A Question of Method in an Attack On Žižek
Posted by Mike E on July 30, 2010
Zizek in bed.
The following essay appeared on the blog The Marxist Leninist.
It is a remarkable negative example — of how not to approach the world around us. For that reason it may prove valuable.
What about Slavoj Žižek?
“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists.”
– V. I. Lenin, The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx
“Pre-Marxian socialism has been defeated. It is continuing the struggle, no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism.”
– V. I. Lenin, Marxism and Revisionism
Someone asked me today what I think of Slavoj Žižek, the well known celebrity of “leftist” philosophy. I’ve always had a hard time reading his rambling, jargon-filled books. I have to admit, having tried to read a couple of his books back when I was a philosophy student, I found them mostly incomprehensible. Most recently I read his book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. I was disappointed that he basically follows the “islamo-fascism” line on Arab resistance movements like Hezbollah, the capitalist restoration line on People’s China, and basically gets his facts wrong on any number of other points. He believes the socialist project in the twentieth century was mainly a giant failure. I see no real value in his writings.
That said, I’d like to share an article here on Žižek, from the blog Never Forget Class Struggle for consideration:
Slavoj Žižek: A Case Study in Opportunism
I don’t pretend to understand Dr. Žižek’s “Lacanian,” “post-Maoist” philosophy or critiques of popular culture or whatever it is that he does. All I know is that he pretends he’s some kind of adherent to some form of Marxism Leninism and “Maoism” and people seem to have an impression of him as a genuinely progressive academic.
When it counted, however, Žižek was an unabashed leader of counterrevolution in his homeland of Slovenia. Žižek in fact fought to destroy the system he claims he now supports, or at the very least that people he now admires (Lenin, Mao) fought so hard to build. Žižek during the era of socialism was one of the prominent members of the “dissident” circles advocating for its destruction. In the late 1980s he joined the secessionist anti-socialist movement developing in Slovenia, and become an active member of the Liberal Democratic Party (who came to power once Slovenia seceded from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). He was not just a passive participant in this movement, since he was the candidate for the position of President of Slovenia for the LDP in 1990.
People like to taunt socialists about the supposed “misnomers” characterizing a lot of the formal names of the regimes of socialist countries (for instance, there is always a chortle about the name ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’). However, the name “Liberal Democratic Party” of Slovenia is a joke. For one, these cold blooded killers murdered members of the multi-ethnic JNA (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija – Yugoslav National Army) in cold blood, simply for being stationed in their own country. There is video footage of Slovenian nationalists gunning down JNA soldiers waving white flags. The “liberal democrats” then proceded to steal the bank accounts of non-Slovenes who had bank deposits in the banks of Ljubljana. Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia), was the banking center of Yugoslavia. The Ljubljana banks avoided paying back money to their non-Slovene depositers by simply changing the name of the bank, and saying the new bank should not be held responsible for the previous accounts. The LDP quickly went to work dismantling the socially owned economy in their new ‘republic’, undoing what had been built for generations. This included workers’ self-management, directing authority back into the hands of the capitalists.
This is the movement with which Dr. Žižek became an integral part, and even led. Of course, Žižek had also been a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia at times. He seems to have done whatever it took to ensure that he himself would be of influence and power. He claims he left the Party because of the trial of four people by the JNA in the late 1980s. The Slovene Communists had nothing to do with that trial and in fact implemented the “punishment” in the mildest manner possible. The fact is Žižek was writing anti-Communist diatribes for decades.
Since socialism has been dismantled in many parts of the world, parroting the line of his new masters is no longer new or novel. He must do something different in order to get attention. So he tries to meld his Lacanian gibberish with some kind of revolutionary politics. The question is: where was Slavoj Žižek when it counted? He was on the side of counterrevolution. An old wine in a new bottle is a still an old wine.
Tanz Mit Leanback said
-Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek: interview.” The Guardian. 27 June 2010
andy said
“THE Marxist-Leninist”. Like in ‘Highlander’ – “In the end there can be only one”?
balzac said
I think Zizek DOES have a deeply problematic take on Islam.
The phrase ‘Islamo-fascist’, which he will use freely and, seemingly, without a trace of irony (which is a wonder for a person with such a deft sense of irony most of the time), is a catch-phrase for the far right and indicative of an attitude which pays no attention to the extraordinarily diverse body of Islamic thought (from the sort in line with liberation theology to the clerical-authoritarian) which emerged along with the anti-colonial movements of last century. (For those interested in a more nuanced take on Islam, I would suggest Hamid Dabashi, Edward Said, and Susan Buck-Morss.) He dislikes the hypocrisy of many Islamic leaders who inveigh against the oppression of Palestinians but brutally dispossess and mistreat their own people, which is of course the correct position, but so much so that he has also made some rather brutal and insensitive comments about Palestinians themselves. Which, to put it bluntly, is pretty fucking childish.
Overall, though, Zizek is all right and I agree with his other political positions (he called as it was with “Avatar” when a lot of people were making excuses for its Pocahontas narrative), though I think in terms of theory as well as cultural criticism he is a bit weak, but in this case I am more aligned to the Deleuze-Foucault axis than the Lacan one. (Someone like Badiou would be in the middle here.)
This is more of a personal thing, though, along the lines of preferring Kant to Hegel or Spinoza to Nietszche.
Tanz Mit Leanback said
Citation?
balzac said
I spent a night reading his articles on the London Review of Books site a few months ago, which is here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/slavoj-zizek
The specific article with his comment of Palestinian children is here, though I can’t remember the one where he uses the phrase islamo-fascism (though I take it from the essay Mike E posted that he has probably used the phrase more than once):
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2008/11/14/slavoj-zizek/use-your-illusions
Quote: “Time picked the wrong victim: it should have stuck to Muslim women or Tibetan monks. The death of a Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is worth thousands more column inches than the death of a nameless Congolese.”
This is obviously not anti-Palestinian, at least directly, but seems to smugly detach itself from the very real suffering of Palestinians living under apartheid policy. It is also not true; there are border shootings, deaths, indefinite detainments, etc., happening on a daily basis in Palestine-Israel that remain unwritten outside of IDF “combat” reports, human rights documentation or the occasional Haaretz article (which always justifies them). Zizek definitely hits on a very real – and brutal – truth when he points to the fact that black African bodies (and body counts) are ignored/rendered invisible to the rest of the world, but the fact that he holds up Palestinians as a counter-example is a bit daft (or, I think in Zizek’s case, arrogant), given the similarities between the South African and Palestinian experiences.
balzac said
I also should append/correct what I said earlier about his targeting of “Islamic leaders” – at least in this case, Zizek seems to mostly be targeting those on the left with Palestinian sympathies, though that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the original statement itself. (I think in this case it was just my reading a bunch of his articles and connecting the ‘islamo-fascist’ statement with the Palestinian statement, which could be interpreted as either connected or unconnected, though I would still go with connected.)
Hannie Schaft said
There are two separate issues here: The Slovenian independence movement was in fact a nasty group of narrow nationalist anti-communists. Zizek was knee-deep in that movement. He bears a personal responsibility for his part in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and for the openly capitalist gangsters he helped come to power.
But that doesn’t really answer the arguments Zizek makes. He admits in his more recent works that his movement was wrong to dismantle “Stalinist” rule in the former Yugoslavia. They thought markets would free them, and as it turns out the opposite was true. He says that over and over again. So a purely biographical critique about Zizek’s past is sort of moot.
I have issues with his use of Lacan as a sort of double speak, I think his views on Palestine are a little hinky, but I also applaud his attacks on Post-Modernism, his defense of radical actions (using the piles of vaccinated arms from “Apocalypse Now” as a POSITIVE example?!?), his staunch refusal to conflate Hitler and Stalin, and his call for a revival of the communist project.
He wants a return to Lenin, but more to Lenin’s “outside of the box” thinking than actual Leninist policies. I see commonality between this and Mike’s “Radical Ruptures” and “breaks from Comintern thinking.” But I also see the same potential risks of revisionism.
balzac said
One also has to consider his attacks on postmodernism in view of what you called his Lacanian doublespeak. Lacanian thought is one of the significant centers of postmodern thought and Zizek’s use of Lacan is no exception in this case. I also don’t like the outright dismissal of postmodernism by anyone, let alone someone who is as mired in it as Zizek is (despite what he may claim), as history has proven that ‘totality’ and ‘universality’ (the fundamental discourses of modernism) to be deeply problematic and, at the very least, worthy of study and critical interrogation. This is particularly true for those who identified the ‘norm’ as a bourgeois project for enforcing the disciplines of capitalism, i.e. Canguilhem (who taught Badiou), Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Judith Butler (who collaborates with Zizek), maybe even going as far back as Gramsci), but are often dismissed by many Marxists for their rejections of dialectical thought.
Ben Allen said
Mike, you should post your comments from the M-L site as well, they are dead on.
May9 said
Oh my, I get the honor of writing the “worst essay in ages”. That’s two blog posts dedicated to me in the span of a week or so. Wow.
Hannie Schaft hits the nail on the head here:
Absolutely, and this is the problem which – as much the defenders of Dr. Zizek would like – won’t go away. And of course, it won’t be addressed. At most, Dr. Ely will claim that Yugoslavia had always been capitalist so the fact that Zizek helped usher in the nationalist gangster capitalists and a bloody civil war doesn’t matter. It matters deeply. You can’t do something like this and then say “Oops, sorry” all the while continuing your affiliation with the same party you claim you ‘mistakenly’ supported, and then pretend you’re some kind of Marxist working towards progressive change.
It’s nonsense.
The fact that now Dr. Zizek has written approvingly of Lenin and Mao is also irrelevant.
Mussolini wrote approvingly of socialism before he became a fascist dictator. Yeltsin wrote approvingly of socialism before he started firing tanks on parliament buildings and drunkenly plotting counterrevolutionary coups. Are we to separate out actions from words? I don’t think so. Zizek’s work in destroying socialism and helping imperialism overwhelms any lefty academic writing he now does in terms of his ‘contributions’ to society.
Mike E said
There is another method involved: assigning a stupid position to someone, and then calling them stupid.
May 9 writes (among other things):
Of course, this isn’t my view at all (despite May 9′s reductionist claim about what I “will claim.”)
The fact that various governments are capitalist hardly makes them all the same.
In fact, the Slovenian movement wasn’t just “nationalist” it was also pro-German. At that moment, the U.S. was hoping to keep Yugoslavia together, and in a major moment, Bush 1′s Secretary of State Baker gave Serbia the green light to suppress Slovenia’s independence attempts. That is what unleashed the horrific civil war in the Balkans (and at that moment, the U.S. imperialists had approved the attempts to keep Yugoslavia unified, and the Germans were (temporarily) on the other side.
It was not long before the U.S. recognized that Yugoslavia had shattered, and they shifted their stand (to join with Germany in an anti-Serbian campaign that ended with the U.S./Nato invasion).
This civil war was horrific, and people who had lived as neighbors and intermarried suddenly found themselves caught up in a horrific war of ethnic cleansing dominated by the most vicious and murderous rightwing nationalist deathsquads.
Another example of reductionism:
Zizek participated in Slovenian politics in a time when a civil war was triggered. That hardly means that he intended to unleash a horrible civil war, or that the outcome of the a complex chain of events is somehow “the fault” of people who were there when the chain initiated. Who was responsible for the civil war? Was it simply Slovenian natinalists? Or were the imperialists (German and U.S.) and the Serbian chauvinists also players?
Does it matter what Zizek now thinks about those events? May 9 (typically) claims that what Zizek thinks now is essentiall irrelevant.
Actually: Zizek’s actual statement needs to be examined. And his actual activity (and impact) now need to be examined.
Instead with this reductionist method, everything is flattened. Intent and effect are conflated. Past and present are compressed to a singularity. Politics and theory are indistinguishable.
And every story is told in a distorted way to serve a prepackaged point. It is utilitarian — where facts are twisted or omitted in ways that serve a narrative. It is “cutting the toes to fit the shoes.”
Favored forces are onesidedly prettified and whitewashed. Demonized forces are painted as totally bad, and any counter-evidence is simply called “irrelevant.”
This kind of flattening makes it impossible to actually understand the world (a dynamic, changing, complex world).
An odd assertion.
Perhaps that is why it was not seriously evaluated in this supposed evaluation of Zizek. In fact, thousands of students have re-encountered communist thinkers because of the efforts of people like Zizek — who have reinjected communist theory (in its own right) back into academic discussion (where it has been excluded for a long time).
Perhaps that too is irrelevant.
But that is in many ways the heart of this discussion: what is relevant for evaluation someone and his theory.
There is a view that people are easily reducible to one quick verdict. They are this or that. They are good or bad. It is metaphysics — it denies the contradictoriness of things. And it is idealist — it denies the need to do the actual work of knowing reality (including understanding the complex of messages and views what Zizek in fact is arguing for).
If everyone is (like a egg) either good or bad — then you don’t need to examine them in their totality. You can simply take one small piece, in isolation, make a verdict on that piece — and then you have the answer about the whole. If Zizek was caught up in some reactionary politics in 1980s, then he must be a reactionary. What else do we need to know? His theory must be worthless. His insights mere deception. His current impact must be bad. His recent statement must be irrelevant — even if they introduce a new generation of students to Lenin and Mao.
In this cardboard world, everything is simple. Everything is quickly knowable. If someone doesn’t subscribe to our views, they just aren’t shit. Simple.
May9 said
All of this apologia would be nice if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that Zizek never really gave up consulting the Slovene nationalists of the LDP all through the 90s, and pinned all of the blame for the wars in Yugoslavia on the “Serbian monsters” as he called them.
So what’s the excuse when he’s writing this crap in 1999, when Serbian hospitals and maternity wards are being blown up and the media is spouting lie after lie in order to justify NATO aggression?
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-nato.htm
“gave Serbia the green light to suppress Slovenia’s independence attempts. That is what unleashed the horrific civil war in the Balkans”
Utter nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense. The Slovenes attacked JNA soldiers for merely being in Yugoslav territory. There was no “suppression”, which is why the conflict in Slovenia lasted 10 days, most of which was Slovenes attacking people with white flags.
Mike E said
I covered the Balkan war for the Maoist press at the time — and followed these events closely.
U.S. imperialism backed (and unleashed) SErbia in its attack on Slovenia. Baker flew to Belgrade to meet with the Serbian government as the Slovenian indpenendence crisis erupted. Yugoslav armed forces entered Slovenia.
You can read the official Serbian justifications (about Slovenia attacking first etc.) — but this is another example of disregarding facts you consider inconvenient.
In fact, interimperialist struggle pulled Yugoslavia apart. Germany backed Slovenia. the Soviet Union backed Serbia. And the U.S. first supported Yugoslav unity (i.e. the now Serb-dominated Yugoslav central government) and then switched (as the war unfolded) to an increasingly anti-Serbian position.
zerohour said
“I don’t pretend to understand Dr. Žižek’s “Lacanian” “post-Maoist” philosophy or critiques of popular culture or whatever it is that he does. All I know is that he pretends he’s some kind of adherent to some form of Marxism Leninism and “Maoism” and people seem to have an impression of him as a genuinely progressive academic.”
I find it troubling that people who call themselves Marxist are proud to be ignorant and dogmatic.
Although he adheres to Leninism, he has not ever claimed to be a Maoist in any form that I’m aware of. In fact, Badiou’s latest book, The Communist Hypothesis, contains a letter he wrote to Zizek criticizing his take on Mao.
No investigation…
Nelson H. said
Mike, I’m afraid that I too might be a counter-revolutionary in our midst. As a child I too sympathized with reactionaries, and part of my childhood was also in the late-1980s. I produced important theoretical pieces meant to help destroy socialism, like a journal entry in the 2nd grade about how I didn’t think it was nice to kill people standing on the street with tanks. Plus, when I was 16 I wore a yellow ribbon on my backpack for the entire time that the 3 US troops were captured during the US/NATO invasion of Kosovo, so I was also responsible for supporting nationalist gangster capitalists in the Balkans!
Thanks to the eternal contributions of the Marxist-Leninist blog I now know this means that I am also taste like a rotten egg!
This is becoming a major existential crisis for me, but I am hoping that May9 can help me understand what to do.
I was raised Catholic so I have some memory of prayers, but just the Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s, I can say these many times if that will help me. Perhaps there is some other ritualistic purification processes like self-flagellation or hunger induced periods of semi-insanity I can undertake.
If not I guess that I can probably find a Tea Party rally in the area to attend, after all the die is cast…
May9 said
“Yugoslav armed forces entered Slovenia.”
What do you mean “entered” Slovenia? They were already in Slovenia as Slovenia was Yugoslav territory. This is like saying Federal Troops “entered” South Carolina by having a fort at Sumter. What they did was put the JNA troops on combat readiness. The Slovene nationalists ambushed the JNA, that’s a fact.
It’s on (Austrian) film. The idea that the US gave the “green light” to Yugoslavia to “suppress” (a day 10 war?) the poor Slovene nationalists is also ridiculous. This all began as early as 1989, when Slovenia passed a constitution calling themselves a sovereign and independent state. The Slovenes held their referendum of independence in 1990, the 10 day war happened half a year later. Slovene and Croat separatist parties had won multiparty elections held in the spring of 1990. The Croat party in particular (HDZ) called for the removal of Serbs from top political positions in Croatia and the annexation of Bosnian territory. This was before the constitutional crisis later in which a new constitution was proposed that would centralize Yugoslav, which was done in response to the election of separatists. The Slovenes and Croats were arming themselves in early 1991, and made a joint pact saying they would declare independence immediately if the JNA tried to intervene to disarm them. The Slovene and Croat paramilitaries refused to comply with any order to disarm.
In November of 1990, the US Congress passed Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513. Section 599a of this Act cut off all aid, credit, and loans to Yugoslavia and demanded immediate, separate elections in each of the country’s six republics. The U.S. State Department would alone determine the validity of each election and resume aid to individual regions if the victors were deemed “democratic.” As a result of that law, in April of 1991 all aid to Yugoslavia was frozen due to supposed “human rights violations”. How is that expressing support for Yugoslavia? In June of 1991, the US said that Belgrade must find a way to “vent the national aspirations within Yugoslavia in a peaceful way”.
In September of 91, Baker made this long speech heaping the blame for the conflict mostly on the Yugoslav government:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1584/is_n39_v2/ai_11498149/
Yes, it is true that in early 1991 the US, like most of Europe save Germany and Austria, wanted Yugoslavia to stay in tact. But this wasn’t a “green light” to anything, they insisted that any change must be peaceful and made special demands on the Yugoslav government. The policy changed as soon as Germany recognized Croatia and Slovenia in 1991, which gave the “green light” to everyone else to follow suit.
It’s preposterous to claim that the Yugoslav government started the crisis yet Slovenia declared independence and had been arming themselves for months, if not years. The nationalists in Bosnia and Croatia took their cues from the actions of the Slovenes. Croatia declared independence right when Slovenia did, and war erupted because of massive Serb population that was about to be cleansed by the neo-Ustasha Croat government.
Anyway, one more note on Zizek.
Zizek considers the Secretary-General of the LDS (Golobic) from 1992-2001 and current leader of the liberal Zares Party to be the “Slovenian Stalin” (hilarious) and a close personal friend. So much for all of this being in the past.
May9 said
More on the “Yugoslav suppression of the Slovene nationalists”
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/anx/iii.htm#V.A
“In June 1991, the JNA appeared ready to crush the Slovenian independence movement. On 2 6 and 2 7 June, forces of the 5th MD seized border crossings. However, the JNA’s initial action was also subject to the approval of the political leadership in Belgrade, and that approval was withheld.
Notwithstanding the JNA’s overwhelming military superiority, it acted with restraint and reserve, ultimately allowing itself, by 3 July 1991, to be repelled by Slovenian forces. The JNA launched a mechanized attack in much the same way federal planners had envisioned a Soviet invasion would take place, and the mounted formations were road-bound, affecting link- up operations with previously inserted paratroops or forward detachments. Meanwhile the Air Force flew sorties in support of the invasion. But, while there was much show of force, there was in effect little action. There was, for example, no use of massed artillery.
A total of 45 YPA combatants were killed and 152 wounded in just over one week of fighting. Additionally, some 7,900 soldiers (including 1,000 officers), of a total deployment of 25,000, apparently defected or were captured by the Slovenian TDF. The JNA lost 31 tanks, 230 combat vehicles, and four helicopters.
Tactically, the Slovenian TDF forces effectively cut the JNA forces from their lines of support in much the same manner as had their partisan forbears had done to Axis forces. In the absence of concentrated artillery and air interdiction, the TDF mounted a successful anti-armoured defence. Slovenian TDF units cut off the columns of vehicles, or erected barriers on the roads to stop the advance, and then destroyed the stalled vehicles with light anti-tank weapons. Slovenian forces also captured and retained 124 tanks, plus heavy weapons and ammunition, from the JNA garrisons in Slovenia. The poor showing of the JNA, which was so much stronger in every respect, was due to the fact that it was not allowed by Belgrade to fight an all-out war. Thus, its troops became demoralized and uncertain as to the political goals of the leadership in Belgrade, which was restraining them.”
Tell No Lies said
May 9,
You write:
The actual passage in which Zizek uses the phrase "Serbian monsters" reads:
Zizek, who although he quite clearly has no sympathies for Milosevic, is attributing the manichean view that the Serbs are “monsters” to the Western pacifists he is criticizing for their ideology of victimization. Your characterization of Zizek is a misreading of the article that you linked to.
Also, your detailed narrative of the events leading to the dissolution of Yugoslavia conveniently excludes the rise to power of Serbian nationalist.
The point here is not to absolve Zizek. It is rather to insist on certain standards in making an argument against him. As I said in the other thread, I would eagerly read a serious critique of Zizek’s current views that began with a serious investigation of his political history and demonstrated specific linkages between the two.
P.S. Your essay is not “the worst in ages.” Don’t let Mike’s hyperbole flatter you. Its bad, and a useful exemplar of a particular method, but there are many worse.
Mike E said
TNL writes:
Heh.
( ) said
To Mike and some others on this thread. I find it hypocritical that you speak of self-criticism, humility and civility, but then make ad hominem attacks and snicker at comrades with whom you are debating instead of simply addressing their arguments.
