Where to Make the Cut: Does Zizek have a Statist Fetish?

In Slavoj Zizek’s “In Defense of Lost Causes” I came upon the following paragraph, a paragraph that I believe encapsulates both Zizek’s strength as a Lacanian and his weakness as a Marxist:

Recall the classical Marxist account of the overcoming of capitalism: capitalism unleashed the breath-taking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity – in capitalism, “all things solid melt into thin air,” capitalism is the greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity; on the other hand, this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism – the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is the Capital itself, i.e. the capitalist incessant development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction… Marx’s fundamental mistake was here to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility”: if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism – if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates… And it is as if this logic of “obstacle as a positive condition” which underlied the failure of the socialist attempts to overcome capitalism, is now returning with a vengeance in capitalism itself: capitalism can fully thrive not in the unencumbered reign of the market, but only when an obstacle (the minimal Welfare State interventions, up to the direct political rule of the Communist Party, as is the case in China) constraints its unimpeded reign.

Here we can see why Guy Debord claimed that Lacan was crystalizing the contradictions of Capitalism into ontological categories, however I’m willing to entertain the idea that from a Hegelian perspective wherein ontology is historical we are required to do precisely this. That is in the words of Debord, “we are living in a Society of the Spectacle and all that was directly lived has been transformed into representation.” This means that the ontological basis for our lives has really been transformed into the Spectacle.
My gripe with Zizek then resides elsewhere. The difficulty is where Zizek makes his cut. The central antagonism in Capitalism is not between private Capital and State Power, but rather between the coercive power of production and the liberty of individual consumption. The antagonism that provides the “condition of impossibility” that propels Capital’s production and reproduction is not a choice between two kinds of coercion–the private coercion on the job or the public coercion in the street–but rather the contradiction we are presented with is between private coercion on the job and private freedom in the market. Free choice exists in the market, but this freedom can only be maintained by the coercion and limitations of the class system in production. State power is the excessive intrusive public authority that Capital requires in order to maintain the contradiction between individuality and collectivity, but it is on neither side of the primary contradiction. State Power is shot through both sides of the economic order.

Zizek goes on to claim that Mao’s great mistake was a failure to understand the necessity of the negation of the negation. And without quoting Zizek at length again, nor claiming to fully understand what he is driving at in his Hegelianism, I’ll try to double the negation, or negate both terms on both sides of the contradiction. Would a Communist society be set up wherein production is public or collectively organized in an open and free way while consumption is regulated collectively but coercively? And, if Lacan and Zizek are correct about the split subject of history and the inherent perversity of humanity, would there be some other excess in a communist future? Can we imagine that what might prop up the free collective production of our lives or what the coercive collective consumption of our lives might be like? Just what monsters would real Communism, rather than Maoist State Capitalism, unleash on the world?

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I’ve changed the video accompanying this post because I think Cooney’s exploration of Value theory is more relevant here than Zizek’s shock therapy on Fascist aesthetics. Given the reaction to this essay so far I think I should clarify two points. First, my presumption is that the Communist hypothesis is the best and perhaps only progressive hypothesis for the future. The Communist hypothesis, as I understand it, is that productive labor does not require exploitation and that social life could be an egalitarian and thus shared project. Communism is first and foremost about the economy, and one of the key insights of Marx is that Capitalist modes of production have political and cultural consequences. The economy is a first principle, not in some casual chain, but in a feedback loop, or a process of dialectics.
However, this Marxism has to rise to the challenge of Lacan and his neo-Hegelian interpreter Zizek who both point out that the structure of reality is such that any given subjectivity has to be split. Zizek further speculates that the Capitalist mode of production is successful precisely because it fits the split subject.
In practical terms the reality of the split subject seems to indicate that symbols of authority (leaders of various stripes) are necessary. I’ll run through Zizek’s argument on strictly Lacanian grounds, or try to.

At lacan.com there is an essay entitled Slavoj Zizek’s Key Ideas, and in this essay there are brief explanations of both the law and symbolic efficiency.

“At the beginning” of the law, there is a certain “outlaw”, a certain real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of the law… The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of the law. (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor)

Any law or symbolic authority requires a cut or an excess simply to exist. To clarify this point we can drop real and living political considerations and be very cold and abstract about the idea which paradoxically liberates us to play around because there is nothing real at stake, right? In that spirit let’s take a look at this work of conceptual art and see if we can figure out what this cut, or excess, is:

What this artwork demonstrates is how language works and doesn’t work. The words are clear enough and have a meaning, and the simple fact that the words label themselves should be clear enough, but there is something wrong here. If there weren’t something wrong that we can almost immediately perceive the work wouldn’t be on the wall at the Portland Art Museum. What’s wrong is that the meaning of the “Five Words in Orange Neon” can not be embodied by five actual orange neon words because the meaning is really split off from the neon. Five Words in Orange Neon need not be five words in literal orange neon in order to communicate, and if in fact they are five actual words in orange neon then they are actually more than they need to be. They are excessive. The medium is stepping on the message here, or the body is overtaking the subject.

But this is always going on. The words I write require some sort of physical trace in order to materialize, and yet the meaning of the words are not contained in the physical trace. The people at Lacan.com explain it this way:

One key aspect of the universalization of reflexivity is the resulting desintegration of the big Other, the communal network of social institutions, customs and laws. For Zizek, the big Other was always dead, in the sense that it never existed in the first place as a material thing. All it ever was (and is) is a purely symbolic order. It means that we all engage in a minimum of idealization, disavowing the brute fact of the Real in favor of another Symbolic world behind it. Zizek expresses this disavowal in terms of an “as if”. In order to coexist with our neighbors we act “as if” they do not smell bad or look ridiculous.

The big key to understanding all of this is that the contradiction is what makes the big Other, or the five orange words in neon, function. That is the meaning and efficiency is always derived out of contradiction and negation. The subject is split.

This is all very fancy, but I imagine that I haven’t resolved the issue of how this relates to the question of the State, democracy, and Communism. Each of these ideas come along with their opposite, with their contradiction. So political democracy is contradicted by economic coercion. One apparently sustains the other. However, I’m arguing that political democracy as opposed to economic coercion is not the contradiction at the heart of Capitalism. I would say that Capitalism has a contradiction that is more basic, and that is between production and consumption, or the factory and the market.

The last line above about imagining monsters is just my perhaps eccentric way of trying to describe what a realizable Communist alternative might be like, and eschew a utopian answer that stays within the realm of Capitalist contradiction.