Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Second letter to a friend
If you read this text of Zizek on Democracy Now, at the end you'll find something that seems to confirm the impression you tell me that "your generation" gets from Zizek, and that you object to: license to be politically unengaged. He would reverse the 11th thesis on Feuerbach and say it's time to interpret the world and not change it; the left is too engaged in changing. But if you check the context of this you can see that he is giving an impetus to dis-engagement, standing back from the usual leftist stance, rather than not becoming active in the first place. Zizek is addressing people who have already become enmeshed in the left but have not thought through their categories of understanding, not those who want an excuse not to even think about their choices, and instead cover their fear of risks by following a star. I take it his latest book In Defense of Lost Causes is also along these lines.
A first-hand illustration of what I think Zizek is getting at: in 1974 I created a one-man project, growing out of a protest letter to the first Gulf War that I circulated to everyone I knew, a couple hundred people, many of whom responded positively. My project following that was Letters, an invitation to a public space of writing in which to understand, criticize what we are doing politically. I asked people to respond to each other, like letters to the editor, only there would be no editor, only each other, and it would be a private network. I got several letters of people expressing their political feelings, but not at the level of awareness that goes beyond mutual support. The assumption was that our agreement on fighting government policy was the political foundation. I also wrote to the Progressive Magazine, suggesting it could be a forum of the sort I was looking for, and got a polite rejection from the editor. I should have continued the project but felt isolated, became discouraged and quit.
If I had known Lacanian categories then I would have concluded, the core of the Left is a Big Other, obscured by an ideology of radicalism (going to the root of things). This Big Other is in some way always a step ahead of any rooting out, of getting under itself, so It is actually preventing us from being radicals in any thoroughgoing, disturbing sense. We progress or fall back but in ways that are always defined for us. (Always my analogy to music: it is like the way improvisers have now become a role and are seen from outside themselves, such that they don't really have to face the ugly fact of not knowing what to play. In a way they consider that they have already improvised before they begin to play; they have achieved improvisation). Every attempt by someone to find out why we must honor and obey this Big Other is automatically feared and avoided as harmful, self-destructive, an outsider with malicious intent. If you question It you are actually (and here is the continuing Stalinist core of the left, which would say "objectively") on the Right. Now, the left that young people find themselves in the midst of has inherited this whole notion of correctness, of moralism, which means you are obliged to step on the toes of the bad guys, the fundamentalists, the racists, etc.--transgression against someone else's Big Other gets its kicks right here--but don't step on the toes of your own Father.
Since the fall of "really existing socialism" almost twenty years ago, the embarrassing link of the left to Stalinism has disappeared from view, and with it the attack from the right that the left was really dogmatic, which means theory-driven, ideological rather than pragmatic, that is, unamerican. This was a defeat only to that part of the left that felt it needed some link with a revolutionary past, and through that with Marxism. However, it strengthened that part of the left that was more interested in practical politics--think globally, work locally. This part traced the failures of the left to the turn of the 70's when some had confused the "genuine" left with Maoism, the Weathermen, Panthers, etc. There has always been a huge majority of the left that had at least a hierarchy of beliefs that could be safely asserted, such that they could not give the kind of support to eastern Europe resistance to Communism that the anti-communists could. As late as 1982, Susan Sontag was considered a traitor, at least an embarrassment, for her accusation that the left had protected Communism from valid criticism (her Town Hall speech).
After 1989-1991, the left can be activist, and play a purely constructive role, demonstrating and writing, and be perceived as united (the "overzealous" who embarrassed it were now political correctors on the campuses). Leftist organizers and activists can ignore a Marxism that had been linked to it simply by the existence of socialist countries claiming to base themselves on Marx. Philosophy, however, as understood in the West is generally seen as something other than a social order, it is the questioning of all forms of order, including that of its own practitioners. So Marxism as a philosophy, as a stumbling block of self-criticism, could be left behind, guilty by association with the failed socialist "experiment". It's not just that the left wants to think of itself as questioning its enemy and not itself. It has to do with the left imagining itself as a movement, which can only go in one direction. This is politics, the practical question of how to be effective, getting the job done, reflecting back like all politicians on what it looks like, how the press sees it. And criticism from within, as in Obama's camp, looks bad.
The left has then no way to criticize itself from within; all criticism is from the alien other side, the dark side of evil. Americans especially need to be as light and bright, clean and incorruptible as possible (which rules out "true" radicals actually holding political office, of course). The American Left-Liberal coming from Dewey was always embarrassed that it was joined at the hip to a dominant philosophy like Marxism, since it interpreted that in a Stalinist way, as the Book, a scripture that had to be taken literally. Even dialectical thinking, which requires us to see beyond an us/them antagonism, could not be wrenched away from top-down Stalinist/Maoist authoritarianism. The left does not want a unified correct theory to stand in judgment, yet it also ridicules the normal working of philosophy which yields conflicting philosophers, who are so cranky and individualist that they always differ from each other, and so are unable to come to the same Party. There were all these splinter groups, that couldn't decide on how to symbolize the failure of the 1917 Revolution, how to characterize the USSR--as a deformed workers state, or whatever other term would distinguish one splinter from another and prevent a unified front. Marxism made the Left look foolish, whereas the right (after Goldwater, at least) could come together on all its basic ideological terms in the interest of gaining political power.