Hannie Schaft said
I think May 9 and Mike are answering different questions, so their arguments are like ships passing in the night. On one hand May 9 makes a convincing case (to me at least) that Zizek did some politically horrid things in the former Yugoslavia. These horrible political stands may persist. But how does that inform a critique of a specific Zizekian argument? Maybe if there is a Leninist hell Zizek will burn there for his actions in the 80s. Maybe he is a bad person. I guess I’d raise my glass and say, “Fuck that guy.”
But Mike is talking more about his arguments. And he makes some arguments even May 9th would agree with. Like his stuff attacking the concept of Totalitarianism, re-injecting Lenin into academic debates, skewering Po-Mo orthodoxy as detestable liberalism, and many other similar claims. Someone called him a Maoist–I’ve always read his stuff as being a little too critical of the GPCR. But again, I’m not trying to get him into Maoist heaven. For such a douchebag he can be fun to read, and he’s the only mainstream thinker out there who can get away with defending Lenin and (sort of) defending Stalin. That’s big in this creepy world of Conquest and Mace. I also like the way he sums up his time as an anti-communist and admits he was wrong, that Capitalism is worse.
When I said “Lacanian Doublespeak” I didn’t mean to jump on the “Don’t read difficult material” bandwagon. What’s harder to read than Marx? I meant that Lacan’s method as used by Zizek often literally sounds like doublespeak. Y’know, “Mike calls May 9th the worst writer, which means that the possible space for good writing is established by May 9th so in fact Mike is defining not-May 9th as the quintessence, which opens up a transcendent role for Mike being the truly best writer.” I’m not doing it well, but Zizek uses Lacan to make NOT A into A a lot. Literally doublespeak. I still like reading him….
And aren’t Zizek’s calls to “revive” Lenin without “repeating” Lenin super close to what Mike is doing with Kasama? It was the first thing I thought of……
Nelson H. said
Hannie, I think you’re half right: they are talking about two different sets of questions. And I agree somewhat with your characterization of what May9 doesn’t like about Zizek.
But I don’t see Mike’s line of argument in anything like the way you seem to read it. All that he says in this post is “The following essay appeared on the blog The Marxist Leninist. It is a remarkable negative example — of how not to approach the world around us. For that reason it may prove valuable,” while giving a title he’s already winked at being hyperbole (see 19 above). In his “Reply to Worst Essay in Ages” he keeps the critique largely to methodological questions of how to think and write, introducing Zizek’s past political activism only insofar as it is relevant to a certain errors May9 made in his original piece.
In comments Mike does at points engage with Zizek’s work when responding on these threads, but I would actually claim that his doing so is feeding the troll beast he’s wishing to expose, in turn confusing matters more not less. In the two dimensions tankies like to think they live in, there is little room to discussmethod and aims, goals and process. To them these are easily collapsible in a mechanical way, outcomes be damned.
This, at least to me, was why Mike’s “Reply” was so valuable. In it he took care to reduce the unimportant political critique of Zizek being made by May9 (or as Mao might have called it “disgraceful” “nonsense”) in order to cut through the smokescreen and expose the actual political error being made: namely shitty method being used for a never ending hunt for opportunism.
In a real sense, the problem ain’t with the political arguments May9 was making (although many of them are incorrect as others have pointed out), at issue are the “firm and definite lines of demarcation” May9 and crew draw over and over again concerning any given issue without the slightest sense of wtf they are going. I certainly see this contradiction expressed rather clearly in the previous “Marxism is Not a Layer Cake” conversation. They seem truly disinterested from studying past practice and identifying the root source of past errors, and throughly confused on where we as a movement ought to be heading. Instead “left” sectarianism predominates (coupled in a rather complicated way with rightist influence with regards to “actually existing socialism,”* revisionism and 20th century practice, but again “left” and right errors can ofter share similar origins). In the world of two dimensions the path behind us gets lost and the path ahead of us leads into a nice comfy corner of irrelevance. No wait, the corner isn’t comfy at all, it’s like the spiked room in that really racist Indian Jones movie I loved as a kid.
I guess what seems most odd about May9, the ML blog, and crew is that these folks at least nominally claim political, intellectual, and organizational linage from forces who have been at the forefront of exposing this destructive cancer in our midst rather clearly since 1977**.
Here again, I don’t think that Kasama is immune from the threat of this metastasis. But I will give props where due, and as a project they seem pretty willing to “dump the… baggage,”+ break with past errors and affiliations, and work to figure out what is worth saving and what previously ignored is worth adding, all in a pretty genuine way that tries to leave as many bridges intact as possible. Again, at least as far as I can tell.
* As opposed to actually existing socialism.
** This link is to an incomplete version of the book, which sadly leaves out some of the most important sections, namely Chapters 5 and 6.
+ ;-)
May9 said
Once again, people can’t pretend that all of this just took place in the ’80s and that now we have to address Zizek’s supposedly progressive arguments. He is a supporter of a liberal party and remains a mentor and close personal friend of the leader of the neoliberal gangsters who savaged the Slovenian social economy. Why are we supposed to ignore not only what he did in the 80s, but what he is doing *now* against socialism simply he says nice things about Lenin? For whatever reason the people in Kasama and elsewhere have more respect for people who work against socialism but theorize in favor of it and yet heap abuse on the people who spent their life’s work fighting FOR socialism. And I don’t know how Zizek can criticize Post-Modernism, as someone else pointed out, when he injects Lacanian thought into everything and everything he writes smacks of post-modern obscurantism. He is a walking contradiction.
As for this
“Zizek, who although he quite clearly has no sympathies for Milosevic, is attributing the manichean view that the Serbs are “monsters” to the Western pacifists he is criticizing for their ideology of victimization. Your characterization of Zizek is a misreading of the article that you linked to.”
It is you who is misreading the article. Zizek is saying that pacifists should stop complaining about arming the Albanian extremists and supporting their terrorism. So long as they remain passive in the wake of “Serbian aggression” they will always be the victim. He’s calling for an independent KLA gangster led state. It’s not enough to prevent their supposed ‘abuse’ at the hands of the monsters, they need to arm themselves in “self-defense”.
And anyone who has read any speech by Milosevic whatsoever knows that he never was a nationalist. The nationalists (Seselj & co) hated him and blame him for betraying the Serbs of Bosnia and not doing enough to defend them. It was the “Serb nationalist” Milosevic who forced Karadzic out of power in Bosnia and forced the Serbs to sign the Dayton Accords. A Dayton Accords, by the way, that the Bosnian Islamists now want to scrap, in favor of a centralized Islamist state with no Serbian autonomy.
Everyone is entitled to self-determination in the Balkans, except, apparently, those living in Srpska.
May9 said
” I also like the way he sums up his time as an anti-communist and admits he was wrong, that Capitalism is worse.”
If he claims he was wrong why is he still mentoring these people and supporting these parties?
Such a phony ‘apology’ by anyone else would be laughed at.
It’s on par with David Duke claiming his Klan days were ‘in the past’ and is no longer a racist, then going to a Holocaust denial conference. Nobody believes he’s renounced his racist past.
Mike C. said
A useful reference for this discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
Although I suppose since most these were systematized by “bourgeois” philosophers they are ultimately invalid . . .
Tell No Lies said
() is right. The title of this is contrary to the spirit of this site. And so was my snarky comment.
Mike E said
Ok. Fair enough. i agree. The criticisms of TNL and () of hyperbole and tone are valid. I’ll change the post titles.
Tony K said
As I recall Zizek said in an interview that he has cut all ties with the Slovenian arts group NSK because they have become too close with the nationalists; apparently the NSK was upset that they weren’t properly included in the Slovenian nation-building narrative (and ironically he was attacked by some in the academic left for cutting ties with the NSK and Laibach who organized an event with Slovenian nationalists just a few years ago).
In another interview he said that the Slovenian Lacanian circle decided to support the LDS as a strategic move to keep the nationalists from obtaining hegemonic power. He has also said somewhere that many people in power during the LDS reign have now become his enemies precisely as May9 pointed out that they have horrible politics.
As for his supposed support of the NATO bombing, Zizek pointed out that both choices (supporting NATO and supporting Milosevic) are part of the same logic, ie. US/NATO engages in military adventures to establish the post-Soviet New World Order, which then generates such monstrosities like Milosevic and the Taliban that the US/NATO then has to fight. That’s hardly a ringing support for US military actions.
I think it’s worth repeating the quote that Tanz referred to: “It is very ironic how professors who attacked me for not being a Marxist have now turned nationalist and attack me for being a Marxist. But, really, I don’t care.”
Harriet said
He supported the bombing and used overtly racist and white supremacist arguments to do so as well as appealing to macho American nationalism:
A prize to anyone who can determine whether “a genocide of African proportions” suggests one smaller or bigger than a genocide of the local European proportions.
May9 said
“They seem truly disinterested from studying past practice and identifying the root source of past errors, and throughly confused on where we as a movement ought to be heading”
Obviously you don’t pay much attention to the literature put out by the ML blog, FRSO, and other groups associated with “them”, who have laid out very clear analyses of strategies for building revolution in the US, if you’d ever bother to look. They have also put out numerous studies on “past practices and errors”. What they don’t think do is conclude from past practice and errors that existing socialism is terrible and Marxism is a mess of incompleteness – which is what Kasama wants “them” to do.
But the real difference the source of this holy war Mike Ely and friends have decided to wage against the ML blog and FRSO is that the group(s) Ely is attacking actually work on the ground to implement the strategy they have laid out, while Kasama does little if any on the ground organizing. Instead they just criticize from the safety of their armchairs. What way forward is Kasama presenting again? All they say is that they are “breaking with the past”. Oh, how bold. But what exactly does that mean? How are they implementing this strategy on the ground? How does that help us in concrete terms? What protests is Kasama leading? What is their “strategy” for revolution? All they do is criticize with longwinded, condescending, pedantric blog posts day after day and pat themselves on the back for being well read. What is Kasama doing to help build revolution in the US? What is their way forward?
Kasama has been asked this time and time again, and they have no response. Only more adhominem attacks and longwinded blog comments that say nothing.
May9 said
@Harriet, thanks for posting that. Everything is clearer now from that disgusting genocidal rant by Zizek.
I wonder what the Zizek apologists will say next to dismiss Zizek’s barbaric cheerleading of killing civilians and extreme anti-Serb chauvinism [if anyone cares, NATO exclusively bombed civilian targets in 1999, they destroyed maybe 7 tanks, but dozens upon dozens of schools and hospitals – glad to see Zizek thinks the NATO imperialists are not murderous enough). There is evidently nothing Zizek can do or say that would diminish his “progressive” credentials in the eyes of his adoring and cultish followers.
“He has also said somewhere that many people in power during the LDS reign have now become his enemies precisely as May9 pointed out that they have horrible politics.”
Which is why he’s still best good buddies with Golobic (LDS leader for the duration of the 90s) and supports Golobic’s new party – Zares. So by “many” he evidently doesn’t mean the top people in power.
Tony K said
Thanks May9, it’s good to know that the Revolution is right around the corner all because of the “on the ground” strategies of the ML blog and FRSO. Let’s all just overlook the inconvenient fact that a true revolution requires the masses and at the moment we (the Left) just don’t seem to have them…
In case people doubt my activist “credentials”, I’ve been involved in several Queer Feminist Anti-Racist anarchist collectives, and I’ve been to my share of anti-poverty and peace protests. What May9 and other attackers of Zizek don’t seem to get is, the broader Left is in a state of organizational and intellectual malaise, one that has been plaguing it since the end of the Cold War. Even in revolutionary conditions (like global economic crises) it’s just not happening. Zizek is rightly asking the questions of why that’s the case, and where do we go from here? And while I think we need Marx, Hegel, and Lenin more than ever, I don’t think returning to an orthodox Marxism-Leninism is the answer.
May9 said
“A prize to anyone who can determine whether “a genocide of African proportions” suggests one smaller or bigger than a genocide of the local European proportions.”
Of course, we now know there was no “genocide” of any proportion, and that while Zizek’s NATO buddies were claiming 500,000 Albanians were killed, we now know that the total death count was a fraction of that, and that most of those killed were either Serbs or KLA militants.
But who needs facts when racist hysteria is much easier. I hope NATO and the KLA paid him for his loyal service.
Harriet said
exactly MAY9, I am just stressing the insane white supremacism Zizek peddles to delight his fans – he gives them sexism and racism equipped with alibis and they cheer him.
here an all white crowd goes wild as he charms them with visions of “half-ape blacks our grandparents jumped in trees like apes in Africa.”
(around 2 minutes in)
as I posted at the marxist leninist -
He’s a sleazeball and a fraudster:
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004183
Here’s some sheer racist lies, about the Strojan family who were persecuted in Slovenia, in his attack on sara ahmed who criticised him:
http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454
(Here’s the real story –
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/the-real-anti-semitism-in-europe/
He’s a racist, sexist, neoliberal con man.
The BBC recently called him “the world’s most influential Marxist” and pictured him as even the reincarnation of Marx:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8800931.stm
Anyone who cares about the public image of Marxism and the left has to stop tolerating this grotesque imposture.
Mike E said
I also appreciate Harriet’s active investigation — and I think with some common work we are excavating bits about Zizek’s political activity during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
I choose to focus on the methodological questions (not on an evaluation of Zizek).
My own views on Zizek are not settled — I have found him an interesting agitator and provocateur on a number of questions. And I value the fact that his work has reintroduced communist thought into many previously closed corners. But I have not personally investigated his philosophy deeply enough to have an opinion.
And I want to assert: as a revolutionary movement we are not simply trying to make some simple “up or down” assessment of someone (“he is not us, he is an asshole”) — but actually make a three-dimensional understanding of what someone is doing, saying and what their influence is for a variety of political and strategic reasons.
The point (again) is not to make a checklist of our (pre-packaged) views and decide how much someone agrees with it — but to understand the surrounding political landscape, and to engage (creatively, as communists) many different kinds of people who inhabit it (including those large numbers of radical intellectuals who have been grappling with Foucault, or Lacan, or Zizek, or Badiou).
I have personally found Badiou and Althusser of real interest as philosophers (i.e. there are elements of their creative work that i consider as i work on ways of understanding the world). Zizek has not struck me (so far) as helpful in that way — but i can’t claim to have delved very far into his work.
To uncover his political path (and not just a quote or a moment but to actually uncover what he is doing, and why he is doing it) is part of understanding what is his work (and trajectory) has been about. And (again) the politics and discourses of Eastern Europe are rather disconnected from ours (for reasons tied to their very different post WW2 history). There was a great disorientation in eastern Europe — as official “Marxism” closed off many radical paths of thought to those wanting change (i.e. it has been coopted by the immediate oppressors), and as people often (rather naively) just wanted “space” to think and act and regroup or even (worse) just want a “normal life” (by which they meant, end the divide in europe, end Soviet domination, end the stultified freezing of political life fixed by the block alignments etc.).
And, for me, this is still a question of method (not of evaluating Zizek) — and calling out the methods that are simplistic, mechanical, reductionist, and (inherently) incapable of actually understanding even the facts, events and figures they choose mull over.
As someone said: this is a method of pseudo analysis that actually is about legitimizing your own analysis (as the onlyu acceptable one), and so really is not seriously about the object of analysis. It is about dismissal (with quite a bit of smearing and disrespect for actual evidence) and about cutting the toes to fit the shoes.
Distortion need not always invent facts (i.e. Zizek may well have played a troubling role in slovenian politics then or now). But it presents a slice of facts (separated from context, from priorities) to “make a case” (not make an actual all-sided analysis).
The argument made here is “you don’t need to know his philosophy to know he is a shit,” which really is an argument that you can solve the problem of ideas by a cheap method of delegitimizing the source — a method that has deep roots. It is a way of putting a “Keep Away” sign on the ideas of others, and encapsulating anyone who will listen to you within a fixed doctrinal world.
And it is a method that can be used (easily, casually, automatically, without any work) to debunk anything in the world — without actually understanding anything. In my opinion it is a way of legitimizing a form of aging orthodoxy that has few other methods of defense — i.e. it is an orthodoxy that can’t actually allow people to do real analysis of the world because its own threadbare quality would emerge. (I.e. think what it requires to uphold the theory of General Crisis in todays world, or as someone else actually tried to argue on these threads, that Stalin mainly tried to stop the purges in the 1930s but was uninvolved in sponsoring their conduct. Or, similarly, some people seriously argue that the forced confessions of people in the public trials should be accepted as credible evidence (in the absence of any corroboration). These are arguments that obviously care nothing about reality — and are a rearguard action for an indefensible set of verdicts.)
similarly May 9 writes:
Let me (again) stay on the terrain of method:
May 9 is trying to respond to a set of political and ideological arguments by attacking the source. There is a particular theory of authority involved: to dogmatic people the truth is what authoritiative people proclaim (popes, classics, heroes, geniuses, messiahs etc.) So the way to disprove the remarks of someone is to debunk their claim to special authority.
May 9 claims here:
(a) are simply a red herring in these discussions of method and dogmatism,
(b) are not true — i.e. the discussions here on Kasama of revolutionary strategy (including electoral activity, trade unionism, and summation of past revolutionary work) and the activism of people around the Kasama project are both real.
(c) methodologically are wrong i.e. even if someone were (theoretically) opposed to political practice, it would not prove their insights or statements wrong.
Even the idea of “armchairs” etc. is part of a stubborn (and obvious) anti-intellectual and anti-theoretical prejudices.
I’m glad Althusser spent his life in armchairs. Or marx and Lenin for that matter. (In the early RU days, someone indignantly demanded to know “If practice is primary, how did lenin find time to write 40 volumes?”)
It is all smoke: Smear the source, taint the idea, legitimize our faded orthodoxy.
Mao had a different approach. Even in regard to wrong ideas Mao said “Blame not the speaker but be warned by his words.”
* * * * * * *
I keep returning to RedGuard’s words:
Harriet said
Zizek:
“there was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped [lie] close to a small town. When a man was killed [lie] in the camp, [lie] the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp [lie] (which they occupied illegally [lie]) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. As expected, all liberals condemned them as racists, [lie] locating racism into this isolated [lie] small village [lie], while none of the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, [lie] had any everyday contact with the Roma [lie] (except for meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras when they supported them). When the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen [lie] to be a group of people frightened [lie] by the constant fighting [lie] and shooting [lie] in the Roma camp, [lie] by the constant theft [lie] of animals from their farms, [lie] and by other forms of small harassments [lie] from the Roma. It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) [lie] that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, [wtf?] that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, [wtf?] etc. – nobody clearly answered the local “racists” [lie] what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems [lie] the Roma camp [lie] evidently [lie] was for them.[lie]”
There’s no “camp”, nobody was killed, there was no shooting, no animal stealing, no harrassment – all racist lies and justification of as well as incitement to violent racist crimes. The (then) President of Slovenia went to show support for the Strojan family when the racist mobs threatened to burn the houses down and kill the kids. Watch the video – this armed racist mob shouting “gypsies! gypsies!” in camouflage are his “frightened people” only trying to protect themselves from the evil violent thieving gypsies in the “camp”.
Criminal policies of Zizek’s libdems include:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR68/002/2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3620395.stm
Dave Palmer said
I think Hannie Schaft gets it half-right about Zizek: “For such a douchebag he can be fun to read.” He is definitely a douchebag, but I don’t find him particularly enjoyable to read. His politics are confused at best and abhorrent at worst. It’s difficult to decipher what his actual politics are, since he seems to make many statements out of a desire to shock and provoke, without much concern for logical consistency. He seems to me like more of an entertainer than a philosopher — and one who I personally don’t find all that entertaining, although I can see why some people like him.
I also think May9 is correct to point out that FRSO has an outstanding record of activism. Saorsie pointed this out in an earlier thread, as well. I don’t think, however, that this record of activism (which deserves to be recognized) proves in any way that a reconception of communist theory is not needed.
I would like to see a group that would combine a reconception of communist theory with meaningful concrete action. (When I have brought this up in the past on this site, I have been told that using the word “concrete” is an example of “1930s Comintern thinking”). Maybe this is too much to ask, and it’s either one or the other. That is a depressing prospect.
May9 said
““you don’t need to know his philosophy to know he is a shit,”
This repeated attempt to separate theory from practice is undialectical and has nothing in common with Marxism. You say Marx and Lenin sat around in armchairs. That’s ridiculous. Marx led revolutionary organizations. Lenin led a damned revolution. None of their theory was separate from their practice. Their theory was informed by their practice and vice versa. Mao wrote “On Practice” about precisely this very point. I’m saddened Maoists never bother to read that pamphlet.
And we’ve analyzed Zizek’s writings (bomb Serb civilians!), and gone into great lengths with an “all sided” contextual analysis of Slovenian politics (an analysis which is never given of those Mao criticizes). You keep repeating the same arguments that have been addressed over and over again.
And to claim that you haven’t made your mind up on Zizek defies belief, since you’ve written multiple spastic blog entries going to great lengths defending Zizek and have come up with any number of excuses to ignore criticisms of him. Any time one of your defenses is destroyed – like the line that Zizek has renounced his 80s politics – with proof that he hasn’t renounced them one bit, we get yet another long screed ignoring the point.
Harriet said
“he seems to make many statements out of a desire to shock and provoke,”
But if his statements provoke armed white supremacists to burn down houses of Roma with kids in them, or provoke citizens capable of resistance to support months of massive bombing of people and uranium poisoning of land and water, then it’s not just another comedy act.
Nor is it that funny if he provokes his fans to roll back the standards of civility and respect achieved in many places by decades of anti-racist and feminist struggles and provokes them to make racist verbal assaults on and sexually harrass black colleagues, students, neighbours and acquaintances:
“To provoke people when I’m asked about racism, I like to do my line I love racism, I can’t imagine my life without racism, there there’s no progressive movement now without racism. I’m not crazy…Now comes the preacher part, the real….what do I mean by this is that there is something false about this respectful multiculturalist tolerance…my God, for me political correctness is still inverted racism…let’s cut the crap, let’s say we want to become friends, there has to be a politically incorrect exchange of obscenity. You know, some dirty joke or whatever, whose meaning is “cut the crap we are now real friends”. And I can tell you this from my wonderful experience here, you want a shocking story you will hear it. How did I become here a friend, a true friend, am not advising anybody to do it because it was a risky gesture, but it worked wonderfully with a -with a -with a black, African-American guy. No? How did I become? We were very friendly, already, but not really, but then I risk and told him, it’s a horrible thing I warn you, is it true that you blacks you know have a big penis, no? but that you can even move it so that if you have on your leg above your knee a fly you can Boff! smash it with your penis. The guy embraced me and told me dying of laughter “now you can call me a nigger.” Like when blacks tell you “you can call me a nigger” means they really accept you no?”
http://www.radioopensource.org/slavoj-zizek-what-is-the-question/
I’m not saying the guy should be censored but people have to stop identifying him as a leftist and start objecting when he is called so and correcting those who identify him as a leftist.
