confrontation (say, the parliamentary logic of party confrontation in today's liberal democracies) and what from that point of view is considered illegitimate (say, positions of the extreme Left and Right). Such a vision clearly dismisses the liberal notion of politics as a neutral, all-encompassing field; instead, it draws on the psychoanalytic insight that the emergence of the socio-political field, insofar as it is symbolically ordered, hinges on an act of exclusion.

QuoteIn pursuing the question of what is required of an effective critique of liberal democracy, Zizek points out that the term anti-capitalism has become an elusive misnomer within the discourse of today's radical Left (including the New Social Movements), the reason being that, at best, it stands for the emergence of 'sites of resistance' (Zizek, 2002a, 297), which lack authentic political incisiveness and ultimately serve the purpose of the radical Left's proud self-marginalisation. The logic is 'one which includes its own failure in advance, which considers its full success as its ultimate failure, which sticks to its marginal character as the ultimate sign of its authenticity' (Zizek, 2000a, 233), and in so doing it confirms the Foucauldian dictum that power and resistance secretly rely on each other.

QuoteAfter reminding us that, owing to its supposed intrinsic openness, liberal democracy is hailed today as the only solution 'against the "totalitarian" temptation to close the gap, to (pretend to) act on behalf of the Thing itself' (Zizek, 2004a, 79), he proceeds to argue that rather than being situated on the opposite side of liberal democracy, the totalitarian temptation is its (inevitable) other side. By submitting the notion of liberal democracy to a Lacanian interrogation, Zizek denounces the strict complicity between today's post-political platforms (from the 'Third Way' to multiculturalism) and the 'totalitarian excess' which he regards both as their fantasmatic supplement and 'concealed true face' (Zizek, 2000a, 205): the more democracy is conceptualised as an abstract container purified of ideological divisions, the more it would reveal its disavowed and traumatic core by generating new forms of racism, outbursts of irrational/fundamentalist violence, and so on.  Zizek's contention is that if the Left continues to endorse the current democratic parameters (liberal democracy allied with global capitalism), it will face the same political deadlock ad infinitum: the Western Left will keep standing for a distributive justice that systematically fails to engender political passion, whereas the Right will keep mobilising various forms of obscene 'enjoyment' (racism, proto-Fascist nationalisms, etc.).

Quote"[T]he awareness that politics is a complex game in which a certain level of institutional alienation is irreducible should not lead us to ignore the fact that there is still a line of separation which divides those who are 'in' from those who are 'out', excluded from the space of the polis – there are citizens, and there is the spectre of homo sacer haunting them all. In other words, even 'complex' contemporary societies still rely on the basic divide between included and excluded. The fashionable notion of 'multitude' is insufficient precisely in so far as it cuts across this divide: there is a multitude within the system and the multitude of those excluded, and simply to encompass them within the scope of the same notion amounts the same obscenity as equating starvation with dieting to lose weight. And those excluded do not simply dwell in a psychotic non-structured Outside – they have (and are forced into) their own self-organization, one of  the names (and practices) of which was precisely the 'council-democracy'