So now, when Zizek says, lets learn what look critically at what beliefs we must be holding given the evidence of our actions, some will of course use this as a way to stand on the sidelines. Every time you jump into such a situation you might be found to defend something that later you will have to criticize. And thus the left re-creates itself and its defensive self-image. ¶ 1:38 PM
If you read this text of Zizek on Democracy Now, at the end you'll find something that seems to confirm the impression you tell me that "your generation" gets from Zizek, and that you object to: license to be politically unengaged. He would reverse the 11th thesis on Feuerbach and say it's time to interpret the world and not change it; the left is too engaged in changing. But if you check the context of this you can see that he is giving an impetus to dis-engagement, standing back from the usual leftist stance, rather than not becoming active in the first place. Zizek is addressing people who have already become enmeshed in the left but have not thought through their categories of understanding, not those who want an excuse not to even think about their choices, and instead cover their fear of risks by following a star. I take it his latest book In Defense of Lost Causes is also along these lines.
A first-hand illustration of what I think Zizek is getting at: in 1974 I created a one-man project, growing out of a protest letter to the first Gulf War that I circulated to everyone I knew, a couple hundred people, many of whom responded positively. My project following that was Letters, an invitation to a public space of writing in which to understand, criticize what we are doing politically. I asked people to respond to each other, like letters to the editor, only there would be no editor, only each other, and it would be a private network. I got several letters of people expressing their political feelings, but not at the level of awareness that goes beyond mutual support. The assumption was that our agreement on fighting government policy was the political foundation. I also wrote to the Progressive Magazine, suggesting it could be a forum of the sort I was looking for, and got a polite rejection from the editor. I should have continued the project but felt isolated, became discouraged and quit.
If I had known Lacanian categories then I would have concluded, the core of the Left is a Big Other, obscured by an ideology of radicalism (going to the root of things). This Big Other is in some way always a step ahead of any rooting out, of getting under itself, so It is actually preventing us from being radicals in any thoroughgoing, disturbing sense. We progress or fall back but in ways that are always defined for us. (Always my analogy to music: it is like the way improvisers have now become a role and are seen from outside themselves, such that they don't really have to face the ugly fact of not knowing what to play. In a way they consider that they have already improvised before they begin to play; they have achieved improvisation). Every attempt by someone to find out why we must honor and obey this Big Other is automatically feared and avoided as harmful, self-destructive, an outsider with malicious intent. If you question It you are actually (and here is the continuing Stalinist core of the left, which would say "objectively") on the Right. Now, the left that young people find themselves in the midst of has inherited this whole notion of correctness, of moralism, which means you are obliged to step on the toes of the bad guys, the fundamentalists, the racists, etc.--transgression against someone else's Big Other gets its kicks right here--but don't step on the toes of your own Father.
Since the fall of "really existing socialism" almost twenty years ago, the embarrassing link of the left to Stalinism has disappeared from view, and with it the attack from the right that the left was really dogmatic, which means theory-driven, ideological rather than pragmatic, that is, unamerican. This was a defeat only to that part of the left that felt it needed some link with a revolutionary past, and through that with Marxism. However, it strengthened that part of the left that was more interested in practical politics--think globally, work locally. This part traced the failures of the left to the turn of the 70's when some had confused the "genuine" left with Maoism, the Weathermen, Panthers, etc. There has always been a huge majority of the left that had at least a hierarchy of beliefs that could be safely asserted, such that they could not give the kind of support to eastern Europe resistance to Communism that the anti-communists could. As late as 1982, Susan Sontag was considered a traitor, at least an embarrassment, for her accusation that the left had protected Communism from valid criticism (her Town Hall speech).
After 1989-1991, the left can be activist, and play a purely constructive role, demonstrating and writing, and be perceived as united (the "overzealous" who embarrassed it were now political correctors on the campuses). Leftist organizers and activists can ignore a Marxism that had been linked to it simply by the existence of socialist countries claiming to base themselves on Marx. Philosophy, however, as understood in the West is generally seen as something other than a social order, it is the questioning of all forms of order, including that of its own practitioners. So Marxism as a philosophy, as a stumbling block of self-criticism, could be left behind, guilty by association with the failed socialist "experiment". It's not just that the left wants to think of itself as questioning its enemy and not itself. It has to do with the left imagining itself as a movement, which can only go in one direction. This is politics, the practical question of how to be effective, getting the job done, reflecting back like all politicians on what it looks like, how the press sees it. And criticism from within, as in Obama's camp, looks bad.
The left has then no way to criticize itself from within; all criticism is from the alien other side, the dark side of evil. Americans especially need to be as light and bright, clean and incorruptible as possible (which rules out "true" radicals actually holding political office, of course). The American Left-Liberal coming from Dewey was always embarrassed that it was joined at the hip to a dominant philosophy like Marxism, since it interpreted that in a Stalinist way, as the Book, a scripture that had to be taken literally. Even dialectical thinking, which requires us to see beyond an us/them antagonism, could not be wrenched away from top-down Stalinist/Maoist authoritarianism. The left does not want a unified correct theory to stand in judgment, yet it also ridicules the normal working of philosophy which yields conflicting philosophers, who are so cranky and individualist that they always differ from each other, and so are unable to come to the same Party. There were all these splinter groups, that couldn't decide on how to symbolize the failure of the 1917 Revolution, how to characterize the USSR--as a deformed workers state, or whatever other term would distinguish one splinter from another and prevent a unified front. Marxism made the Left look foolish, whereas the right (after Goldwater, at least) could come together on all its basic ideological terms in the interest of gaining political power.
So now, when Zizek says, lets learn what look critically at what beliefs we must be holding given the evidence of our actions, some will of course use this as a way to stand on the sidelines. Every time you jump into such a situation you might be found to defend something that later you will have to criticize. And thus the left re-creates itself and its defensive self-image. ¶ 1:38 PM