Harriet said
An earlier version of his mastering the “big, black guy”:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation
In a yet earlier version of this tale, the grateful adoring submissive was a Kosovo Albanian and the charming abuse took place in the Yugoslav Army. The victim’s “race” varies in Zizek’s oeuvre but it is always someone over whom Zizek feels his aryanist white supremacism (he informs New Left Review readers that Slovenes are not really Slavs but descended from Etruscans, and their work ethic and cleanliness makes them much like Germans) gives him an advantage. He never tells us of offering to play “trade racist insults” with Bourbons, Rohans, Windsors, white California billionaires or anyone who might percieve him as the social and “racial” inferior.
He’s absolutely appalling.
May9 said
I’m sure if Buchanan was an unnecessarily jargony and dense writer who said one or two good things about Lenin, Kasama would be lining up to defend him. As it is he is critical of US foreign policy, so why isn’t he a comrade?
The jargony language of Zizek offers Kasama the perfect defense, they can arrogantly accuse any detractors of not understanding the material while absolving the theoretician of their actions in practice with demands for an “all sided” analysis (which effectively means solidarity with the counterrevolutionary activity).
Mike E said
I agree with this:
And he obviously contradicts himself. Says things he later pulls back. Throws out arguments (consciously) in order to draw a crowd and get a discussion raging. (He remarked that his comments on various movies are often made without seeing them — and obviously even that confession is itself a provocation.)
There is a kind of literalist who simply cannot deal with (or abide) that kind of method and provocation. That assumes that everything needs to be read (and judged) literally.
And it is part of a larger fundamentalist mindset (that can’t see or evaluate irony, provocation, mockery, hyperbole, humor etc as devices, but simply sees them as error). Its like someone who reads fiction and keeps yelling “Hey, this isn’t real.”
And i do think that evaluating Zizek’s sayings and actions are part of the evaluation of him and his work (obviously) — but again it is not a simple checklist (“here are our list of correct necessary positions, if you ‘deviate’ then you are an asshole.”)
Lets assume we are dealing with a philosopher from Slovenia who after years of increasing domination by serbia (within yugoslavia) supported independence, and then opposed Serbia in the coming wars. This would not be unusual for the Balkans — even while it would not be (in my opinion) a particularly communist point of view.
Ok, and is that then the end of our evaluation of this person and his role in intellectual and political life? Again, this is a question of analysis and method.
Let’s assume (for arguments sake) that Zizek (like lots of people) welcomed the knocking down of Serbia. Is that the end of any investigation of his work and role? It is a question of method here. Is it a “gotcha moment” where we glimpse his core essence and don’t need to dig further? And what assumptions are embedded in that kind of gotcha politics and assumptions of essence?
Bruce Springsteen supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Is that the end of his story too? Does that mean that we don’t need to evaluate his music? Or seek to understand his deep discomfort with America and its impact on a large audience? Are we really smug denizens polishing our orthodoxy within a tiny encapsuled sandbox?
Proudhon and Bakunin were both nationalists. Bakunin is riddled with slavophile remarks. Marx made anti-gay remarks (and talks about LaSalle looking like an African). We should excavate and understand such things — but how often have you seen people say “what more do we need to know?”
Is that really a method we can use? Or tolerate? Or are we going to apply (and articulate) a method of analysis that is all-sided, dialectical, contextualizing, and able to detect various impacts by someone and their ideas? Are we sophisticated people seeking to navigate a worldchanging process with many complex currents or are we dumbed-down fundamentalists of the aging orthodoxy produced by a long-nonexistent socialist state (a state we have an overall positive assessment of)?
May9 said
“Thanks May9, it’s good to know that the Revolution is right around the corner all because of the “on the ground” strategies of the ML blog and FRSO.”
No one said revolution is around the corner. It’s hard work to build organization. It doesn’t happen overnight. But here’s the problem, the people who do organize for change are ridiculed by the Kasama types for not doing enough or not being close enough to revolution or not doing it “perfect”. But yet we don’t see the critics leading the way for us and helping us out. It’s easy to criticize and do nothing.
“Let’s all just overlook the inconvenient fact that a true revolution requires the masses and at the moment we (the Left) just don’t seem to have them…”
Revolutions don’t appear out of thin air. They don’t happen like spontaneous combustion. They have to be built. The fact that we’re in crisis and yet have all of the “masses”, is a problem of lack of organization. As we’ve seen with the crypto-fascist anti-government Tea Party rallies, it’s not as if people are happy with the system as it stands. The way forward is to build organization and fix the “malaise”, not just complain about it.
Mike E said
A methodological point:
I am impressed by how little May 9 cares about accuracy, especially in the way he characterizes arguments. There are a dozen examples in these threads, but here is a good one:
Every part of this is invention.
I particularly like the way quotation marks are around the word “perfect” as if it is a quote.
Break it down. Where are “people who organized for change” being “ridiculed” for “not doing enough”? Or for “not being close enough to revolution”? Or for not being “perfect”?
No where.
What is a “Kasama type”?
Every part of this is invention. But more the point it is a method: ascribe a stupid view or venal motives to an opponent, then attack them for being stupid or venal.
How does such a method get someone closer to “know things to change things”? It doesn’t.
onehundredflowers said
“they can arrogantly accuse any detractors of not understanding the material”
May9, you began your tirade by proclaiming that you didn’t understand his material, now you’re claiming that others have unjustly accused you of this?
Harriet said
There is a passage in a work of Helvétius written to be published after his death, which happened in 1771, so much in the tone of the dissatisfied and despairing advocates of public liberty at present, as to deserve to be cited in this place. ‘In the history of every people,’ writes he, ‘there are moments in which, uncertain of the side they shall choose, and balanced between political good and evil, they feel a desire to be instructed; in which the soil, so to express myself, is in some manner prepared and may easily be penetrated by the dew of truth. At such a moment, the publication of a valuable book may give birth to the most auspicious reform: but, when that moment is no more, the nation, become insensible to the best motives, is, by the nature of its government irretrievably plunged in ignorance and stupidity. The soil of intellect is then hard and impenetrable; the rains may fall, may spread their moisture upon the surface, but the prospect of fertility is gone. Such is the condition of France. Her people are become the contempt of Europe. No salutary crisis shall ever restore them to liberty.’
It is scarcely necessary to add that the French revolution was at this time preparing by an incessant chain of events; and that the train may particularly be considered as taking its date from the circumstance, the destruction of the parliaments by Louis XV, which inspired Helvétius with so melancholy a presage.
- Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
May9 said
So now we go from he’s renounced these kinds of politics a long time ago to “it doesn’t matter if he supported the bombings”. Ely’s argument is a constantly moving target, which is what makes it so tedious to argue with him.
And I love this
“Lets assume we are dealing with a philosopher from Slovenia who after years of increasing domination by serbia (within yugoslavia) supported independence, and then opposed Serbia in the coming wars. This would not be unusual for the Balkans — even while it would not be (in my opinion) a particularly communist point of view.”
Aha, let’s decry reductionism and call for an all-sided analysis by advancing a ridiculously simplistic and reductionist view of the crisis in Yugoslavia. Brilliant. But we get to the crux of the matter, Ely doesn’t care about Zizek supporting the NATO bombing of Serb civilians because he largely sympathizes with that view (Serb domination of Yugoslavia, people just wanted some room to have a voice, etc). Doesn’t matter that the apologia is factually untrue (Serb domination of Yugoslavia). You can be simplistic as long as you’re defending Zizek.
“Let’s assume (for arguments sake) that Zizek (like lots of people) welcomed the knocking down of Serbia. Is that the end of any investigation of his work and role? It is a question of method here. Is it a “gotcha moment” where we glimpse his core essence and don’t need to dig further? And what assumptions are embedded in that kind of gotcha politics and assumptions of essence?”"
First we get denial, then we get “so what”? This is “gotcha politics”, as if Zizek’s work destroying Yugoslavia was some small part of his life, like an off color remark made 25 years ago.
“Proudhon and Bakunin were both nationalists. Bakunin is riddled with slavophile remarks. Marx made anti-gay remarks (and talks about LaSalle looking like an African). We should excavate and understand such things — but how often have you seen people say “what more do we need to know?””
Once again, Zizek’s decades of campaigning against socialism, continual association with anti-socialists and neoliberals, and enthusiastic endorsement of horrific crimes in Yugoslavia are equated to off color remarks, a very small thing – a tiny sandbox. It’s an absurd and dishonest comparison.
Whereas before we got “it’s only practice, but what does he actually say now”? Now we get “it’s only words, it doesn’t matter”.
You can’t win, no matter how reactionary Zizek behaves, now matter how disgusting his whole life’s political practice is, Ely will defend him because he likes some books he wrote.
May9 said
What do you mean no where? Most of your blog is dedicated to ripping apart “past errors” and socialism in practice. Most of the arguments here have stemmed from you doing exactly that, and criticizing anyone who says you go overboard or even celebrate counterrevolution as being “dogmatic” and “orthodox”. And then FRSO and the ML blog’s organizing activities were dismissed by a commenter because ‘revolution isn’t around the corner’.
May9 said
“now you’re claiming that others have unjustly accused you of this?”
No, never said it was unjust. But that my not understanding Zizek’s jargon has been used as a source of derision – hence why I said it was arrogant.
But the larger point is that Zizek’s impenetrable language offered a convenient defense for the defenders. No matter what Zizek does, or no matter reactionary policies he supports, they can say that Zizek’s detractors don’t fully understand him and therefore can’t criticize him.
Harriet said
The bizarrest is that he is to be forgiven his significant role in imperalist mass murder and US and German capitalists’ embezzlement by ethnic seperatism of the public equity of tens of millions of working people because of his staggeringly brilliant insight that Starbuck’s marketing is kinda, you know, it’s, well, they say fair trade but its kind of, oh, hypocritical. Yes, he dares to say it, marketing is sometimes hypocritical or even kind of not exactly well – you know what I mean! Don’t you hate when they say have a nice day? Aren’t you embarrassed by your parents sometimes?
And for these brilliant insights, this searing provocative critique of liberal ideology, you can let the ethnic cleansing and privatisation of Slovenia, the 78 days of NATO bombing of Serbia, the support for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the apology for Abu Ghraib and the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, the repeated slanders of the left and of all those who resist US imperialism, and all the rest of the imperialist propaganda slide.
Mike E said
May 9 wrote:
Note here: no one has proclaimed Zizek a “hero.” This is a complete invention by May 9.
He is the person with a worldview where people are either heros or assholes — and therefore if we oppose a shoddy method of cheap shots we must (by mechanical logic) be elevating Zizek to “hero.”
The metaphysical thinker sees our arguments through the lens of metaphysics.
Mike E said
Another revealing statement of method:
May 9 writes:
Is this true? Is this all you need to know?
Let me put it a different way:
In our world today, people don’t generally or automatically have an antiimperialist politics. Many people can imagine situations where they would ally with this or that imperialist.
For example, quite a few communists (even in America) allied with the U.S. imperialists in world war 2, and thought that was correct. The world (for them) was not a matter of simple obvious principles.
And so, in the caldron of the Balkans, my experience is that most people (in fact all people I know of) got pulled into a very nationalist (and very typically balkan) view: where they analysed who was brutalizing them, and allied with “the enemy of my enemy.”
I think that was a mistaken view. I think that the Balkans were crying out for a radical and internationalist approach — that sought to find (in univeralist ways) a transcendent unity among different nationalities, against the vicious nationalists, against the imperialists, for a new and revolutioanry direction. As we know, such a pole did not emerge. Many people in former Yugoslavia had long abandoned nationalist identification, many intermarried, at least 16% identified as “Yugoslavs” not Croats or Serbs or Montenegrins.
But as a political pole, a communist internationalist movement did not emerge. And all forces were caught in a nationalist polarization — increasingly dominated and shaped by someone of the most genocidal nationalists, and then recast by invading Nato/imperialist forces (with the non-invading Russian imperialist forces playing their role as well).
Politics is not a set of simple principles, known and understood by all, where the denial of one of those principles is simply a venal and “disgusting” act.
It was a shame the degree to which the rise of nationalism (including the rise of a revanchist Serbian nationalism to the helm of “Yugoslavia”) drove politics away from a previous possibility of an internationalist resolution. And this kind of ethnic-cleansing and polarization was (of course) not just in the Balkans — the collapse of a bi-polar world and the attempts at U.S. hegemonism has led to the disintegration of several places into this kind of petty nationalism and wars (including the Caucasus, Iraq, the breakup of Czechoslovakia, and the genocidal dynamics of Central Africa.)
I don’t agree with Zizek’s choices. I don’t think they are communist politics (obviously). But to enter the world around us with a cardboard checklist of “all you need to know” — self-declared litmus tests of what is righteous and what is disgusting — is a disastrous (and anti-Marxist) method.
Harriet said
Sorry to keep interrupting but Mike E, I am curious, is there something about Zizek you like and learned from that you can describe? Something you think people should know about him that’s not objectionable and disgusting but instead admirable and interesting?
Mike E said
May 9 writes:
This is worth breaking down (again methodologically).
First, there are quotes around “it doesn’t matter if he supported the bombings” — as if someone said this. Again: assigning a stupid view to an opponent, then calling them stupid.
In fact, I spent the Balkan war writing one exposure after another — of the Nato bombings, of the imperialist motives, of the U.S. lies about the war… We were active in opposing U.S. imperialism (tenatiously and consistently) — and obviously thought it mattered that people oppose the U.S. bombing of Serbia.
And it was terrible (for example) that the Greens of Germany helped prettify Germany’s participation in the first Nato hot war of aggression. And it was wrong and even deeply troubling that all kinds of forces (including people in Kosovo and Bosnia) supported U.S. imperialism (in ways that betrayed deep illusions and false hopes about what U.S. motives and the impact of U.S. attacks.)
So, again, May 9 doesn’t really care about the facts, and feels free to invent them.
And it is worth mentioning again because it is actually part of the method here. “Cutting the toes to fit the shoes.”
Beyond that:
I think there is an underlying assumption: i.e. that communist politics is (at root) a short list of simple “principles,” that differentiate the communist from non-communist world. And you either follow those principles or you are “disgusting” and an “opportunist” and can be simply denounced (“all you need to know”).
Like so much of this reductionist thinking it doesn’t bear up under any examination.
For example, virtually every progressive figure and force in American endorsed Obama. Quite a few of them are now silent about his escalations in Afghanistan. Is that all we need to know about them? Does alone that determine how we view them? How we speak of them?
We have written here on Kasama very sharply about leaders of various antiwar coalitions who are not that actively antiwar. There is opportunism in the world, and some betrayals are very conscious and infuriating.
But is it simple here? Or is there a large group of people we need to win over who are (currently and rather uniformly) infatuated and conflicted about the commander in chief of the empire. That is no small thing! It is a disturbing thing — especially when we currently have little platform from which to speak and compete.
But is support for the chief imperialist honcho “all we need to know” — is life a checklist of the heroes and the damned?
Or do we need BOTH a clear and independent COMMUNIST approach to key political matters and also a sophisticated engagement with progressive people who don’t yet share our approach?
onehundredflowers said
If it’s not unjust then why are you raising it?
“But that my not understanding Zizek’s jargon has been used as a source of derision…”
This is completely false. You have been criticized for dismissing his work without even putting in the effort to understand it. His language, writing style and references are not easily accessible, I would imagine most people don’t understand his jargon. There is no reason to criticize anyone for not understanding it any more than one would criticize someone for not understanding the language of economics or theoretical physics. However, anyone claiming to take on neoliberal economics had better know what the hell they are talking about, and when one starts off by saying “I don’t know what Milton Friedman does or what he is saying…”, they should expect to be dismissed.
“But the larger point is that Zizek’s impenetrable language offered a convenient defense for the defenders.”
No one has defended him on this basis because his language isn’t “impenetrable”, it just requires a great deal of work, work which you were proud of not having done.
“they can say that Zizek’s detractors don’t fully understand him and therefore can’t criticize him.”
That’s generally how it works in any field. Before you criticize Einstein’s physics or Hegel’s philosophy, you need to understand them or why would anyone take you seriously? Or is it only necessary to look at Einstein’s work on the Manhattan Project or Hegel’s defense of the Prussian state to invalidate their ideas?
If you want to criticize Zizek’s political practice, his stance on the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, that’s one thing, but then to use these arguments to dismiss his entire philosophical project without even understanding it, is the hallmark of religious dogma, a refusal to learn from anyone or anything that isn’t in some approved canon.
In Harriet’s case, it is reflected in a seeming inability to get past Zizek’s particular style of irony and sarcasm so that a comment in the youtube video she links to is interpreted as racist, when in fact, it’s part of criticizing white multiculturalists for paternalist liberal racism. Perhaps it’s because he’s willing to refer to racist language and imagery to make his points, that the Marxist priests of linguistic purity have banished him from the fields of acceptable discourse.
As others have pointed out, and I agree, there is the larger question of method here. I don’t think this is mainly about Zizek, but about how to generate new communist theory and practice, and part of that is breaking with cherished assumptions about both.
“is there something about Zizek you like and learned from that you can describe?”
This is exactly the wrong question to ask, the better question is, why you haven’t bothered to investigate if there is anything worth learning, even if you are convinced he is a reactionary? Especially if so many progressives and radicals are engaging with it. What are the underlying assumptions about who you do or do not consider worthy of serious engagement?
Radical Eyes said
Harriet, can you please offer quotations or citations to back up your claims that Zizek has in fact done any or all those nasty things you say he has in your post #50?
Speaking for myself, I have been uncomfortable at times with Zizek’s comments on the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan. (See his recent Culture Show appearance, for example.)
However, as I take it, when Zizek argues that it is not enough (for Western intellectuals or activists) to simply oppose the occupation–or is even somewhat dismissive of such anti-war campaigning– he is trying to call attention to how much of what passes for left politics today appears to him merely to be a negative exercise in moralism: the listing of crimes and victims, generally lacking in a substantial, positive political program or even a vision for how we could actually get beyond the system that produces such wars and occupations. He is, again, trying to highlight how so the perspectives and activities of ostensibly radical tendencies have become (or may become) parasitic upon the very insitutions and structures that they think they are opposing and working to “resist.”
Now, to me, this type of a stance risks being rather one-sided. (Why can you not simultaneously condemn an ongoing imperialist occupation, while also pointing out the limitations and illusions of existing moralistic “resistance” that does not actually chart a path towards politically challenging the system?)
Nonetheless, I think it is a stretch to say that Zizek “supports” the invasion or occupation of Afghanistan, as you suggest he does.
Harriet said
ethnic cleansing
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhevMb4vA3UJ:cms.horus.be/files/99935/MediaArchive/pdfevents/Presentation%2520N.%2520Kogovsek.ppt+erased+slovenia&cd=6&hl=fr&ct=clnk&gl=fr
white supremacist historical revisionism:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2008/11/14/slavoj-zizek/use-your-illusions
same fable here
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas
and elsewhere including _First as Tragedy, Then as Farce_ -
apology for Abu Ghraib here and many other places including books:
http://www.lacan.com/zizunder.htm
apology for Israel’s attack on Lebanon:
http://www.lacan.com/zizimp.htm
Afghanistan:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/welcome-to-the-desert-of-the-real/
and now -
http://sophrosyne.radical.r30.net/wordpress/?p=5027
More revisionism, this time of Enron of all things (he invents whistleblowers!):
http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2010/05/essay-nature-catastrophe
some recent aryanism and slanders of dissidents and the left:
http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2010/04/god-order-wisdom-paul-love
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/slavoj-zizek/resistance-is-surrender
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2008/10/10/slavoj-zizek/dont-just-do-something-talk
this is all pretty easy to find. there’s much more. Google Zizek and start reading, you won’t find a single article or book that does not contain extremely objectionable apology for US imperialism, historical revisionism and disinformation, reactionary mythology (usually neoliberal, sometimes basically fascist) and/or racist raving.
Harriet said
why you haven’t bothered to investigate if there is anything worth learning,
I have looked and found nothing worth learning in his work. And neither evidently have you. This is the way everybody answers that question – “something interesting and not repulsive and reactionary? wow. er. uhm. geez. sure! uhm. all the kids like it! why don’t you go find out yourself why?”
Harriet said
radical eyes there is an answer to your request awaiting moderation I assume because it is so heavy with links.
Harriet said
” it’s part of criticizing white multiculturalists for paternalist liberal racism.”
He’s talking about what people meant by singing the Marseillaise in 1804. That is before there was anything or anyone you could call “white multiculturalists” with “paternalist liberal racism”. You seem to have misunderstood completely and precisely the way you are invited to in order to enjoy your forbidden vision of “half ape blacks” which you have now dutifully enjoyed and obediently excused.
He also gives an absurd revisionist account, in a kind of Spielbergian vein, of the incident one presumes he is somehow pretending to refer to (a soldier’s memoir of the seige of Crete a Pierrot) in writing in several texts. If you need me to direct you to the real evidence , I will. You can compare it to the Zizekian fiction, with it’s white French soldiers approaching “the black army” and hearing what “at first they thought was some tribal war chant…”, just what he knows, from watching all those movies, will titilate you.
Harriet said
And if he is just daringly willing to “use racist words” to “make his points” can you explain the points he’s making here?
and here?
Are the “points” being made here valid, in your view?
Tell No Lies said
Even though (or perhaps especially because) I have have mixed feelings about Zizek, I have posted a number of things by him here, mainly videos. Why do I post them? Because I think they are interesting on several levels.
First and foremost, here is a guy who is popularizing communism among intellectuals in a way that hasn’t really happened since the 1960s. I think on its own that deserves our attention.
Second, the psychoanalytic spin that he brings to criticizing everything from movies to political actions, casts many old questions in a new light. It is particularly refreshing to see it used to skewer the conceits of liberalism.
Third, he can be, as others have said, entertaining and provocative.
