Zizek the Reformist? (a comment I wrote for Zizek Studies facebook page)
Zizek is a reformist, but then again so is everybody else on the visible left. None of the figures on the visible left are going to get this job done, and it’s not because they don’t want to get it done, or because they’re too busy screwing supermodels and drinking champagne to do it, but because they can’t do it. Now, the question arises, if these geniuses can’t do it then can it be done at all? Is it just an impossibility? From where we’re standing it looks impossible, and yet there are moments of revolt springing up all around.
As to Zizek’s lucrative book contracts I wonder if it’s accurate to suggest that the dollar amount he earns from writing pushes him into a Capitalist position. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to see Zizek the author as petite-bourgeois? That is, he exploits his own labor as a kind of entrepreneur, but doesn’t reap rewards from the labor of others? Now, the ideology of the petite-bourgeois is often liberal. That is, the petite-bourgeois position views the uprisings in Egypt and the London riots from a charitable perspective. The oppressed Egyptians deserve support to overthrow their dictator, or the London rioters aren’t to blame because they are the excluded; they are pushed to act out.
However, Zizek doesn’t take the petite-bourgeois stance on these issues. Instead he says, “The Egyptians should be supported because they really are struggling for equality and democracy and they’re giving lie to the myth of the fundamentalist character of the Arab world.” He says, “The London rioters should neither be condemned nor pardoned, but criticized. The rioters are acting out. They are staging a riots instead of revolts. Whereas, in Egypt and Spain, they are staging revolts instead of revolutions.” (These are paraphrases and not exact quotes.)
So what should we ask of this champagne swilling radical, this petite-bourgeois author? One thing we can skip asking is that his person be uncorrupted, or that he stop participating with the current economy. That’s just identity politics really, which is for sure a kind of politics that is very comfortable staying within Capitalism.
The only thing to expect from Zizek is that he challenges us to think and create new modes of Praxis. Not that we should stay at Zizek’s level of political intervention, but rather that we should brutally test his ideas and criticize him so that we can discover to what degree the impossible is possible.
Learning Not to Blink
In today’s Oregonian the columnist David Sarasohn pointed out that it appeared that the Republicans were able not to blink in the staring contest that was the debt ceiling crisis. He quoted Oregon’s Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley:
“It’s almost unbelievable that so many of my colleagues were willing to say let’s default.”
There is a difference between Democrats and Republicans and this is it: the Republicans don’t blink. This difference is largely tactical rather than ideological, although there is a sliver of ideological difference involved as well. What it comes down to is that, for the Republicans, there is a rock solid belief in the profit system and the market as a divine force that justifies their behavior and that sanctions acts of destruction. On the other hand, the Democrats only believe that the market and the profit system are the apex of human achievement. The Great Free Market is fallible and should occasionally be corrected. There is your difference. The Tea Party Republicans are willing to see the market do its thing even through a period of terrible creative destruction whereas the more mature Democrats and mainstream Republicans envision slogging on with endless paper in order to protect the free market system from its worst excesses. The disagreement here isn’t about whether the market is worth protecting, its not even whether or not sacrificing the well being of the majority can be justified in the name of the free market, but rather the difference about what the system itself can withstand.
Now, a Marxist like Andrew Kliman would side with the Republicans in so much as he would advocate that massive creative destruction, something like what happened in World War 2, is necessary if Capitalism is to correct itself. The system now is suffering from a crisis of profitability, not a crisis of finance, and not a fiscal crisis.
From the exact opposite position from the Democrats and the Republicans, that is from an anti-capitalist position, the question remains whether a crash and the attendant creative destruction is more likely to threaten Capitalism or if continuing to paper over the bad debt is more harmful. Kliman sometimes seems to think that a crash would be preferable, that the political consequences of such a thing would be bad for Capital, and at other times he seems to think that since the system would in fact heal itself in this way and, even more significantly, the working class would be devastated by this sort of correction, that one must hope that we continue to paper over the problem.
It seems to me that in order to have a sound approach to the current crisis we need something more than a solid critique of Capitalism and a grasp of the mechanism behind the falling rate of profit. We need a positive vision of some other basis for production. If not the production of commodities for exchange, what about production as a spectacle done not to produce objects for exchange but for the enjoyment of a society of spectators who are also performers? The stuff we produce, whether iPads or cereal boxes, would become nothing more than tools for the conscious production of affects. This is an economy based on American Idol only collective entities rather than individuals would be more typical as contestants.
Instead of competing for a buck we might collectively compete for the eyes of God. And perhaps, if this was a real belief beginning to materialize through revolt, we might learn not to blink. After all, that is what it takes to win.