The post that started this thread is, as Mike has repeated ad nauseum, about METHOD. It is not a defense of Zizek. You may choose not to believe it, but none of us worship Zizek. None of us find it hard to imagine that he has said or done reactionary things or even that he continues to. The question here really isn’t whether Zizek was or remains reactionary, but rather the methodology of the original essay that attacked him. And in this regard, the presentation of further evidence against Zizek, while interesting for other reasons, is an evasion of the critique of the original method.
The original essay on The Marxist-Leninist would have been a lot stronger if the investigation that has apparently occurred after it was written in order to defend it had occurred before hand and informed the argument.
That said, the additional evidence presented here that I have had the opportunity to examine has not been that compelling. May 9 linked to an essay in which Zizek supposedly spoke of Serbian monsters, but in fact was attributing that view to “Western pacifists.” And Harriet links to a video from the Idea of Communism Conference in which “an all white crowd goes wild as he charms them with visions of “half-ape blacks our grandparents jumped in trees like apes in Africa.”” Well thats not quite accurate either. First, the crowd hardly goes “wild” but rather there is a combination of what I take to be nervous laughter with applause for the political point that Zizek is making, not about Africans, but about white liberal multiculturalism.
The full quote is
While, like much of what Zizek says it requires considerable untangling and this lends itself to misreading, what Zizek is insisting on here is in fact the opposite of what Harriet is accusing him of. He is caricaturing the patronizing attitude of white liberals and arguing that Africans singing the Marseillaise has a different content, that is one of claiming their universal humaninty, than the white liberals might suppose.
Now Zizek can certainly be faulted here for using explosive imagery while speaking in sentence fragments in ways that invite trouble, (and nervous laughter). But if you take the time to figure out what he is trying to say and aren’t just fishing for evidence against him, its pretty clear that this is not what Harriet suggests.
And to be absolutely clear, I say this NOT to claim that Zizek is therefore innocent of charges of racism or Slovenia chauvinism (which may well be validated in some of the other evidence Harriet presents that I haven’t looked at yet) but to point out the problems that arise when you go fishing for evidence to support what you’ve already convinced yourself of rather than undertaking a serious all rounded investigation.
Finally, on the question of involvement in mass organizing work. I respect both FRSOs (Fightback and Left Refoundation) for their mass organizing work and believe that the process of theoretical reconception that Kasama has been promoting must (and will) become grounded in common mass work in a way that is not presently the case. I’ve done a hell of a lot of mass organizing work, but it is true that I am not really doing any presently for a number of reasons. One reason has been a sort of demoralization arising from what I see as a crippling anti-intellectualism on the part of most of the left that seems generally oblivious its own marginalization. The fact is that there are a lot of people doing “good mass work” that has no clear relation to a coherent or convincing strategy for making revolution in the United States. When that is combined with an approach to theory that trains people politically not to stray from within an orthodoxy that has not produced any sort of political breakout in over a generation I think that is a problem.
Todd said
Harriet, in post 57 I read virtually none of those quotes even remotely the same that you do. Could you explain how he’s apologizing for the Israeli attack on Lebanon, i.e., in your citation? Or the quotes on Afghanistan? I just don’t get the meanings from those quotes that you’re ascribing to them, whatsoever.
Harriet said
oops “1804″ should say “1802″
There were no “liberal multiculturalists” in Slovenia insisting paternalistically that violent, thieving Gypsies with their violent thieving culture should be embraced because their wicked way of life is the result of centuries of persecution. By inventing them to denounce them, Zizek is merely trying to convince you that Roma are violent thieves. And there were no “liberal multiculturalists” in Saint Domingue in 1802 saying oh those blacks just have a half-ape way of life the French should embrace. His inventing them to denounce is just his way of saying the black people are half-apes, the opposite of “Frenchmen”, as Roma are violent thieves, the opposite of “frightened farmers”. He says, oh these liberal multiculturalists are paternalistic, they are the real racists, they want you to embrace the theiving murdering “Gypsies” and the primitive “half-ape Blacks” when you and I, the real anti-racists, don’t make excuses for them!
Mike E said
I honestly think Harriet does not understand the quotes she cites. In a way that is remarkable she gets neither the context in which these things are said, nor the irony that Zizek employs.
From what I can tell, the quotes simply don’t say what she implies.
Harriet said
“Could you explain how he’s apologizing for the Israeli attack on Lebanon, i.e., in your citation? ”
Israel is the victim. Israel is the one damaged and suffering. Israel’s image is even the one bombarded (by “images of dead Lebanese women and children”). Lebanese women and children are doing the bombarding, with their images. They are the agents of the bombardment, bombarding us with pictures of themselves dead. (You saw the mainstream press, of course, this fits in with the theme that Hezbollah was arranging to have dead children for propaganda purposes – recall the context! Zizek confirms this, but subtly of course, since he is pretending to be a leftist dissident.) Israel is under attack. Hated. Impotent. It’s intentions are “paternal”, merely a “display” – comical, reminiscent of a badly subtitled movie, the surgeons are on strike! hahahahah. – but it is weak. and it suffers catastrophic damage.
Seems very clear to me and everyone I know who isn’t a devotee of the guru. I think you’d have to really be a kind of blind Zizek fanatic not to notice. Especially in the context of everything else. But it is admittedly the most subtle, and thus the one someone would naturally isolate if not arguing in good faith.
Now can you tell me how you interpret this?
The guy embraced me and told me dying of laughter “now you can call me a nigger.” Like when blacks tell you “you can call me a nigger” means they really accept you no?
and this
“There was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gypsy) family which camped close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which they occupied illegally ) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc…. When the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen to be a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of small harassments from the Roma.
“It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. – nobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.”
and this:
“The problem that we have today in Afghanistan is a real problem. I understand the Americans. It’s easy to say ‘exit strategy’ but we all know with the corruption of the existing American puppet regime, if the United States withdrew now, probably, probably, in the latest a couple of months, Taleban takes over, and that’s the fiasco which the United States cannot afford.”
These are more explicit and ought then be less challenging if you are sincere.
Harriet said
“But if you take the time to figure out what he is trying to say and aren’t just fishing for evidence against him, its pretty clear that this is not what Harriet suggests.”
No I only linked the conference because the written versions are all in books and not on line.
Read the written versions of these same remarks.
You claim: “He is caricaturing the patronizing attitude of white liberals”
Name six white liberals who have this “^patronizing attitude” about “half ape blacks” not including yourself or Zizek. Name those people who interpret rebel Haitian soldiers singing the Marseillaise this way, those who you claim are the target of this caricature. Justify the caricature.
What does Zizek himself contend in contrast to the purported white liberal caricature? He says that the soldiers (presumably those under Dessalines at the seige of Crete à Pierrot) meant to say “we are more Frenchmen then you.”
Justify that interpretation of what Dessalines and his beseiged forces meant to say by singing the Marseillaise.
Zizek has put in writing that they meant to say “We stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology”
Justify that interpretation – there is evidence, use it, don’t think you can just make things up to suit you because the protagonists of this history were black – and explain how Zizek’s imputation differs from the “paternalistic” liberal multiculturalist foil.
That is, try to make a coherent case for something rather than just opportunistically batting back fragments you tear off my comments. Or don’t. But if you don’t, you can’t persuade.
Harriet said
I honestly think Harriet does not understand the quotes she cites.
This one especially really stumps me:
Like when blacks tell you “you can call me a nigger” means they really accept you no?
Can you explain it? I know you don’t want to insult my intelligence by having to put it in the clearest, most childish words, so I can get it, but don’t worry, I won’t mind. Because I really do want to understand it. What does it mean?
Harriet said
And this baffles me also:
When a man was killed in the camp
I don’t understand. Can you explain what this means?
and this too?
a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms,
Can you explain what he is trying to say here? I can’t untangle it.
And this?
in Belgrade people are defiantly dancing on the streets while, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place…
Please please tell me what this is about? A genocide three hundred kilometers South of Belgrade? when was this? What is a genocide? How does the genocide of African proportions compare to the European proportions one? Bigger or smaller? Or the same? (If so why an African one in Europe?) I ask everywhere and nobody will tell me. Because I’m too dumb I guess, but please, try. Someone.
Thanks for your efforts.
Harriet said
There were no “liberal multiculturalists” in Slovenia insisting that the thieving, murderous “Roma way of life” should be embraced by the non-Roma neighbours because it was the result fo “centuries of persecution”. Zizek invents these liberals to denounce in order to establish that the “Roma way of life” involvies the theft and violence of which he accuses them and which he lies about to justify the attacks of the racist mobs who terrorised the Strojans from their home. And there are no “liberal multiculturalists” claiming that the defenders of the fort at Crete à Pierrot under Dessalines were “half-ape blacks” whose “grandparents jumped on trees in Africa.” Zizek invents them to denounce just as he invents those in Slovenia, to propagate the idea of the Saint Domingue rebels as ‘half-ape’, in contrast to “Frenchmen” just as his fictional Slovenian liberals can propagate the idea of the violent and larcenous ‘Roma way of life’ in contrast to that of the “frightened” Slovene kkk types.
Mike E said
Again, I’m not going to spoonfed a textual analysis to anyone. But I think you have misunderstood all these quotes. And I see no evidence that he is endorsing racist ideas.
I’ve spent time in a Roma camp, at the time when the neighboring French city was in a frenzy over their arrival. The persecution of Roma has been horrific — inlcuding of course real genocide under the Nazis, and real persecution in the last decades in several eastern European countries.
But are you implying that it is racist to even raise the questions Zizek raises around this?
Radical Eyes said
But, Harriet, for Zizek to say that Israel’s international image will “suffer” from the circulation of images resulting from its bombing of Lebannon does NOT imply that for him Israel is to be ultimately sympathized with or supported, with respect to its treatment of Palestinians or Lebanese, or in general. (Indeed, in Zizek’s most recent book Living in the End Times, he quite clearly argues for the position of a singular democratic secular state in Israel-Palestine, the Finkelstein position…This represents movement on Zizek’s part as far as I am aware.)
Similarly for Zizek to “understand the Americans” with respect to Afghanistan, and even to recognize that the United States “cannot afford” the “fiasco” of the Taliban rising/returning to power does NOT mean that Zizek is saying that what the USA–its ruling leadership and institutions–is fighting for in Afghanistan (or more generally) is just or ought to be idenitfied with or supported. But that does not mean that he (or that we) can and should NOT think through the viewpoint of the ruling class in the US.
Perhaps though we are getting at something that makes Harriet (and no doubt others) uneasy with or confused by Zizek’s method of argument and analysis: namely a great deal of what Zizek does involves inhabiting a mode of thought, or a particular philosophical or political perpective (that is NOT his own ultimately) and thinking through its various aspects and moments in order to expose something new about that position, say, a contradiction buried beneath the surface, an ironic similarity between said position and its ostensible “opponent,” an obscene implication that is generally kept out of sight, etc.
But just because Zizek–or because any one– seeks to understand and to see through the eyes of others or other ideologies that may seem to belong to the “enemy” camp (or even that ultimately DO belong in that camp!) does NOT mean that he is advocating for that camp, nor that the ideas or values of that camp are to be taken as Zizek’s–or anyone’s–own.
That said, I do agree with Tell No Lies that Zizek could do better sometimes to phrase himself in such a way as to make such misreadings less likely. Nonetheless they remain misreadings.
Harriet said
These are all fictional characters
- the Slovene multiculturalist liberals who want the hearty Slovene native villagers to embrace the murderous larcenous Roma way of life,
- the multiculturalists who see the defenders of the fort at Crete à Pierrot as half-apes who were asserting their inferiority and gratitude to be able to participate in the superior French culture
- the “black, African-American guy” who was so delighted and impressed with Zizek’s joke about his big black penis that he told Zizek he could call him “a nigger”.
- the person who Zizek claims accused him of “visual rape” in the United States for looking her/him in the eye
- the “lesbian feminist” who “In an incident in US academia a couple of years ago… claimed that gays are today the privileged victims, so that the analysis of how gays are underprivileged provides the key to understanding all other exclusions, repressions, violences, etc. (religious, ethnic, class)”
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol5_1/v5-1-article3-zizek.html
- the Serb perpetrators of “a genocide of African proportions”
- the “Popular Assembly” in Paris that greeted Toussaint L’Ouverture and a “black delegation” from independent Haiti with ecstatic ovation
These are a small sample only. They are all the props with which Zizek fashions his bigotted fictions. There are imaginary Jews, among them is an imaginary “Viennese Jewish writer”, there is an imaginary friend who keeps having an imaginary lunch with Noam Chomsky, there are the imaginary Enron whistleblowers, loads of imaginary leftists who say the dumbest things, imaginary Muslim fanatics who shut down opera productions, there are imaginary anarchists who transform into tyrants and despots, there is the imaginary Noam Chomsky who said Barack Obama is “a white guy blackened by a few hours sun tanning” and who also “wrote a preface” for Faurisson’s holocaust denying book, and on and on. You can single out one and find an excuse for it. But the racist and bigoted stereotypes who appear in the Zizek Show are legion. The fawning black sidekick like a Klansman’s fantasy of the good old days of Jim Crow when every swaggering white terrorist could get an invitation to call his victims that word; the egoist lesbian feminist with her absurd narcissism, the political correct gestapo persecuting white men by falsely crying rape, the Serbs cavorting “obscenely” and perpetrating an “African” bloodbath…these are the dramatis personae of the paranoid reactionary’s imaginary world. We find them in the National Review, in the discourse of Anne Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and, serving a different niche – yours – Zizek.
Harriet said
But, Harriet, for Zizek to say that Israel’s international image will “suffer” from the circulation of images resulting from its bombing of Lebannon does NOT imply that for him Israel is to be ultimately sympathized with or supported, with respect to its treatment of Palestinians or Lebanese, or in general.
So what? Do you take orders on who to sympathize with from Zizek? Does anyone?
Are you a child? Don’t you have any idea how advertising works?
Well, it’s not important. You are the sort of mark he makes his living off. If you want to beliebe that inventing fictional history – Toussaint L’Ouverture cheered at the “Popular Assembly in Paris”, someone killed at the Strojan’s house, genocides in Kosovo – is thinking through a philosophical position, then you are very far gone, basically I am tugging at your crack pipe. So, keep it.
Harriet said
“But are you implying that it is racist to even raise the questions Zizek raises around this?”
What question? You mean, is it racist just to explain that the Ku Klux Klan was not “racist” after all but just defending people from black aggression? While the white multiculturalist liberals condemned them as “racists” and insisted that the raping black way of life should be embraced by white people because the black male penchant for raping white women was the result of centuries of oppression? Would it be racist to even “raise this question”?
Yup. But if I have to tell you then a) you already know and b) you’ll never admit it.
saoirse said
I think its going to require some distance from all of these posts to gain some perspective on what’s really being talked about here. Gotta admit this is one spicy discussion though I think its gone off the rails quite a few times and had some seriously unnecessary nastiness. i read Zizek as I read Kissinger, Camille Paglia, etc. They all have problematic politics. And they all have interesting things to say (Kissinger’s not as funny as the other two). I learn from all of them. Zizek is unique in that he may in fact be the most famous Communist (?) philosopher in the world right now. As a revolutionary he doesn’t necessarily help the project along at least directly and at times he sure as heck seems to be hurting it.
Post Modernism, post structuralism too are a mishmash of ideas, theories and methods. But where would our understandings of sex, gender, identity and art be without them. I mean really. where? When I was at Brooklyn college in the 1990s I spent most of my time organizing and skipping classes. But when I went to class I was drawn to studying African American fiction, French new wave film and Gay porn, AIDS, historical materialism, the art of the Dadaists and the poetry of Lower East Side drug addicts. Most of these heady discussions took place in the English Dept of all places which was a hot bed of PoMo theorists at the school. Young queers may have taken action with the anarchists and commies but we also drew from Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. You had to even if it meant wadding into some intellectual naval gazing along the way.
Going back to the original ML blog post they may have read more Z than I have. Harriet too. And if the later has mis-read some of his work well I mis-read Judith Butler’s first book Gender Trouble 15 years ago and lo and behold she wrote an entire second book devoted to mis-readings of her first book too. Which is to say if Zizek is so incomprehensible to so many of us well give of a frakking break. I read a few of Zizek’s quotes differently than she did but I also found his flip attitude when speaking about homophobia fucked up. I(we) should delve deeper into some of the other work Harriet has pointed out as Mike and others have.
I think the Balkans war is a concrete issue we could really tease out here. Mike has brought out some excellent previously written material that we should chew on. In the mean time perhaps someone can sum up some of Zizek’s better and clearer work and point those out. As I’ve said elsewhere his film criticism is quite good.
Harriet said
Saoirse – Paglia is a good comparison, she is a fraud, but Anne Coulter is a better one, or Coulter crossed with Borat.
But I find it a little amazing that these guys actually consider it practising “philosophy” to fantasise about calling people “n***ers” and having them grin and laugh and pretend there were whistleblowers at Enron. It’s creepy really.
Dave Palmer said
I think Harriet was exactly correct to put Zizek in the same category as Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern. He seems to be a professional buffoon, and claiming to be a Marxist is part of his act.
I don’t think it shows a lack of sophistication to regard this buffoonery as obnoxious. There’s nothing wrong with using humor to make a point — it’s just that Zizek’s humor is not very funny, and the points he makes are often wrong.
That being said, I think the tone and methods which Harriet and May9 have adopted in this discussion doesn’t do their arguments a lot of favors.
If I were to adopt the same methods, I could note that in comment 64, Harriet says that Gypsies are “violent and thieving” and that they have a “wicked way of life.” And in comment 66, she says that “Israel is the victim.” So clearly Harriet is a reactionary — and possibly a drug addict and a thief, since in comment 74 she expresses a desire to steal a crack pipe from someone.
saoirse said
I suppose one could say to each is own Michael Savage and Howard Stern are both assholes that can be incredibly funny. They maybe right wing or liberals or fascists but they have talent. Paglia and Zizek might be too but they are both incredibly smart and say things I find interesting. I read them actively with interest even if I see some of their limitations. I don’t find Beck or Coultier funny or interesting or smart perhaps others do though they do speak for a certain layer of the right in this country therefore I sometimes pay attention when they are attacking certain bald communists.
balzac said
While Mike originally posted this article as a polemic against dogmatic dismissals of writers based on some combination of the fact that they are theoretical and not understandable at first glance or that they have had (or even still maintain) some problematic politics, there are some really interesting questions about Zizek which are emerging in the discussion – basically, how do we evaluate someone who is at times hypocritical, self-contradictory, egotistical, or overly inclined to the use of irony in very sensitive circumstances? These are significant questions, because a person’s worldview tends to be deeply interconnected and one cannot simply cut out the good parts and leave the bad (just as one cannot say that an entire body is ill if it contains one pathogen in one remote region); so how do we do that? What our are options? I do not have any real answers but I will try to summarize what I see as going on here:
The consensus here seems to agree that Zizek is not much of a theorist, at least in terms of offering us some new way of looking at the world. There is also a relative consensus that Zizek has, at the very least, a questionable past and that aspects of some of his past political tendencies may or may not reappear in his present-day writings, not to mention the fact that his use of irony is not always successful or simply unnecessary and insensitive to the very real struggles of some people; not to mention that his tendency to use irony can make it difficult to understand what the fuck he is really trying to say in the first place. So what is the value of Zizek? Those who do see a value in what he says seem to agree that it can be entertaining and engaging. Others might not find what he has to say particularly valuable (I do personally think he rehashes a lot but updates it with his ironic Lacanian shtick) but the fact that he is someone willing to defend Lenin and partially defend Mao (and even Stalin) has a use in bringing these figures back into popular discourse – even if this only popular academic discourse and, given the “dustbin of history” status neoliberalism has been so eager to assign to Marxism (be it socialism, communism, anarchism, or various combinations thereof), this is obviously not insignificant. He, at least superficially, seems to be on “our” side and this is the potential of his appeal, especially since he has the capacity to reach a large amount of people.
Personally, I’m still reserving my judgment – not because I have not read enough to really say much, but because I do not know the overall effects he will have on Marxist discourse, at least within the circles that he addresses. There are writers who do what he does a lot better, with less problematic pasts, and who aren’t pricks half the time; but that doesn’t make Zizek useless, or necessary to ignore.
Harriet said
Terror firmer
Second, terror: the ruthless punishment of all those who violate the imposed protective measures, including severe limitations of liberal “freedoms” and the technological control of prospective lawbreakers. Third, voluntarism: the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of collective decision-making that will arrest the “spontaneous” logic of capitalist development (Walter Benjamin, in his essay “On the Concept of History”, pointed out that the task of a revolution is to “stop the train” of history that runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe – an insight that has gained new weight with the prospect of ecological catastrophe).
Last but not least, trust in the people: the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own and are ready to participate in their enforcement. We should not be afraid to encourage, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the resurgence of an important figure in all egalitarian-revolutionary terror – the “informer” who denounces culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)
Once upon a time, we called this communism
http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2010/05/essay-nature-catastrophe
This is an excellent example of Zizek’s technique – “financial authorities” is sufficiently vague that when an objection is raised to the falsehood of the statement – there were no Enron insider whistleblowers, nobody tipped off the government or regulators; Time magazine published no piece about Enron heroes, but did have one about an executive whose ass-covering memo to the controllers became an important bit of evidence and who became a key witness for the prosecution because of it – his crackaddict fans can say but the firm’s own bookkeepers are “the financial authorites” who were tipped off by the subject of a Time magazine article. If you then say but Time magazine doesn’t celebrate anyone as a hero for that memo to these “financial authorities” another excuse will be found. The fan doesn’t have to even cover the whole deception with an explanation, just each fragment of the nonsense can have a seperate excuse. It’s buried in so much noise, too, that any objection will seem kind of overly finical, and missing the important issue, which is available for reading on any point of the spectrum from sincerity to insanity; it’s parody, some will say, it’s provocation, others will say, depending on the criticism, whole no one will be able to say what’s interesting about it or in what way it is other than vacuous blabber surrounding a bizarre but not (to the ruling class) politically useless lie about Enron.
onehundredflowers said
Harriet said: “I have looked and found nothing worth learning in his work. And neither evidently have you.”
Second things first: I haven’t gone into an extended argument about the virtues of Zizek’s ideas because this isn’t about defending Zizek, but about methodology, and how to engage, or not, ideas in an all-sided manner. As to the first sentence, this is further confirmation of bad method. Even if one disagrees with a system of thought, to make no reference to key ideas or concepts in a criticism seems bizarre. Perhaps I missed it in your flurry of comments, but I don’t recall any analysis of “the Symbolic,” “the Real”, “the Imaginary”, the “big Other,” or to any writings on the Cartesian subject, belief or violence. It’s fine to argue that these concepts or Zizek’s arguments on these topics are of little or no value, but to ignore them and then to claim to have a serious critique of Zizek is a bit peculiar, to say the least.
Dave Palmer said: “If I were to adopt the same methods, I could note that in comment 64, Harriet says that Gypsies are “violent and thieving” and that they have a “wicked way of life.” And in comment 66, she says that “Israel is the victim.” So clearly Harriet is a reactionary — and possibly a drug addict and a thief, since in comment 74 she expresses a desire to steal a crack pipe from someone.”
I don’t agree with Dave’s take on Zizek, but I think he’s zeroed in on why this debate is so frustrating. Selectively quoting, or misquoting, people, produces bad readings which then take time and effort to untangle. Here’s another way we could apply this method:
Albert Einstein contributed to the Manhattan Project, which produced atomic bombs which lead to hundreds of thousands of Japanese deaths. It also laid the cornerstone for the ascendancy and dominance of US imperial power in the post-world War II period, which could account for millions of more deaths [I'm including those by US-supported puppet governments as well]. He was even asked to be president of Israel! The fact that he wrote an article supporting socialism, and even later regretted his participation in the Manhattan Project can’t erase the blood of millions from his hands. Obviously Albert Einstein was a tool of imperialism and must be repudiated.
Mike E said
moderator note:
Discussions on this site are civil, respectful and substantive. Not ad hominem (personal) attacks or attacks on people’s motives.
Tell No Lies said
Harriet,
Can we take this down a notch and give each other the benefit of the doubt please?
I am not a “Zizek groupie.” I think he has some interesting things to say and deserves our attention, if only because he already has the attention of many. I’ve read a little of his work and liked it, but it has not been a significant influence on my thinking, philosophically or politically. I also think he invites misinterpretation.
In every instance where you see Zizek “justifying” this or that atrocity I see him making a quite different point which has little to do with either justifying or condemning, or even about the actual events, but rather about the meanings these events take on and how they are used by often distant actors. You accuse him of wanting to “propagate the idea of the Saint Domingue rebels as ‘half-ape’” when it is quite clear that he is attacking others, fairly or not, for holding this view. (I would say that a great many white liberals have publicly patronizing and privately much uglier views of Haitians or black folk in general and that lurid as Zizek’s imagery is, it describes views still quite prevalent.) And while it is in some sense anachronistic to describe French troops in 1802 as “liberal multiculturalists” this might be exactly what Zizek wants to suggest. They were quite literally the official representatives of the Declaration of the Rights of Man even though they were in the process of suppressing a slave revolution. If you understand that in the context of 1802 to be a “Frenchman” was at least in one sense to be the bearer of a revolutionary ideology, the act of singing the Marseillaise was to lay claim to that status and to deny it to the French or to at least expose their hypocrisy. This at least is how I read Zizek’s comments.
Is Zizek pompous and arrogant? No doubt. Hyperbolic? You bet. Does he invent or borrow other peoples inventions in order to illustrate his points? Yes. He is not a historian. He is a philosopher with a sense of theater who makes shit up to get across an idea because he can’t be bothered to use the Google to find real facts that would illustrate his point just as well. If you don’t understand this and you take his stories as serious factual representations you will blow a gasket. A central theme in his work is how liberal multiculturalism smugly constructs a racist other without confronting its own racism, the way, for example that upper middle class whites with West Indian nannies unselfconsciously look down on racist Southern whites. He does this in a deliberately provocative way, putting inflammatory words in other peoples mouths, but I think you really have to miss his central point to interpret his views as hateful towards Black folk or the Roma, which is a separate question from whether his characterization of liberal multiculturalism is on target or not.
Harriet said
“So clearly Harriet is a reactionary — and possibly a drug addict and a thief, since in comment 74 she expresses a desire to steal a crack pipe from someone.”
Well the thing is though that this is how propaganda works now. The floating point of view – Colbert, Borat are models, the Caveman insurance ads, things like this:
Zizek exploits these same techniques, and I could too. Indeed if I were just evoking, as Zizek does, some vague, “typical” “liberal multiculturalists” when I introduced the notion of “wicked Roma way of life”, you could assume my purpose was to light up that cliché, just turn it on and let it work, like showing an emotionally charged picture, no matter what kind of posture I packed it in.
But you will notice that Zizek brings up incessantly a lot of images and tropes that are virtually forgotten: he revives them (like David Lynch), he resuscitates every image and topos that antiracism and feminism and progressive cultural praxis came close to obliterating. His incessant recital of the vices of Jews according to Eastern European anti-Semitic tradition for example – especially when he is in dialigue with someone ethnically Jewish, like Judith Butler – is teaching Americans anti-Semitic mythology many honestly never heard before. Nobody who is 20 in the Bay area of California ever heard, anywhere but from Zizek, that Jews are “dirty” and prey sexually on “our” gentile women, or profiteer in human blood or, as children, demand to be bitten. But he repeats and repeats these things and gradually they become current again (and some for the first time, because he works on the newest style of Islamophobia too). There was nervous laughter when he began with his “half-ape blacks” but within thirty seconds there were cheers. It took less than a minute to accustom the audience, to show them to give themselves permission. An all white audience, already attracted to his white supremacism, with no black folks there, needs little encouragement alas. He is very actively undoing the civilising accomplishments of decades of feminist and anti-racist and anti-homophobic cultural activism. He is not by any means the only cultural worker on that tip but he is the principal evangelist to the radical Left on it. He delights resentful white men and he intimidates others into fearing to seem “not to get it” – his white male volunteer storm troopers make sure to try to convince everyone who objects that they have no sense of humor or don’t understand his complex thought (the biggest joke of all). Students, especially women, especially women of color, are more easily bullied in this manner than their elders. This is where he and his posse focus, so far with lamentable success.
He should not be indulged. The Emperor Has No Clothes. The reason none of his defenders here can name something positive and worthwhile about his work is that there is nothing, not that it is too deep and complex to describe. The reason they all ignore the “nigger” story, the African proportions genocide, the libel of the Strojans, is that they can’t figure out how to spin it not because they refuse to “spoonfeed” a simpleminded dame like me.
Mike E said
In a discussion of these matters, “the Marxist-Leninist” writes:
I think that is a revealing comment.
The Marxist-Leninist said
What does it reveal, Mike?
Harriet said
Well better to smugly sniff at racists – I mean, racists can’t complain too much when people sniff at their racism (I am not unaware there is an implication that this is class snobbery, that it is bourgeois and white to be “multicultural” and the working class and people of color who are racist, but this is yet another one of those myths that Zizek propagates in this sneaky way) – anyway, better to sniff at Glenn Beck snootily and act decently than to shove your racism in the faces of people who don’t want to be assaulted by it, no?
Can you name an African American who claims to prefer to be assaulted verbally in racist language by some refreshingly uninhibited racist like Zizek then surrounded by people who have learned to keep their malice, fear and fantasies to themselves and act respectfully even when they have “lurid” thoughts?
Everyone is always willing to say this about others – oh, other people are repressing their racism. Some do and they should! Are you? if not, do you really think you are the only one? Aren’t there other people who are not black and who don’t feel the need to talk about big penises every time they meet a black man? And who don’t think “African” is just a term of contempt, a name for everything horrifying and lowly, and “European” the greatest compliment a person, idea, capital asset or colony could receive?
Zizek is obviously unusual in the US – he is obviously deeply racist and uncomfortable. he comes from a country where sports fans make gorilla noises at black footballers. He wants to spread this kind of thing, he is convinced that everyone he meets who is not black is repressing the urge to do this. Well whoever is repressing these urges should continue to do so. religiously. It’s not, happily, the majority where I live; there are many places where many white people do not have to restrain themselves from bursting out in penis jokes and monkey noises.
65% of Slovenes polled _called themselves racists_, claiming to hate Roma most and Jews next. Are they just more honest? No, they are more racist. We should resist Zizek’s efforts to insist on others being multiculturally “open” to his Slovene “way of life”. If its about renouncing the hypocrisy of multiculturalism, then great, screw Slovenian culture with its Roma hunting Judeophobic monkey shreikers. We do things differently here, there, everywhere, and we prefer our ways to these barbaric furrin customs.
David_D said
Was the title or content of this posting edited; if so, why? I recall something about “worst” which is no longer apparent.
Tony K said
The Marxist-Leninist: Though I can’t speak for Mike E, this did cross my mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
On another note, this whole discussion has been wildly enlightening; the fact that things Zizek said can create such rabid responses is a symptom in itself of the predicament that we find ourselves in, a symptom in my opinion of the hegemonic triumph of postmodern-liberal individualism and anti-intellectualism even among many of those in the “Left”.
So thanks for that.
David_D said
To clarify, formerly this post was entitled “The Worst Essay in Ages: On Žižek.” Why has it been revised? Similarly, this question applies to the renaming of the post formerly entitled “Reply to Worst Essay in Ages: Not on Žižek.” In engaging in criticism, I think things like revision of polemics should be open and aboveboard. If it was said in the first place, it should be memorialized, and the rationale for revision put forth.
Iris said
It was mentioned in the thread that Mike felt the tone of the title was inappropriately snarky (and I’ll assume a little ironic, since it was heading an article that critiqued method).
Specifically: comment 27, in ‘A Question of Method in an Attack On Žižek’
May9 said
“The original essay on The Marxist-Leninist would have been a lot stronger if the investigation that has apparently occurred after it was written in order to defend it had occurred before hand and informed the argument.
That said, the additional evidence presented here that I have had the opportunity to examine has not been that compelling. May 9 linked to an essay in which Zizek supposedly spoke of Serbian monsters, but in fact was attributing that view to “Western pacifists.”
Well, you can ignore evidence if you wish, but this was posted multiple times now.
http://www.lacan.com/kosovo.htm
This is a clear and unequivocal demand for more bombing and a lament that it wasn’t done sooner, among other disgusting things.
As for the part the nonsense about ‘method’ – which is nothing more than excuse making and apologia for what Zizek has done in practice – I never intended for this essay to receive any kind of wide audience. I wrote the thing two years ago on a blog I never developed and forgot about. The ML blog found it useful and posted it, Ely had already been trying to pick a fight with ML blog so he used my post as fodder.
So yes, I wasn’t going to do a research project on every aspect of Zizek’s impenetrable “thought” before commenting on the fact that his ‘in practice’ Marxist credentials are exactly zero. I wanted to bring attention to the fact that while Zizek pretends he’s a Marxist-Leninist, he actively worked for counterrevolution and still does so. I believe he’s deceiving people.
I have since been amazed that practice matters so little to some people here and that so many different excuses can be made for Zizek being a poseur, but I hardly think I need to read his reviews of movies before pointing out that he is a phony and a charlatan who obviously doesn’t believe the stuff he’s saying about Marxism.
This rant about “method” is a lot of smoke and mirrors, a pedantic way to distract from Zizek’s reactionary activities. The only argument in favor of Zizek that anyone has come up with in all of these comments is he’s made Lenin and Mao “interesting” among people who read hard to read philosophy for fun, even if he himself doesn’t believe a word he says.
rob said
doesn’t one divide into two?
there is some good stuff in badiou and zizek and some stuff that is also bullshit.
rather, there is some stuff that is useful for communists, and some stuff that is mainly academic ( ie lacan may be interesting but i dont think studying lacan is any great duty for communists).
I mean, it is ok to read all kinds of things, but we should not expect everything to give a marxist leninist line on things.perhaps we shouldn’t expect Zizek and Badiou to be the new Marx.
i think there is a problem with a lot of zizek and badiou, in that they write in a way that it hard for many people to understand. i dont think he is a racist, and he has introduced Lenin to a new generation of people who would never had read him.
zizek asks many important questions but he does not give the answer we like- so what?
Harriet said
And just lastly – one of the results of his method is to attach people emotionally so loyally that they stop noticing their own contradictions.
For example – defending Zizek’s lengthy, vivid musing about “half ape blacks” requires people to posit “a great many” white racists concealing their racism who are supposedly being spoofed here in order to educate the audience about them and to declare Zizek’s daring and radical disagreement with their views (Zizek takes the “controversial” position that “blacks” are NOT “half-apes”!). Before Zizek explained that “blacks” are NOT “half-apes”, what did this all white audience at this all white conference think about this? Are we to suppose Zizek’s daring send-up of those who believe “blacks” to be “half-apes” was needed to dispell their own assumptions? Or are they all just bonding in their liberal multiculturalist mutual congratulation celebrating how they are all so much more enlightened than the object of Zizek’s caricature who imagines “half-ape blacks whose grandparents jumped in trees like apes in Africa”?
So at the same time as Zizek’s fans have to posit, in order to justify his remarks, a great many secretly luridly racist white folks whose imaginations are overrun with images that appear to have been burned in Zizek’s brain by the Nazi propaganda clips in The Sorrow and the Pity, defending Zizek from the obvious observation that he is titillating and gratifying the thinly veiled racism in his white fans – these very “great many” white liberals with lurid thoughts – requires his defenders to make an immedate about face and claim that his white liberal audience is not taking pleasure in his racist expressions and is distinct from these “white liberal multiculturalists”.
Since his fans must claim to know a great many of these white racists but may decline to name any, the racists who justify the remarks (the objects of the caricature) can remain an anonymous cloud whose location can be continually shifted to the propagandistic purposes of Zizek and his fans. At times his fans when necessary will proclaim “but he is only saying that we are all racists and anti-Semites, participants in Ideology or The Racist Imaginary…” and at others they will deny their belonging and Zizek’s to the white racist horde and deploy the horde as their foil. These contradictory positions are adopted simultaneously to render the interlude of “half-ape blacks” at the fort of Crete à Pierrot acceptable and to make the story in the even more absurd written form (complete with white soldiers who at first “think they hear some tribal war chant” before – swelling violins! – realising it is the Marseillaise!) seem plausible. When the unfactuality of his account is objected to, his fans will dismiss it as the result of being too lazy to google. The question of why his imagination should have produced this specific fiction, and what it’s effects on the reader are – what their pleasure in it is – is evaded by praising Zizek as simply an incompetent intellectual.
The white racists or reactionaries or imperialists imagined to be “caricatured” by Zizek are always elsewhere and his odious ideas always attributed to them wherever they are, even though it is confessed it is his own refusal of “hypocrisy” – it would be hypocrisy for him to behave “politically correctly” (courteously, civiliiy, respectfully) to people he thinks belong to a “different race” than his because it would require him concealing or stifling expressions of his real spontaneously racist thoughts and feelings – that results in the daring, principled and magically conquering acts of sexually harrassing black colleagues and students or acquaintances with racist remarks.
It is interesting that Zizek adapts for a racist purpose the really tired misogynist myth that people secretly like the abuse and admire those who sexually harass them – you really love it! He invents “a big, black guy” who really does love it – a kind of Punjab to his Daddy Warbucks, a magic Negro, an adoring and approving best black friend forever – as men have in anecdotes invented the woman who really does love those titty remarks and arse pinches time out of mind. This type of story is outmoded, he is reviving it, but it still ought be recogniseable even to undergrads since it was once so ubiquitous and can be found in heaps of important literature and classic film etc.
But Zizek’s fans become so attached emotionally to him, so addicted to these “provocative” old borscht belt gags, their judgement is deactivated. In the blurb of the RSAnimate lecture posted recently, the RSA promises that Zizek will reveal something “very surprising” about the new genres of ethical and environmental marketing of consumer goods. Listen to the lecture. He describes Starbucks marketing. It has the tone of a set up for a revelation or observation or hypothesis of some sort. But that never comes. He just describes the marketing, says “of course charity is good! i am not saying charity is bad. it is just not a communist revolution.” And that’s it.
Duh. Where is the surprising insight about the ethical/environmental consumer goods marketing? There is an illusion that something was said about it but nothing actually was. There are a lot of words, the superficial trappings of a lecture, but no content. This is the quality Jameson described as typical of “post-modernism”. And Zizek is the ultimate post-modern, because he of course also declares himself opposed to post-modernism. Like “I call my African American students speakchuckers but not in a racist way” and “modernity, rationality and communism are european but I don’t mean this in a eurocentric way” and “I like to email my sexual fantasies about them to women students but not in a sexist way”, and “American occupation is not always the bad guy but I don’t say this in an imperialist way”.
Harriet said
“erhaps I missed it in your flurry of comments, but I don’t recall any analysis of “the Symbolic,” “the Real”, “the Imaginary”, the “big Other,” or to any writings on the Cartesian subject, belief or violence. It’s fine to argue that these concepts or Zizek’s arguments on these topics are of little or no value,”
Okay, you say I ought have discussed Descartes and Lacan or Zizek’s commentary on them to show why I don’t think his remarks on them are of any value. Fair enough.
Give me your idea of the dozen most interesting and valiable of Zizek’s remarks, assertions, proposals on these topics and I will tell you why they are either banal or wrong. I already know that everything he saus is either banal or wrong because I have read his material – there seems to be a lot of books but they are actually very repetitive and there’s about three small volumes, perhaps 800 pages, of material, that is remixed and repackaged repeatedly. I know it all. So you choose what you feel are the dozen most important insights or proposals or content in Zizek – you don’t have to say why you find it interesting, just identify the content you consider to be valuable – and I will take the time to explain why each of them is banal or wrong. Okay? Make your list as compelling as possible, the greatest hits, so you can’t later say that I can’t dismiss his important Philosophy just because of this or that trivial little idiocy. Don’t put trivia, jokes, ironic diversions and idiocy on the list, just the really deep, profound, best, most original, most important and valuable stuff he has written. The stuff that justifies the time to read through all the rest.
thomas said
The ML: “I hold the position that Marxism (dialectical materialism) stands at the end of philosophy, and that any attempt to get beyond Marxism is merely a return to a pre-Marxian philosophical position, though perhaps in new clothes.”
I’m wondering what that means–”the end of philosophy.” Do you mean to say that we’ve reached the limits of philosophical frameworks that can be applied to society to understand it? That phrase–”the end of”–always sends up a (har har) red flag for me, thinking that dialectics teaches us that we’re never at THE END of ANYTHING. I don’t want to cringe at this like I would, say, “the end of history,” but it has the same ring to it, though this is maybe only rhetorical similarity.
Tell No Lies said
May 9,
You really should read (or watch, since many are on Youtube) Zizek’s movie reviews. Because if you did, you would probably have a much better shot at picking up his uses of irony and provocation when he discusses things that seem to actually matter to you.
You link to Zizek’s essay “Against the Double Blackmail” which you characterized as “a clear and unequivocal demand for more bombing and a lament that it wasn’t done sooner.” Its not hard to find the passages that you think support this reading, but its a reading that only makes sense if you don’t ask what the main argument of the essay is (or if you think against all evidence that Zizek is in the business of making “clear and unequivocal demands”).
The main argument is a rejection of the forced choice between NATO and Milosevic — the double blackmail.
Now if you take the position, as you apparently do, that Milosevic was some sort of revolutionary socialist and not the Serbian national chauvinist whose liquidation of the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo in 1990 precipitated the break-up of Yugoslavia, then of course any suggestion of this sort must really be a thinly veiled statement of support for NATO, and the bitter irony of Zizek’s suggestion that there should have been more bombing sooner can be read literally as a straightforward policy recommendation of the sort that Zizek pretty much never engages in, (just as his movie reviews never include thumbs up/thumb down verdicts).
If however you regard both NATO and Milosevic as horror shows, then the quality of despair in Zizek’s provocation is what jumps out and you understand that he is suggesting that Milosevic is a creature of neo-liberalism and that if NATO had taken him out sooner at least we might have been spared the mass death of the war, since at the end of the day whatever the outcome we are still trapped in capitalism.
So the question as I see it is which comes first, the bad method or the bad politics? Does the combing of Zizek’s writings for “clear and unequivocal demands” and the dopey literalism flow from the compulsion to uphold gangsters like Milosevic (and Deng, Hussein, Ahmadinejad, etc., etc…) or is the cartoon version of anti-imperialism a consequence of the lack of interest in serious investigation?
Method is an important part of practice and is in fact central to this discussion.
Your method begins from the position that Milosevic is a socialist and that therefore any serious critic of his rule is a reactionary who must be exposed. After that its simply a matter of digging up dirt for which the Google is so helpful. No actual effort to unpack and analyze what Zizek actually says is necessary. The problem revealed here, of course, is that the cartoon universe in which Milosevic is a progressive doesn’t have much room for the ironic language games that are Zizek’s forte, and so most of the evidence you find ends out only being evidence of your inability or unwillingness to read Zizek the way he needs to be read to actually be understood. You set out to expose Zizek, but only expose yourself. Your know-nothing attitude renders you incapable of actually deciphering his politics and repeatedly causes you to see things as their very opposite.
It also renders you unable to understand Kasama’s politics and why we think Zizek deserves our attention. We are not, your accusations notwithstanding, followers or groupies or apologists for Zizek. Whether Zizek’s ideas are correct is actually a separate question from whether they are worthy of attention. We think they are important because we think the revived interest in communism within philosophy is important and Zizek has been a central figure in promoting that. We understand that the common practice in much of the communist movement is not to give any public attention to any public intellectual without first arriving at a verdict and that therefore some people assume that our posting of Zizek’s speeches constitutes a general endorsement of his philosophy, politics and views on film. This is not, as we have tried to explain ad nauseum, our approach. We believe that the open discussions here are a critical part of the process of investigation and should precede any verdicts, if verdicts are even called for. Much of what Zizek writes and says is on first encounter confusing or perhaps simply confused. It does not lend itself to instant analysis and it benefits considerably from collective discussion in order to figure out what is central and what is peripheral in his thinking.
While this long thread has raised some possible questions about Zizek’s own chauvinisms that deserve serious investigation (as in close readings of Zizek’s arguments and not Google searches for controversies) it has been held back by stubborn literalist misreadings that flow from a particular approach to method. While I am sympathetic to Zizek’s refusal to let opposition to NATO’s bombing be turned into support for Milosevic, it is quite plausible to me that he has been or continues to be guilty of his own Solovenian chauvinism, or that beneath his provocative statements about liberal multiculturalism and Haiti are some other demons. But this simply can not be determined if people are unwilling to do the work of a close reading. The quotes and links that have been thrown around are not a substitute for actually analyzing what Zizek has to say. That work remains to be done.
Radical Eyes said
To you, Harriet:
I think that if you bothered to read more carefully and with more patience, you would find that most of what you have written above is not based in a valid interepretation of the passages to which you have alluded or from which you have quoted. Perhaps some time you will take the time to read the words above with care in their context. Or perhaps you will not.
But really there comes a point where it is not worth my time to speak to people who refuses to make the effort to read.
onehundredflowers said
“So yes, I wasn’t going to do a research project on every aspect of Zizek’s impenetrable “thought” before commenting on the fact that his ‘in practice’ Marxist credentials are exactly zero.”
Can anyone name any actions by Gramsci that have influenced Marxist thinking or practice? Unlike Zizek, Gramsci has a history as a militant with a communist party and did extensive mass organizing. And yet, it’s not his actions that have enduring resonance, but the words he wrote while in prison, during which time, his ‘in practice’ activity was also zero.
It’s this method that reduces thinking to “practice” that reflects a disrespect for the complexities of practice, not to mention an ignorance of Marxist theory which has largely reflected this mechanical “reflection” theory of knowledge. Theory and practice intertwine in contradictory ways, they do not simply mirror each other, nor are they consistent. While it’s widely held by Marxist-Leninists than Lenin was a dialectician, Materialism and Empirio-criticism is a notoriously mechanical and undialectical work. Does this mean that his practice was mechanical while he was writing this piece, only to become dialectical again when he was finished?
Much of your argument also relies on cult of personality assumptions. You claim he is no hero, he is a poseur who doesn’t even believe what he says. So what? No one is arguing that we should emulate his behavior, and even if he is a hypocrite, how does that affect his comments’ relationship to reality? Similar arguments are raised every time Michael Moore makes a film: he’s wealthy himself so how can we believe anything he says when he criticizes capitalism. It seems that words are just emanations of one’s essence.
I mean really, look at this: “So yes, I wasn’t going to do a research project on every aspect of Zizek’s impenetrable “thought” before commenting on the fact that his ‘in practice’ Marxist credentials are exactly zero.”
As for the many concrete issues you and Harriet have raised, people have disagreed with your readings, and you claim they are making excuses or “tugging on crack pipes”. If anything, they raise questions about the complicated relationship between practice and theory which aren’t always easily resolved by proclaiming people revolutionary or reactionary, one of us or one of them. The question for us is not mainly whose side they’re on, but what we can learn from their method or insights to help us understand the world. It’s not about finding a new heroic figure to emulate. You have already decided that there isn’t anything to learn based on limited, and I would argue problematic, analysis.
You and Harriet have avoided any discussion of method from what seems like a position of incredulity. Almost as if you expect your assumptions to be taken for granted among those who call themselves Marxists and you can’t believe you’re being asked to explain them. Or that the truth is just self-evident and clear so the only reason for this disagreement is that those who disagree with you are all delusional or worse.
I’m actually astounded by the claim that Marxism is the end of philosophy. This reflects a rigid idealism that much of Marxist theory has struggled to discard. It assumes that there is an undisputed thing called “Marxism” that exists as some sort of transcendental standard, that there is some sort of pinnacle towards which other philosophies may have strived but those were only stepping stones to Marxism [this is Hegelian teleology btw, speaking of pre-Marx], that the world is not dialectical, but rather it’s static so no qualitative changes can occur, only the re-arrangement of existing things. Moreso, it assumes that those making such a claim can determine what is Marxism and what is not.
Harriet said
Living in the End Times, he quite clearly argues for the position of a singular democratic secular state in Israel-Palestine, the Finkelstein position…
Did he really claim that Finkelstein supports one state? Typical disinfo of the sort he is perpetually peddling. It is almost funny.
But it isn’t. This is not trivial and there’s no excuse for misrepresenting Norman Finkielstein who has sacrificed so much to delivering sincere, accurate and useful militant intellectual work, a very different sort of life and career than SZ’s.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/one-state-or-two-state-a-sterile-debate-on-false-alternatives/
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/reasoned-rejection-of-one-state-position/
onehundredflowers said
“But really there comes a point where it is not worth my time to speak to people who refuses to make the effort to read.”
It’s not just reading, but watching videos as well. Here’s a comment on the youtube video she liked to: “He’s talking about what people meant by singing the Marseillaise in 1804. That is before there was anything or anyone you could call “white multiculturalists” with “paternalist liberal racism”.” [comment 60]
2:12: Zizek refers to “the Marseiiles problem”; it’s not on the video and he doesn’t re-state it so it’s not clear exactly what was being posed, but this is where he begins his remarks containing the phrase: ““half-ape blacks our grandparents jumped in trees like apes in Africa.””
2:19: “…the usual multiculturalist answer would have been…”
2:33: “…this is what white, white multicultrialist liberals like us to do; they don’t want third world people to sing their songs…”
2:49: “…why Marseilles was revolutionary there…”
2:59: “…it didn’t mean, you see, we primitive half-ape blacks our grandparents jumped in trees like apes in Africa, but even we can no participate in your…No!…”
3:08: “…it meant we are more Frenchmen than you…”
If Harriet had watched this video in small increments she’d see that he was referring to contemporary white liberal multiculturalists, and if she would bother to look it up, the last remark refers to Zizek’s claim elsewhere that the Haitian Revolution was “the truth” of the French Revolution, the place where its ideals could demonstrate their true universality.
May9 said
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach essentially declared Philosophy to be “dead”, and asserted that revolutionary practice and science would replace it. Indeed, Marx always stressed the importance of practice in resolving ‘mysteries’. A point, again, which is lost here.
“And yet, it’s not his actions that have enduring resonance, but the words he wrote while in prison, during which time, his ‘in practice’ activity was also zero.”
Which is why his work is not very useful and a bizarre distortion of Marxism, claiming that intellectuals will lead revolution. The point is to work for change, not just talk about it. Incidentally this point I have struggled with more than any other.
“Much of your argument also relies on cult of personality assumptions. You claim he is no hero, he is a poseur who doesn’t even believe what he says. So what? No one is arguing that we should emulate his behavior, and even if he is a hypocrite, how does that affect his comments’ relationship to reality? Similar arguments are raised every time Michael Moore makes a film: he’s wealthy himself so how can we believe anything he says when he criticizes capitalism. It seems that words are just emanations of one’s essence.”
Right, the “so what” defense. I’m growing tired of it. It may not matter to you that Zizek’s life has been dedicated to destroying socialism, and that this has no bearing on what he says. But it’s quite clear that the guy contradicts himself all the time, and just says things for the purposes of “entertainment”. So his claim to be “Marxist” is exactly that. It may very well be that people find his incoherent ramblings insightful and entertaining, but my issue was whether he is actually a Marxist. And yes, to be a Marxist, you can’t simultaneously be a counterrevolutionary. I think that’s a simple point. I wasn’t asking for heroism, I was simply asking for Zizek not to be a reactionary defender of imperialism. Apparently that’s too high a standard.
The Michael Moore canard doesn’t work. It’s less a matter of what class you’re from but what class you’re for. Engels held property but did much to advance socialism. Moore may be wealthy but he uses his wealth to advance progressive causes (mostly anyway). His being wealthy is not “hypocrisy”, we live in a capitalist society, capitalism is unavoidable. You can use the master’s tools to bring down the master’s house. No one is asking for asceticism here. He’d be a hypocrite if he was doing a documentary exposing the flaws of private healthcare, while simultaneously actively campaigning for the drug companies. That’d be the equivalent of what Zizek is done (actually what Zizek did was worse). I’m asking for purism is, and I resent the implication that I am.
nando said
TML wrote:
Then, TML asks why others might see this as revealing.
I appreciate that question, and think there is a lot to say.
1) Let me start by saying it is a very difficult thing to “know the world to change the world.”
A great deal of human activity is marked by “unintended consequences.” Human beings are filled with self-delusion and illusion — thinking they are doing one thing, but ending up doing something else. And, on one level, what we want out of philosophy, is an arena for deepening our understanding of how the universe works, how we act and transform ourselves and things around us, how we connect our thought and action, how we refine (or repudiate) our old assumptions to better serve the people.
To put it sharply: After spending a lifetime trying to grasp and applying materialist dialectics, and watching many many diverse people also seeking to apply materialist dialectics (of different kinds) — i am impressed by how often the sincere pretense of science has over-legitimized what proved to be rather subjective, shallow and unscientific ideas.
I certainly respect a great deal of work and thinking that communists have done (all over the world) — but I am not particularly impressed with its degree of dialectics and materialism — and to put it more sharply, the problem is not just in the flawed grasping and application of an unflawed theory, but also arises from a number of theoretical assumptions that have (over time) come to be assumed to be part of communist philosophy. The problems we have with philosophy are not just in the better understanding and application of a fixed theory — but they reside deeply within the contradictions of that theory itself.
2) Your statement sharply expresses a very different assessment from mine, and is helpful in its clarity. Far from thinking that we are at an “end” (in any sphere, let alone philosophy), i think we are in the very earliest stages of figuring many of the key questions out.
3) Marxism (and marxist philosophy) represented a bold and important leap in our understanding — building on the emergence of enlightenment insights and new scientific views of material reality. I think Marx (and post-Marx Marxists) have developed an extremely important philosophy that I have (personally) sought to internalize and apply — and that I think has proven crucial to the ability of revolutionary people to become self-conscious and able to transform themselves and society.
However it is (at the same time) far far from finished. On the contrary, at this early point in the history of communist revolution, it seems claring that our inherited communist philosophy is still rather crude and primitive — and that the process of trying to “fix” it has compounded that problem.
4) let me give a few examples, so people reading this have an idea of what i’m discussing:
a) The idea of inevitability, that the larger trendlines in society are stark and determined enough that we can know where they “must” go, which in many ways dismisses the role of accident, contingency, and the subjective factor.
b) the Hegelian theory of “negation of the negation” — which Mao, for example thinks simply does not exist, and which many of us marks a mistaken 19th century teleological sense of progress.
c) the question of base and superstructure — whether that is to crude a dicotomy to actually capture the dynamics we are discussing, and (even if we accept this now “classic” terminology) how we understand it, and the relative autonomy of players and spheres and ideas. (this has to do with controversies over thinking and being that come up around economism, the relationship of interests to ethics, what it means for a class to lead the liberation of a much larger humanity, and much more.)
Rather than declare that such things are proven, known and settled — we should treat such elements within Marxist philosophy (i.e. within our body of theory and ideology) as respected hypotheses to be debated, tested and developed over time — and (if need be) discarded in some cases.
In other words, a great many matters which are prominent within our Marxism are, in fact, not proven and settled in some ultimate final way — but are precisely respected, tested and still emerging bodies of thought.
There has in fact been a great deal of work and experience and change (since early Marxist theories were first articulated), while in some ways, our theory itself has sometimes been consciously “frozen” in a way that has left it out of time and place, and lagging. This gives urgency to reversing the idea (from Kautsky to Stalin to today) that sees Marxism as an orthodoxy that is overly fixed or complete — and to view it instead (as any other process in science or art) as ongoing, still open, still developing, still being challenged.
I view communist philosophy as something in its rather early stages of development and still rather primitive — in the sense that it will inevitably go through major changes in the future, and will need to go through major changes. And I think that many forms of marxism have accumulated barnacles (especially in the state legitimization, codification, popularization process) where many of its secondary ideas have been treated as if they are integral, proven, unquestionable etc.
5) My perception is that the attempts to codify and “freeze” Marxism (and Marxist philosophy) into a doctrine that is perceived as “finished” misunderstands what needs to be done. And not only does it undervalue the work of developing communist philosophy in new leaps — but by attempting to freeze preceding communist theories it actually guts them of the creative and critical content they had. Marxism frozen is far less scientific and valid than the unfrozen Marxism of Marx that it took as its source.
Put another way: There was an earlier question raised about revisionism. Let me write using that terminology: The attempt to fix and codify critical and dynamic Marxist theory serves revisionism — the reversal of Marxism’s revolutionary project is not just carried out by bringing in “alien” ideas from without (replacing better and more correct ideas within the original body), but it is also carried out by turning Marxism into a semi-religious orthodoxy, defending uncritically those elements that need to be examined critical and reworked.
6) The end of philosophy theory leads rather quickly to a dismissal of philosophy. And your statement rather tightly connects those two things.
Because you see philosophy as fixed (or ended) — there is no reason to examine new works of philsophy. In fact, even examining them is (in some ways) a dangerous and suspect activity — unless you examine them simply to expose them. After all “any attempt to get beyond Marxism is merely a return to a pre-Marxian philosophical position.” And you claim to know that as a general truth. You actually seem to believe that you can know that a work of philsophy is bullshit without reading or understanding it simply because you have identified (or heard through a grapevine) that it does not uphold key tenents of your particular strain of dialectical materialism.
For example: Badiou’s event has an approach to the eruption of new truth that is radically different from Marxism. Can we know (before starting our exploration) that Badiou is wrong — reducing our task merely to uncovering how? Or Badiou has developed a view of contradiction and change that is distinct from dialectics (he calls it the multiple of multiples) that seems to see the deep contradictions of reality and ideas, but does not give great place to the unity of opposites. (I.e., I for example see that the overall unity of reality lies precisely in its materiality — despite the vast churning contradiction and division and distinctness that marks all of matter… I’m not sure Badiou sees it that way.) But, here too, you seem to believe that we can know that our previous materialist understanding is right before we have engaged the new ideas, and tested our ideas in that engagement.
That strikes me as quintessentially religious, not scientific. And it seems like a prescription for a sterile and dessicated set of ideas that can’t possibly “know the world to change the world.”
7) For that reason, i find it odd that the discussion of Zizek (for some people) focuses so narrowly on a “verdict” — as if our “job” with new ideas and new people is to “peg them” and “grade them.”
Is he a communist? Is he a Marxisst? etc. Well, it doesn’t take anyone (including me) more than a few minutes to uncover that he isn’t my kind of communist or Marxist… but that is so obvious that it really is irrelevant in many ways. It certainly is not the point of taking up a study of his ideas or impact.
The world is not sitting around to hear from us “is Zizek good or bad? hero or reactionary?” That is unspeakably dumbed down and linear(in one sense) in one sense that it is hard to imagine how anyone can keep posing it that way. But more important to a discussion of method, that whole framework misunderstands our work (i.e. what WE are responsible for doing).
And at its base, that view really does deny the need for philosophy (including communist philosophy)
On the contrary, I think Zizek is a very complicated and contradictory character (as so many of us are) — and if we magically came up with a grade (D-? B+?) it wouldn’t get us any closer to the key questions:
a) Politically, how do we engage with radical people whose political and philosophical formation is influenced by him?
b) Philosophically, what do we have to learn from his work? (What does he say about things we have not, as marxists, explored? What does he say might lead us to reconsider some our own previous verdicts? What do we disagree with that we can use to sharpen our own opposing insights and verdicts?
Of course, if you think philosophy came to an end in the 1800s, then we have nothing to learn from his work. The fact that he doesn’t match our checklist of inherited points means that he must be recycling discredited, wrong, misleading and non-revolutionary ideas from the pre-marxist past.
Won’t you treat new ideas (that constantly grip individuals or whole sections of society) as simply noxious flies that you need to swat. Some new ideas are noxious (of course). But aren’t others often something to learn from and incorporate?
Here is what I hear you saying TML:
The buffet of ideas is known and is fixed. And if an idea isn’t already our own, then we can assume (without open-minded investigation or respectful engagement) that it is wrong and dangerous — and the only questions become how is it wrong, and how do we successfully warn people about this poison.
Can’t you see this isn’t the successful “end of philosophy” but a delusional self-enforced dead-end of a inherently contradictory and aging orthodoxy? It won’t be philosophy that comes to an objective end, but your ability to learn.
Why does Mao say “the important thing is to be good at learning?” Can oppressed people really understand the complexities of the world (warfare, economics, planning, ongoing transformation, intimate relations) without a communist movement that processes a profoundly dynamic, vigorous, tuned in, contesting, churning world of ideas at its very core?
nando said
May 9 writes:
And? So what?
The point is not “lost” here — it is wrong. First Marx’s passing remark is not correct. Philsophy is (of course) not dead. And philosophy was never “replaced” by a mix of practice and science — not even in Marx’s own time, and certainly not in ours.
Practice has a great importance in resolving “mysteries” — but this too has to be understood dialectically: Practice doesn’t resolve mysteries by itself — it does so mediated through human thought, summation, and debate (through a truth process), that involves theory and philosophy. Practice is important in resolving mysteries, but that resolving takes place in the realm of ideas.
Just one simple example: in the early 1800s there was a great deal of new investigation into the earth (geology) and fossils (early archeology). A lot of evidence was accumulated through social practice (and it became more generally known because the world became smaller and because professional scientists were emerging). But it was not the practice that resolved the mysteries — it was the new scientific theoretical. work that was based on that practical investigation. It took a Darwin (and a whole world of people debating evolutionary theory) to resolve the “mysteries” (and in a beginning way, leaving more mysteries embedded within Darwin’s own theory to be later resolved later by genetics and other innovations).
And mysteries are not external to the science — as if our understanding is linear, and there is a clear divide between the known and the unknown. There is an interpenentration of contradictions — and some of the “mysteries” reside even within our own most advanced theories. (For example, Darwin’s theory was revolutionary, new and far more correct than the theories it dethroned. But within Darwin’s theory was unresolved mysteries of how new species emerged and how new traits emerge and get transmitted. Darwin’s theory was not “settled” — confronting unsettled mysteries. His theory itself was unsettled, and contained “mysteries” that needed to be resolved (through the revolutionization and transformation of his theory later).
As for this quote: It takes an extreme dogmatism to insist that this point (“end of philosophy”) must be adopted — (simply because it was uttered by the early Marx?) When did that become the way disputes get settled? By finding some quote from Marx to settle the argument? If that isn’t religious (and even fundamentalist!) thinking, what is it?
Can anyone seriously believe or argue that “philosophy is dead” given the history of the last two centuries?
nando said
100flowers writes:
I agree with 100flowers here.
The idea of fixed, complete, frozen, settled thinking is deeply anti-scientific.
I was thinking about examples. Here is one: Marxist dialectics developed out of European thinking (especially building on Hegel’s dialectics, and Feuerbach’s materialism). But Mao’s dialectics incorporates a great deal of Chinese thinking about opposites into communist theory (incorporating an approach to opposites developed in Taoism — while discarding the great “two into one” that makes Taoism metaphysical).
That kind of infusion from a new source (geographically and intellectually new to Marxism) helped envigorate a professionalized Soviet Marxist philosophy that had gotten quite arcane and fixed (where “categories” of thought were multiplying rapidly producing a very baroque and intricate structure).
Mike E said
[[Moderator note: I feel that Harriet is so crudely misreading statements (both by Zizek and others in this thread) that many of her posts really degrade this discussion. It is compounded by the problem that she is posting (then reposting) the same confused accusations of white racism based on the same bizarre misread of the text.
Several people have remarked that this has hijacked (and degraded) the discussion in a "crazy" way. And that the arguments of people like May 9 and the Marxist-Leninist are overshadowed by that craziness.
http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/what-about-slavoj-zizek/#comment-2049
http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/what-about-slavoj-zizek/#comment-2050
Ok. My question: should we have a moderator intervention here -- asking Harriet to move to a new topic and stop spamming on the same point over and over? Or, just let it go?
Please don't post responses here, but email me if you have an opinion.]]
May9 said
Perhaps like Harriet I will be “intervened” on, and then you can all can debate amongst yourselves.
But anyway, the tired example of evolution is a scientific one and doesn’t really do anything to undermine the idea that philosophy is dead. Science was resolving the mysteries regarding Darwin’s theory and helping to complete it, not philosophy. There have been no new philosophical ideas since the 1800s. And I never claimed to advocate practice by itself, (whereas people here have repeatedly said theory by itself is ‘real work’ and practice is irrelevant). Of course practice must be informed by theory – scientific theory. Not philosophy. Not idealism. Not people sitting around thinking without doing, contemplating consciousness, or whatever.
It is the height of irony that people keep deeming the supremacy of science over philosophy “unscientific”. Someone ought to write a pamphlet on the gross misuse of dialectics.
Mike E said
[[Moderator note: Why would you face moderation May 9? We (obviously) actively welcome different views here, including yours.
Harriet is spamming our site, with four or five long posts an hour (quite a few more than you see)-- repeating the same accusations over and over in increasingly hostile tones. It is repetitive and is squeezing out other discussion.
She is not banned (as she claims) but has been asked to limit her posting to a more reasonable pace. And asked (politely) to stop hostile personal attacks.
Those are our site rules.
You (by contrast) have not violated the rules in any major way. Your contributions (and hers) are welcome.
Harriet said
Sorry, I did make several long posts yesterday, but I have not made “several an hour” and don’t mean to spam.
Certain kinds of things require lengthy demonstrations and can’t be explained in quips and links that go ignored. I don’t know how I could at once be guilty of not tackling Zizek’s use of Lacan exhaustively and of being insufficiently brief. I really was just trying to show you all something – Zizek’s long long rap sheet – which, if you had wanted to see ythe implications of, as May9 said before, you would have seen in that single Friedmanian exhortation to bomb Serbia back to the stone age where its “African” genocidaires belong. I apologise for the disruption sincerely, it was a waste of my time and yours.
* * * * * * *
[[moderator's note: personal hostility, not ok. Many highly-repetitive posts, not ok. Long posts, not a problem for moderators, though fewer people read them.
If you had posted on Lacan, it would have been a new theme, and quite fine. Don't post many long posts in rapid succession on the same thread -- especially if the contents are almost identical and with an escalating hostility toward others.]]
Mike E said
May 9 writes:
Really?
Existentialism? Pragmatism? Analytical philosophy? All kinds of Marxist and revolutionary philosophy? Not a new idea in religious thinking?
None of them had a single idea (not one?) since Engels put his pen away? Big? Little? Insights? Nothing?
Wow.
What about Althusser’s overdetermination? New?
If Badiou’s event isn’t new, whose theory is it a rehash of?
What about Gramsci’s theory of hegemony? No ways that it injects something new into the theory of thinking and being, base and superstructure?
What about when Stalin declared that language was neither base nor superstructure? This is an idea that I find mechanical, but I can’t deny it is new. Do you think it is not new?
If you believe that, no wonder you feel free to dismiss Zizek’s work without reading it, and then think that this philosopher should be judged (and dismissed) based on political criteria alone. You really think philosophy is dead (and irrelevant). And that anything (literally anything) outside your very particular strain of Marxism is simply and always recycled poison? Right?
* * * * * * *
May 9 writes:
Three parts:
1) Do you not think that theory (by itself) is real work? (hard work, important work, difficult work?) Why not?
2) Do me a favor: Simply ite the passage where someone said practice is irrelevant. And if it has truly happened “repeatedly” — then cite two or three places.
3) Please, if there are no such passages, acknowledge that you casually and routinely distort the views of others.
rob said
philosophy has been dying for a long time! it is not just Marx/Engels who make this claim, but many philosophers who are not Marxists at all. ie wittgenstein and richard rorty, and many existentialists.
they of course propose their own replacement for the death of philosophy which is of course another philosophy. (like marx himself i suppose) but thats how it goes.
to replace metaphysics with science was a common idea amongst progressive thinkers in the 19th century, socialist or not. i think though, since the 19th century, both science and philosophy has changed. one thing i would be curious for people to discuss is both dialectics and materialism, because dialectics seems to some people a downright fraud, and materialism because some people think that discoveries in physics have undermined materialism as it was understood by Marx and Engels.
I am not sure myself, but i think it would be worth looking at. if we accuse other people of being undialectical and unmaterialist, we need to know what dialectics and materialism are. here is an interesting site from a marxist philosopher who is strongly anti-dialectical, i found this site interesting in the problems it raises about dialectics.
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/
onehundredflowers said
“There have been no new philosophical ideas since the 1800s.”
“philosophy has been dying for a long time”
This is also a Eurocentric viewpoint. Have you investigated philosophy from around the world to a high enough degree to make such pronouncements?
Mike E said
The fact that people have occasionally declared that philosophy (or history or art or whatever) are dead doesn’t mean that we (sitting here today) should believe it.
It seems obvious that philosophy (whatever our criticisms of it) is full of new ideas — and has been. Whether we agree with those ideas is (of course) not obvious — and requires work and engagement (by communists).
But what stands out to me (at this point in the discussion) is why this is not a discussion of Zizek but of method — after all, if you believe philosophy is dead (and has been at an end since the 1800s!) then it is all modern philosophers who you want to brush away with disdain, not just Zizek, but all of them.
In fact the very idea of evaluating new philosophical work is ridiculous — since it is (by settled verdict) impossible to write anything new.
So the method that was used here to diss and dismiss Zizek, can be done (just as quickly and shabbily) with Badiou, or Foucault, or Heidigger, or Bill Martin, or anyone else writing in this field.
It is a method that declares the answers are all essentially known (in your variety of ML), and so any attempt to think anew (in any key field) is an affront to the already settled.
This is the kind of thinking that made some people fume and sputter when the Nepali Maoists decided to innovate in military strategy. After all, wasn’t that too a settled question?
And it will cause them to fume and sputter when revolutionaries build a new organization in the U.S., after all didn’t the 1923 Comintern decide (already) what forms of organization we should be allowed?
Talk about “hidebound.”
rob said
no i have not.
a correction. I am NOT saying philosophy has been dying for a long time, but that western philosophers have been saying this for a long time, regarding the western tradition of philosophy. so take it up with them, such as heidegger, wittgenstein etc.
i assumed we were talking about the western tradition of philosophy. i have looked at indian philosophy and chinese philosophy, but not in any great depth. a lot of it seems mystical and theological, but i am not an expert and do not claim to be one.
it seems to me if people are doing philosophy, then it is alive.
May9 said
“3) Please, if there are no such passages, acknowledge that you casually and routinely distort the views of others.”
Do people need to say something verbatim in order for people to make that point? This whole discussion has centered around the argument that Zizek’s entire political practice does not matter when assessing his progressivism, Marxism, or general contributions. That it is on par with Bakunin making a racist remark, or Jefferson owning slaves, or MLK engaging in domestic violence, or some other personal imperfection or small foible. That it’s “dogmatic”, “religious”, akin to making political “checklists” to hold him accountable for this when he claims he’s a Marxist. As if all Zizek is doing is spouting off political positions, and not enacting these policies in reality.
If you now all of a sudden view Zizek’s practice having mattered, when you made lengthy posts complaining about this “method” of dismissing Zizek’s Marxist credentials on the basis of being a counterrevolutionary in practice, then you are contradicting what you have said over and over again.
How many “so whats” have been written about Zizek’s practice? Do I really have to cite them? Discussing this is already tedious enough without you playing these games.
“Do you not think that theory (by itself) is real work? (hard work, important work, difficult work?) Why not?”
It is work but it is not the only kind of work and it is not the most important kind, nor is it the most difficult. You and others have repeatedly (do I have to cite this?) implored me to “address Zizek’s ‘work’” instead of focusing on his politics in practice, as if his practical work isn’t work at all. As if his politics were just a lifestyle choice.
Building and organizing revolution is the most difficult and important work. Because we can theorize until we’re blue in the face but the point, as Marx said, is to change the world not just interpret it. Without implementing change, all of this talk is meaningless. It’s an intellectual exercise with no implications for how we actually live. People are dying from imperialist wars, they’re unemployed, they’re starving, they’re the victims of all sorts of abuse. THIS needs to be addressed practically. We can’t just talk about it or theorize as to why it is happening. Something needs to be done. We have had a problem of leftist intellectuals being detached from the struggles of the everyday. It’s a serious problem that shouldn’t be trivialized or excused.
Mike E writes:
Is Existentialism even a philosophy? If so, what are its connecting ideas? It appears to be nothing but a catch-all term for philosophers who explore particular themes – namely existence, alienation from meaning or value, whatever. These themes have been explored well before the 20th century (Pascal?). Even if one accepts it is a philosophy, generally speaking its “founder” is considered to be Soren Kierkegaard, who wasn’t of the 20th century.
I don’t have time to address all of these ideas, nor have I studied them. But, similar to existentialism, so-called “Pragmatism” was a trend that began in the 19th century. From reading its core principles “that which is true is that which works”, I find it hard to believe that this idea never existed before Peirce came up with it.
On religious thought, no. What new religious thought has there been? The various Protestant sects are philosophically incoherent, but in general the lines are between Calvinism & Arminianism. Most denominations have both trends living side by side in the same church. The “new” churches that spring up adapt one or the other.
Please point me to a novel branch of religious thought.
On Gramsci, his anti-Marxist, anti-materialist cultural hegemony theories and strategy for revolution emphasizing culture rather than organizing to seize state power, is not new either. Are you claiming hegemony is a 20th century concept? Marx dealt with this at length (although it wasn’t called “hegemony” with his discussion of the German Ideology. Engels was talking about it when he discussed “false consciousness” and “ideology”. They both addressed the myth about “triumphs of thought” explicitly.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm
Mike E said
May 9 expresses a mix of confusion and frustration:
Well, yes…actually. You should respond to people’s actual arguments — not what you imagine them to be.
One of the problems we are having in this discussion is that you are far more sloppy with arguments and detail than others.You are constantly responding to arguments no one makes. And ignoring the arguments that people are actually making.
It would be a good habit for you to take people’s actual statements (which are sometimes nuanced, subtle, and carefully considered) and answer those actual words — rather than reducing it to what you imagine they said or believe.
And then you complain that our arguments are confusing, and seem contradictory to you. No, they aren’t confusing, they are just subtle. And you want to insist on simple and linear arguments.
This is an example of you asserting an argument that no one made. But in fact, no one said (and no one believes) that a person’s actions “do not matter.”
What several people are arguing is that you need to judge a philosopher mainly on the basis of his life’s work, and that his political activism is relevant but (in most cases) secondary. (I.e. dialectical arguments are being made about what is primary and what is secondary.
To say that something (like Zizek’s 1980s activism) is secondary is not an argument that his political practice “does not matter” — it is an argument that his philosophy should be examined in its own right, and his political practice should be evaluated (but in a specific context).
Further we have argued that the main point isn’t to “evaluate” him anyway (in some simplistic up-or-down way) — but to understand his work in order to engage people influenced by (or attracted by) his views, and in order to understand whether there is something we can learn in the process.
You haven’t dealt with any of these arguments — you have just distorted them.
And now it comes out that the reason you don’t believe his philsophy should be considered is that you think philosophy is dead — and so we should all know that his philosophy is reactionary unless it repeats your own idiosyncratic version of dialectical materialism.
It is like your mind is a factory where a complex idea goes in, and a cardboard misunderstanding comes out. You accuse people of a stupid idea, and then denounce them for being so obviously stupid.
And that is why the question of direct quotes matters: Every nuanced, dialectical idea comes back (in your responses) reduced to nonsensical flatness. If you quoted what we were actually saying, it would be harder for you to be so distorting and confused.
And when we say “all figures and events are complex, and you can’t judge a whole by simple sniffing at a small part” you reduce that too. So my analogy of Zizek’s occasional outrageous statements to Bakunin’s slavofilism or Marx’s anti-gay remarks, or Jefferson’s slave owning, you read that as a pooh-poohing. But that too is reductionism. No one is pooh-poohing anything. It is no minor matter that Jefferson owned slaves (he was a political representative of the slaveowning class!) Go back and reread what I said, I was arguing you couldn’t reduce Jefferson to his slave owner status, that he was more complex than that. I wasn’t pooh-poohing slave owning (nor do I think anyone should).
Here is how you disstort that discussion:
How is Jefferson owning slaves just a matter of “spouting off political positions”? What is more concrete and connected to practice and class status than slave owning?
But I was arguing (again) that you can’t reduce a discussion of Jefferson to the simple (true) fact that he owned slaves. And some reductionists say “He owned slaves, what else do we need to know?!”
May 9 writes:
So whenever we say something carefully nuanced, you repeat it in reduced and garbled form. And when we correct your distortion, you complain that this is very confusing and we are contradicting ourselves.
No, we aren’t contradicting ourselves — reality is itself contradictory and we are analyzing the unity of opposites that define all the things we are discussing. things are very rarely simply “this or that,” good or bad, progresssive or reactionary, heroic or disgusting. The world is not so flat, linear, static, essentialist.
For you a discussion is about a quick easy verdict. It is a quick doctrinaire checklist. A discussion about a person is about “holding them accountable” — are they one of us? Or are they not?
But life is far more complicated. OUr tasks are more complicated. And the people, political forces or events we are trying to understand are far more complicated than your worldview allows.
And their impact is far more complicated.
So we need an all-sided analysis. Not a “gotcha” method (where you find something “disgusting” about someone, and can quickly decide they are therefore bad, and need to be “held accountable.”)
Mike E said
May 9, you insist that there are no new philosophical ideas, and to prove it list a bunch of negative summations of everything from existentialism to modern theology. And you don’t just argue that their ideas are wrong, but that they have no ideas.
And then you write:
No one argues that you have to address or study “all these ideas.”
But Marxism does demand this: That if you haven’t investigated them, you have no business claiming to dismiss them.
You insist modern theology has no new ideas, then then admit that you know nothing about modern theology. How is that materialist or dialectical? Isn’t that militant ignorance embarrassing?
The only other group I know who is that arrogant about dismissing the world around them is the fundamentalists who say “The bible says 7 days, I don’t care what you say a bunch of old stones tell us.” That is why we see your dogmatism as a quasi-religious doctrine (which has no god, but treats its quite scientific so-called “classics” as finished prophesy.)
Look at your treatment of Gramsci:
I assume you are aware that Gramsci was very involved in attempts at seizing state power (in the post WW1 upsurge in Italy) and wrote his works while imprisoned for “organizing to seize state power.”
He makes an analysis of culture and its role in seizing power (and you reduce a contradiction to an antgonistic opposition). Do you know anything of the theory you are denouncing?
And then you want to argue Gramsci had nothing new. And what is your proof? That Marx touched on some of these problems in his work, and that Engels used the word “hegemony” too (somewhere), so obviously Gramsci can’t have presented something new.
Are you aware how silly and self-exposing your argument is?
If you teach Marx’s or Lenin’s revolutionary ideas using a dogmatic method, you aren’t teaching revolutionary thinking, you are teaching dogma.
Shouldn’t you reexamine the method and assumptions that allow you to make such truly uninformed (i.e. ignorant) assertions about theology or existentialism or Gramsci or anyone ele.
You think you can dismiss whole world of thought and exploration without investigation or work. And you do this over and over.
This is the very method that caused me (with tongue in cheek) to call your essay the “worst essay in ages.”
balzac said
Mike, you said:
“If Badiou’s event isn’t new, whose theory is it a rehash of?”
Badiou’s theory of event is actually very much a continuation of what emerged with Canguilhem (in The Normal and the Pathological) through an examination of the natural sciences as a field of study in and of itself, what today is considered the philosophy of science and which was given a lot of cultural capital (but nothing really new) by Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift. For Canguilhem, as for Badiou, this was an idea of rupture – for Canguilhem it was an epistemological rupture. This is where the terms episteme and epistemic break or rupture come from. Foucault was responsible (pretty much entirely – and this is what makes him so important from a philosophical perspective) for bringing Canguilhem’s methods and idea of a rupture into the “soft” human sciences.
Badiou is continuing in that vein, at least with his work on event. This is not to say that he does not offer new ideas to this central idea, but to clarify that Badiou was not the one who caused of these breaks with past thinking. Here is a quote from an article, originally published in 1984, and which you can find in Badiou’s Pocket Pantheon, which came out in English last year.
Of course we all broke with phenomenology, the theory of consciousness and the last avatars of psychologism, and he had not a little to do with that. Foucault gambled what Canguilhem confined to the strictly circumscribed domains of science or medicine on what we thought came within the remit of the human sciences, history or anthropology. The clinic, madness, money, linguistics, botany, the penal system, sexuality . . . But this was neither history, anthropology nor the human sciences. It was a gesture that annexed for philosophy, for pure thought, objects and texts that had been divorced from it. We occupied the territories of that annexation, even when Foucault’s gesture seems to us to be incomplete, or difficult to follow.
This is from the section on Foucault, but there is also one on Canguilhem; and, for those who judge a thinker by his politics, it is worth noting that Canguilhem was in the Resistance and was a former teacher of Badiou’s as well. Regardless, Badiou’s work – at least in regards to event, I cannot talk about his writings on “subject” – is very much a continuation of Canguilhem as regards method and Foucault as regards the break itself.
Tell No Lies said
After 117 comments, I think we should pause to thank May 9 and Harriet for enduring this sometimes heated discussion for so long. It can’t feel good to have a blog post you wrote however long ago called “the worst essay in ages” and then ruthlessly dissected. And while nobody has really budged from their original positions that much (though we do know a few more things that have come out of Zizek’s mouth) I think we have actually done a lot to excavate the groundings of the different positions.
I find the propsition that philosophy is dead and that there hasn’t been anything new in it since the 19th century to be preposterous. But its actually good to have that out on the table so that we understand what underpins the method that so many of us find so troubling. I understand of course that you are speaking for yourself and not for your organization, but I am curious as to whether this view is held by others in FRSO or in other organizations. Distressing as it would be to find that it was, it would explain an awful lot that I’ve been unable to understand.
When Marx said “philosophy is dead” he was being deliberately provocative in a Zizekian way. He was insisting on the importance of revolutionary action and condemning a sort of self-contained world of philosophical speculation that was detached from the burning questions of the day. (Marx engages in an awful lot of word play and Capital is peppered with literary allusions and double meanings that most of us miss. He can be plodding and obtuse one moment and quite sly the next.) And understood this way as a provocation, Marx’s statement has much to recommend it. But to treat it as a literal obituary and to insist a century and a half later that nothing new or worthy of our attention has occurred in philosophy since then is dogmatic in the extreme and profoundly anti-Marxist.
The anti-Gramsci stuff is just sad. It is true that Gramsci was appropriated first by the Eurocommunists and then by post-colonial theory for decidely non-revolutionary purposes, but Gramsci himself was revolutionary strtaegist and philosopher of the first order whose work is invaluable and to see it attacked like this is sad. His theory of hegemony — of the role of consent in the maintenance of capitalist rule and its implications for the tasks of revolutionaries — must be a starting point for any serious grappling with the failure of revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.
Tell No Lies said
Harriet has asked repeatedly what people have found valuable in Zizek and in the context of answering so many other points I haven’t really given an answer. While I’ve enjoyed much of his more recent writings and find videos of his speeches entertaining, I can’t say that any of that has really had a big impact on my thinking. There is one piece of his however, that I can not say that about, however.
I had no idea who Zizek was when in 2000 I read his postface to Lukac’s “tailism and the dialectic, a defence of History and Class Consciousness” discovered in the archives of the CPSU. The postface was titled “Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninism” and I found it very helpful in understanding Lukacs and his importance to revolutionary theory. It basically rescued Lukacs both from the Frankfurt School and from his acquiescence to Stalinism and located him as revolutionary and a Leninist in the best sense. It is also, I think, relevant to our broader discussion of the continuing importance of philosophy. It was only a couple years ago that I realized that the piece was written by the philosopher/performance artist that many called a charlatan but who was now calling himself a communist. In any event, it led me to take a second much more fruitful stab at History and Class Consciousness, which I’d found inpenetrable years before, and then Lukacs’s slim but brilliant book on Lenin, which everybody schooled in Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism” should be compelled to read. (You can read it at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/index.htm )
In any event, the postface is available as a PDF here: http://actpolitik.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/zizeklukacsasphilosopherofleninism.pdf
Kyle Stone said
This is my first time visiting this blog – so far, I’ve found little more than embittered dilettantism and closed-minded perspectives on what it means to be a “leftist” or a “Marxist”.
Honestly, people: watch all of the videos from Marxism 2009 and 2010, and tell me Zizek isn’t one of the most honest and forward-thinking particpants in current debates on Marxism. Read Sublime Objects and Parallax View before jumping into the discussion.
Radical Eyes said
Welcome to the discussion, Kyle Stone!
I do hope that you will continue exploring the Kasama site, and not let yourself be “turned off” by the present discussion, which though delving into some important questions of method and approach may not be the best or most representative place to start in here. At least in my view.
If you get a chance to search or even just wander the site I think you will find much that is of interest, both regarding Zizek (and other Marxis 2009-10 paticipants like David Harvey, Alain Badiou, and Alex Callinicos) as well as regarding _many_ other issues of interest to marxists and communists more generally.
So stay a while.
rob said
i think a lot of the ideas that are being put forward by those criticizing zizek are kind of a rehash of engels, and also lenin’s materialism and empirio criticism, where lenin looks at some of the ideas of bogdanov that are being put inside the communist movement, and traces them back to bishop berkeley, the idealist philosopher. i think Lenin’s way of doing philosophy was to see philosophy in terms of political lines, the idealist and materialist political line, and how the idealist line sometimes hides under the cover of science and even marxism. essentially, people who do not think zizek and badiou are marxists are saying that they are idealists who are putting forward non and anti marxist ideas under the banner of marxism. maybe so, maybe not.
Lenin’s materialism and empirio criticism is one of the most used as well as one of the most hated books in the history of marxism, by both marxists and non-marxists. what do peeps think of this book, because any idea we have of marxist philosophy or how to interact with new and non marxist philosophers must go through Lenin’s materialism and empirio criticism.
unlike most, i have no problem with philosophy, but i dont think it is that useful for activism. i mean, badiou’s truth event, it is all very well, but in practical terms- so what? what difference does it make to anything?
Harriet said
tell no lies, thanks.
Zizek’s postface is a childish, laughably transparent cartoonisation, gross and unserious misreading or non-reading; it is historically unfactual; it is clunkily idealist; it is another clownish performance of his supposedly “Stalinist” charismatic daring, a self-display, an adman playing to adolescent boys’ fantasies of superheroism, a fasho-flavoured costume drama.
Here’s the trailer:
“Here, we should reject this blackmail
(as Lukács does à propos of Rosa Luxemburg): there are no ‘democratic’
procedural rules one is a priori prohibited to violate…. The political
legacy of Lukács is thus the assertion of the unconditional, ruthless,
revolutionary will, ready to ‘go to the end,’ effectively to seize power
and undermine the existing totality….Lenin was right: after the
revolution, the anarchic disruptions of the disciplinary constraints of
production should be replaced by an even stronger discipline”
It’s so risible one is struck by how such things are only possible to vend to adults who also consume Harry Potter. And Zizek is championed in the same way – he “revives interest” in (his caricature action figure of) Lenin (and “friends”, Saint Paul, Robespierre, Mussolini, Nixon, Obama…) as JK Rowling is celebrated for “getting kids interested in reading again”. No matter that the content of both is odious, reactionary; silly beyond description, and so irrational that consuming it causes a kind of brain damage.
Zizek’s fantasy battle, Lukacs vs Luxemburg, is revisionism. His version of Badiouvism is Hollywood canned religiosity. You almost expect the final words to be “now a major motion picture coming soon to a theatre near you.”
Which is not to say people can’t enjoy it.
Let’s just not keep calling it Marxism.
Harriet said
Kyle
In 2010 Zizek made several curious false claims and took some extreme reactionary positions at Marxism
1. Victims and perpetrators of political violence (he does not name it US proxy aggression) in Congo “are not working class”.
(He was cheered for saying this, it is not clear why, but may have something to do with the way his audience likes to picture Africans.)
2. BP should not be “screwed” by being made to pay damages in connection with the Gulf spill since “capitalism” is to blame, not BP shareholders, and to “screw BP” is too “easy” and too “personalising”.
(He seems to not understand BP has insurers and is a publicly traded company owned by the entire global rentier class. Or rather, he seems to believe he can suggest this to his ignorant hooting cheering audience.)
3. The Chinese government are inciting the strikes in China.
(He treated suicides of Chinese workers as very humorous had did a lengthy comic routine about what measures were taken in response including placing nets around the high rises from which workers jumped)
4. “You know those people who criticize the twin brothers, these two versions of State Socialism, the Western welfare state and Stalinism they usually do it from a dream of councils, soviets, immediate democracy and so on and so on. I claim that that one also has to be abandoned.”
(He was cheered for this as well.)
http://libcom.org/forums/theory/callinicos-zizek-et-al-talking-shit-marxism-10-08072010
This is “forward-thinking” in the neoliberal sense but there’s no evidence that it is “honest”.
Harriet said
Kyle, at Marxism 2010 Zizek made some curious claims.
1.Victims of the violence in Congo (which he declined to identify as US proxy aggression) are “not working class.”
2. The Chinese government was inciting the strikes. (He found the suicides humorous and amused the audience with a long comic routine about the measures taken in response including placing nets under the windows of highrises from which workers have leapt to their deaths.)
3. He claimed that BP should not be “screwed” by being forced to pay compensation for the Gulf spill damage because “capitalism” was responsible not BP shareholders and “screwing” BP would be too “easy” “anticapitalism” and “personalising”. He ignores that BP and its insurers are publicly traded companies owned by the entire global rentier class.
4. “You know those people who criticize the twin brothers, these two versions of State Socialism, the Western welfare state and Stalinism they usually do it from a dream of councils, soviets, immediate democracy and so on and so on. I claim that that one also has to be abandoned. This was the big dream which died”
http://libcom.org/forums/theory/callinicos-zizek-et-al-talking-shit-marxism-10-08072010
He was cheered for all these strange remarks.
Mike E said
finally something I can agree with harriet on!
Yes, I think his provocations and stage act “revives interest” in communist and radical controversies. And I think the comparison (to Rowling “reviving interest” in reading is not far fetched.
The difference is that I’m more grateful than irritated. I want to see revived interest, I want to speak to those whose interest is revived. And I don’t feel like a painstaking and irritated refutation of Zizek’s gymnastics is all that urgent.
(Doing a sober line-by-line dissection of his provocations somehow doesn’t quite understand what Zizek is doing, and how other people are hearing/using his words — these are not pseudo-classic position papers written for the ages. They are ideas spun off like a sparkler, often cast in a deliberately contrarian and anti-pc way to jar peole into considering their own complacent acceptance of trendy and hegemonic liberalism.)
On the contrary, I think we can learn something from this (as we can learn from Abby Hoffman’s sly provocations in the 1960s).
Abby announced that he was going to drop LSD in the Chicago water supply duing the Democratic Party Convention, and got the authorities’ underwear in a knot — while all the kids were laughing their ass off.
Should we communists have adopted a left version of the authorities’ frowny face and said “Uh, this is not a good tactic, because the masses don’t like unwanted acid trips.” Or should we have laughed (with everyone else) and enjoyed the prank.
Your view of Marxism seems to include a kind of grim tone of anger and disgust over every idea you don’t agree with. You find other views unspeakable, and the people who hold them to be despicable.
But humorless, irony-free anger won’t serve us well. Itr is not something that anyone wants in power.
Obviously people don’t want to follow or join a movement for power that is frivolous or not actually serious and thoughtful (no one would ever nominate Abby or Zizek for actual power). But people don’t want a society of unrelieved iron walls, or a humorless communist movement that seems irrationally infuriated at every mildly contrarian notion.
tellnolies said
Harriet,
I don’t give a crap whether we call what Zizek has to say Marxism, because I don’t think fidelity to that or any other canon is how we should be determining the value of theoretical contributions.
Zizek could be a Marxist and a clown or a non-(or anti-)Marxist of enormous interest. And for that there is no substitute for engaging the work. It’s fine to make a judgment that a particular body of work isn’t worth engaging, indeed we have to make such judgments all the time.
What people object to is the proud certainty with which dismissals are publicly proclaimed without even bothering to undertake a close reading.
Your criticism of the post-face is just a string of insults with a quote plastered in the middle. Aside from the unsupported assertion that “Zizek’s fantasy battle, Lukacs vs Luxemburg, is revisionism” there is no engagement with the substance of the piece.
We get it that you think he’s a chrlatan. Its not a novel or even interesting observation. Even those who respect him intellectually acknowledge his theatricality. But if you want to actually demonstrate the problems with his analysis in this piece you can’t just assume its self-evident.
Why don’t you take the time to explain what you think the actual relationship between the views of Luxemburg and Lukacs are and why Zizek’s characterization is wrong. While the word “battle” is yours, in “tailism and the dialectic” (p. 57) Lukacs writes:
He continues to criticize Luxemburg for several pages at a later point in the book.
So that there are important differences between Luxemburg and Lukacs is quite clear. If your objection is that Zizek presents those differences using vivid language like “blackmail,” that seems to me largely a matter of taste. In any even there is no lack of a sense of high drama in Lukacs’s writings (or Luxemburg’s or Lenin’s) as they were all living within tumult of actual revolutionary upheavals. I actually think it is a virtue of Zizek’s that he is able to convey the passions raised in these arguments because of the stakes involved.
Mike E said
TML has (on his own blog) been articulating (rather clearly and well) the assumptions I have been trying to critique.
He writes:
Without repeating all the discussion held in other places:
Inherited marxisms are precisely insufficient for the problems we face. And the more rigid and orthodox they are the more frayed and self-encapsulated they prove to be.
We need both fresh theoretical runs at the problems we face and new application in practice. There is (obviously) great value in Marxism, and the great work of the last two centuries — but it has not forged a single, solidified, complete and coherent doctrine (and could not, and will never).
There is great value in stopping the terrible habit of “rejecting without investigating” and (finally) being open to learning from the great amount of work and thought going on in many spheres.
Imagine being disturbed, as TML is, that a Marxist theorist would even discuss mathematics and Lacan in a way not already pioneered by Marx, Engels, Lenin Stalin…. it is like a fear of stepping off the paved road… into the forest. While we need to be, precisely, taking off across country, ignoring the “don’t trespass” signs, and heading “into the wild.”
This new generation will forge a new communist path for itself, or else there won’t be one.
Contrary to the tidy warnings: there are many critiques of Orthodox Marxism that are not repeats of old worn-out bourgeois themes, but that are (in fact) worth examining critically and learning from (even if they may be wrong overall, or in aspects).
We started Letter 9 to Our Comrades like this:
And we advocate (in particular) scraping of the barnacles of previous state-authenticated forms of Marxism — where secondary theories got the status of approved gospel in an undeserved and now-damaging way. (Example: general crisis theory, or hostility to psychology, or a belief in orthodoxy, or a view that communist theory is only creatively developed by a small handful of great leaders and the rest of us simply absorb and apply.)
EBF said
The fact of the matter, as has been demonstrated by many people, post-modernism is anti-Marxist gibberish. There is nothing progressive about the ideas they promote, or the things they actually do (when they do anything at all). Despite the claims to the contrary, Zizek is a postmodernist. He learned from them. He spent his time in what Noam Chomsky calls the “Paris Cult” in his article on why he doesn’t get postmodernism. Noam Chomsky doesn’t have the best politics in the world, but he is a certifiable genius in his own right. Are you telling me the founder of modern linguistics is too stupid to decipher Lacan?
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
No body “gets” Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, etc. They don’t make coherent statements. I read a book a long time ago, called “Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.” If I remember correctly, the introduction started with a hysterical story about postmodernists and computer programmers at a conference. The first speaker started his speech, got up, and slowly started adding more pomo-gibberish, confounding the audience, until even he couldn’t contain his laughter anymore and everyone burst out into laughter, including the postmodernists (the speaker was a computer programmer). The book goes on to talk about how Lacan tried to show that the square root of negative one is the “signifier” of a male penis. It’s just pure nonsense.
I have tutored people in advanced mathematics. I have carefully explained to old ladies the concepts of calculus, trigonometry, algebra, statistics, etc. I have allowed them to pass classes to get their certificates and degrees, after they had failed multiple times. Are you telling me that I can teach old ladies and frat boys how to do integration, but someone can’t patiently explain to Noam Chomsky what the fuck Lacan is talking about?
I am reminded of my grandparents Pentecostal religious services. Eventually when someone starts babbling in tongues, you’re not meant to understand what they’re saying. In the same way, there is no actual meaning to the vast majority of postmodernism. It’s not that I, or May9, or the Marxist-Leninist can’t understand it. It’s not meant to be understood. It is the language of the internal cult-life of Paris intellectuals. To be a party to their clique requires you to speak this way. The truth is, a broad part of the Left even sees Marxism this way, just like rabid atheists see their atheism as justification for believing they are smarter than others. It’s all a bunch of bullshit for children who need to think they’re special because of the ideas in their heads, and not for what they actually do.
Wasting time of pseudo-intellectual pursuits is for petty-bourgeois, privileged white children. It is not something that will help Marxists in any practical way, or it would have long ago been appropriated by some movement somewhere on this planet. The actual purpose this stuff serves is probably one of further weakening the Left. If you have inclinations toward Marxism, the bourgeois put in front of you at their universities this crap instead. Since this crap is claims to go beyond Marxism, all the way upholding all the anti-communist lies of history, and not actually telling you how to change anything (or even if you should), and further alienating yourself from the masses, postmodernism is a valuable tool for turning petty-bourgeois white children away from being allies of revolution, into being tools of bourgeois reaction. That is the real purpose of postmodernist gibberish. I think it says a lot of about Kasama’s politics that they would even flirt with this crap.
Nando said
Rob writes:
There is a world of difference — including the fact that Lenin actually read both Bogdanov and Berkeley and Engels, and his analysis (whether we agree or not with his conclusions) was actually informed.
And part of the method at work here is to assume (without any investigation) that all new philsophical work must be just a repeat of earlier anti-marxist ideas… and so it is possible to dismiss any modern work in philosophy without doing any work.
That is not similar to Engels or Lenin — it is a form of dogmatism that is alien to Marxism (then or now).
There are several issues packed into this comment.
First, I have heard many philosophically-involved people assert that Lenin’s book “Empirio-Criticism” is more of a political tract than a serious work of philosophy. I am not in a position to comment on that myself (I am out of my depth in that area). But I do understand the political beef that Lenin had with Bogdanov (who was trying to insist that the Bolsheviks refuse to participate in Duma elections after 1905).
There is another issue: For some people it is particularly infuriating that Zizek calls himself “a Marxist” — because (in their view) Marxism must be defined very very sharply, and no one should be allowed to step on their brand exclusivity. So a view that would be tolerable (say) in a liberal we are in alliance with, suddenly becomes infuriatingly intolerable if it is expressed by someone claiming Marxist orientation.
Zizek considers himself a Marxist — and promotes people who I consider Marxists. But he is not a communist, in the sense that I use the term communist. I don’t see that as some major issue for denunciation and anger — we will be working with many people whose politics we don’t share, and who choose (for various reasons) to label themselves marxist.
I can’t imagine any policy that makes sense other than making our own evaluation of their politics and of ours — and putting forward (as clearly as we can) what we think the core methods and verdicts of communist theory should be. Asserting our communism doesn’t mean that we have to run around jealously snatching the tiara off of everyone else’s head.
Nando said
Harriet writes:
There is a ratio between invective and insight in Harriet’s post that is far to slanted toward unsubstantiated invective.
But, leaving that aside,
And (as has been mentioned many times), for some people the issue is simply about labels and evaluation. “Is he like us or not?” But that is a very narrow conception of our tasks and goals. To me, labeling him (pinning him down in some small defined “bag” of ideology) is really not that important. Understanding his views is far more important.
Put another way, I don’t think we have any need to call Zizek a Marxist at all. And I don’t think we need to shout from the rooftops that he is a fake Marxist and a select few among us are the only “real” Marxists.
I’m of the school that sees Marxism as a bush, not a tightly defined line of descent or tradition.
Zizek calls himself a Marxist, and discusses the “communist hypothesis.” He is anti-capitalist. He is left. He is certainly radical.
But I don’t think we need to feel an obligation to repeat or endorse what people label themselves.
I also think we need to deal with the fact that there are a number of communist forces that are not Marxist. Certainly Badiou can be considered both communist and non-Marxist. That’s just part of the terrain today.
Radical Eyes said
Nando,
I appreciate the general thrust of your above two comments. But, if it’s okay now to shift the dicussion a bit from the terrain it has been sitting on, I wanted to ask you what you mean when you write:
“Zizek considers himself a Marxist — and promotes people who I consider Marxists. But he is not a communist, in the sense that I use the term communist.”
Particularly by the second sentence here.
You say in the last past sentence of our post #130 (!) that “Certainly Badiou can be considered…communist.”
So if I may ask, what do you see as the differences between Zizek and Badiou that amount to making Badiou communist and Zizek not communist, despite his self-identification?
Or pehaps Badiou would also not be someone you see as “communist in the sense that you use the term”?
Again, I am not interested in the exclude/include verdict here, so much as the thinking behind it.
sks said
It was once Avakian, now its Zizek.
Who cares about great theory?
What we need is great organizing, force multipliers, build the capacity to challenge the State and the state of things, and to make those who enjoy alienation, competition, individualism, and oppression irrelevant.
Theory with out action never solved anything, action without theory always loses… true. But if we spent half as much time theory and used that time to organize, we would have both theory and action.
Right now, all we have is theory. And boring, long-winded, self-referential, and useless theory, at that.
Nando said
SKS writes:
On the contrary, almost all we have is theory-less practice. We have a left of routine activism, and NGO social work (perceived as “social movement”).
We need a strategy for revolution in the U.S. And we need a vision of socialism that can both liberate and also take root.
I’m not a fan of Zizek. He is not one of the thinkers I’ve chosen to study (other than here and there). I appreciate the provocation, but the shtick gets tiresome (and even predictable) after a while.
This is simply mistaken.
If you re-read these threads, you will notice that no one here (no one) has put forward Zizek as someone who has solved (or even ripped open) the key problems of theory we face.
Anyone who wants to be free.
Proclamations of militant eclecticism is its own shtick of provocation, and is often the surface gleen of a deep cynicism about radical change.
Radical Eyes said
Ok, Sks, let’s say that your enthusiasm for practice fires me up. (!)
What then at the present time is “to be done.” What exactly are the goals, the demands, the methods, the forms of organization that you see as “on the table” in the present period?
Can you forward us a clean and concise article–of your own words, of those of others–that clarifies in a clear and incontrovertible way “what is to be done” in a way that is concrete, not simply abstract–i.e. calls “to organize the proletariant to take state power” etc? If so please forward it on to Kasama. I would be eager to read it, to discuss, and to put it into practice following such discussion. (And I am sure that I am not alone in this.)
We will await the article.
If, however, you find that there is no clear articulation lying on hand and ready to “be applied” in our current moment, then I guess you might be returned to the fact that we at present lack the theory from which an adequate pracitce could potentially derive…In this case what would be so wrong about devoting extended attention to those (unfortunately few) self-identified communist public intellectuals who have–for whatever reason–succceeded in kicking up a significant following, enthusiasm, and intellectual impact.
sks said
@Nando
Cynicism baiting is so old. Next.
A fundamental problem is whatever practice we have, its always seen by those not doing that practice as “being wrong” because it doesn’t fit with their “theory”. Not even Mao at his most dogmatic did that.
Every organization and every collective has its own “strategy”. They spend hours week in, week out discussing it and implementing it.
Its not cynicism: I think this can change, and I think revolution can win in my lifetime, in the USA. No society is so special it remains static and invulnerable to revolutionary agitation. I am however skeptical that the way this can change is with some new-flanged theoretical insight. The toolbox we have is pretty awesome to spend all out time waiting for the perfect tool that will make all of this easy.
Maybe we need clarity in language: when I say practice, I mean “transformative practice”. There is value in say, harm reduction or immigrant support (or whatever “progressive” NGOs are doing). But that is not transformative. It might be transgressive and “concrete” but it is not transformative.
Transformative is achieving power in consciously and openly anti-capitalist terms in any power structure. Electing an open socialist on a socialist platform in an union, or a school board or to alderman, or to whatever. Transformative is multiplying the impact of what, say, the ABC people did in Citi Field the other day, because we own our own mass press, we can reach millions, and we are part of a movement, not a series of sects with a sprinkling of cults.
You mistake cynicism, with sober assessment. Perhaps the central mistake of your line of argument: sober assessment is perhaps the only theoretical insight we really need in the present period. Yet we are all preoccupied with the abstract questions of the movement, and doing abstract interventions, rather the concrete ones.
But that would be asking people to actually DO stuff, rather than cry on the internet about how the revolution fails because we do not read enough books.
@Radical Eyes -
I will gladly do so, ping me privately in facebook, its in Spanish and only applies to PRican conditions, but I will fulfill the request ;)
However, one has to be be blind or disingenuous to say that “no clear articulation lying on hand and ready to “be applied” in our current moment, then I guess you might be returned to the fact that we at present lack the theory from which an adequate pracitce could potentially derive”
Every sect in the US left has one. Some are quite successful in implementing theirs – to the extent that “success” is defined vis a vis other sects. This is my main point: WiTBD was written when there was already a mass movement, and mass organization, that could tap into its ideas – ideas that resulted from the concrete experience of an active cadre in the middle of a period of great strife. We are trying to write WiTBD decades before it is needed or called for.
World-wide it gets even more ridiculous to claim there are no clear articulations – there a more than a dozen live mass revolutions world-wide of an anti-capitalist and/or national liberation perspective, and there is civil strife in most western nations with a diverse articulation of political and extra-political mass strategies (and some of the same problems we have in the USA, except they tend to have more people around). Basques and Catalans, French and Portuguese, Nepalese and Venezuelan… take your pic of stage, method, purpose, strength all have in depth theoretical understanding that takes Zizek for a ride (not to say Zizek is invalid – I have the same view as Mike does of him).
Just that the world a’int just what is in front of you, and that is an important, concrete, insight.
Tell No Lies said
The basic task of revolutionaries is to fuse radical/revolutionary/socialist/communist ideas with the mass movements that arise from the oppressed. Thats difficult when there are serious problems with the inherited versions of those ideas and coherent alternatives haven’t really been worked out. Its even harder when there aren’t significant mass movements to speak of.
Confronted with these conditions people do different things, sometimes on the basis of a political analysis, more often on the basis of temperment. Some people throw themselves into whatever sort of mass activity they can find in the hope/certainty that eventually a critical mass will emerge that can revitalize the theory (which they may or may not recognize to be in crisis).
Others set out to resolve what they see as the pressing theoretical questions, resigniging themselves to an even more marginalized existence than the folks doing mass work without much mass in the expectation that further clarification will eventually illuminate a path to a praxis both revolutionary and mass in character.
Neither of these is optimal or even satisfactory, but the logic of our conditions drives us into imperfect choices. And I will freely concede that Kasama, as a consequence of a mix of political analysis, temperment, and just the circumstances of its gestation out of the RCP, falls pretty squarely at least right now into the latter category. I hope we can change that.
Do revolutionary movements arise in a linear way from the application of either of these ersatz “strategies”?
I don’t think so.
“Spontaneous” struggles erupt (spontaneous in the sense that someone else organized them) and, for complex reasons that tiny revolutionary groups have little influence over, some gain traction. If we’re lucky maybe the struggle erupts in a place or sector where some revs are doing some mass work. I say maybe because there is often a good chance that instead of commanding the respect of the masses they have alienated many of them but what are you going to do? In any event, scattered rev forces of both types, some with a tiny mass base, some with highly polished lines on questions completely removed from the situation at hand, scramble to relate to the new struggle. And if we are lucky some of the better ones find ways to fuse with new people to constitute something even newer — a revitalized revoutionary movement, a movement that will need both the social and organizational skills acquired from years of thankless mini-mass work and the theoretical chops acquired reading the Grundrisse and arguing with the peddlers of competing very small-circulation newpapers and journals. Who will successfully make the leap is not easily predicted. Not everyone will. The charismatic leader of demonstrations of two dozen people proves insufferable before a crowd of a thousand. The geek with a skin condition who used to stay up until 3 am arguing about Enver Hoxha finds their groove. Old line antagonism melt away and new ones spring forward, splitting old groups and producing new fusions. The “spontaneous” movement of this or that section of the masses (almost certainly not the one your group was betting on) produces a reshuffling of the deck and we are back at the races.
At least thats basically how I see it. Which is to say that the future is unwritten, we should struggle with each other but try not to have too many hard feelings because the day may be soon when the people need as many of us as can to work together. (Of course they need that now, but unfortunately they don’t get it until they move first.)
p.s. SKS, is your plan a secret or can you share it with the rest of us? Spanish ain’t an obstacle.
Tell No Lies said
SKS writes:
Really? Are more people doing theory or organizing right now? My sense is that while a fraction of folks are pushing newspapers containing ossified “theories” of one sort or another, serious theoretical work (reading, writing, and arguing) among rev-minded activists is almost non-existent. Kasama is one of a few places where you find it, but even here its pretty spotty. Not that there is a surplus of organizers, but frankly there are a lot more, in part because it can be a paying gig (with a unon or CBO) sometimes.
Basically I think we are each of us walking around with half an egg (yolk or white) and no basket, berating the fools who kept their yolks instead of their white or vice versa. I’m looking for a frying pan so we can make an omelette.
sks said
OK, I just emailed mike the document. Ask him for it!
worker antagonism said
@sks
“Maybe we need clarity in language: when I say practice, I mean “transformative practice”. There is value in say, harm reduction or immigrant support (or whatever “progressive” NGOs are doing). But that is not transformative. It might be transgressive and “concrete” but it is not transformative.”
so far, so good…
“Transformative is achieving power in consciously and openly anti-capitalist terms in any power structure. Electing an open socialist on a socialist platform in an union, or a school board or to alderman, or to whatever.”
so one achieves power in “consciously and openly anti-capitalist terms”, through participating in the state structure of the exploiters?
by legitimizing the bureaucratic apparatus of the ruling class, through running in the elections it imposes, thus both giving further reinforcement to the ideological hegemony of the capitalist state as the site of authority within the social body, and encouraging mass passivity by cultivating people not as the determiners of their own destiny within autonomous popular democratic organs, but as constituents and voters?
a very significant portion of the apolitical working class already has the common sense not to contribute to the electoral circus,why try dragging them back into it?
revolutionaries should not be mobilizing workers to vote for “open socialists” in the elections of legalized union bureaucracies, they should be building autonomous worker’s groups, organizing neighborhood committees and assemblies not electing “openly socialist” alderman, helping high school students to impose their collective power against the capitalist educational process, not electing “openly socialist” school board members.
the strategy you are outlining is the strategy of Social Democracy, of Euro-communism,of the Popular front, it cannot lead to autonomous proletarian power.
Dave Palmer said
I want to thank Tell No Lies for posting Zizek’s postscript to Lukacs. It’s quite thoughtful and very different from other things by Zizek I have read.
Mike brought up Abbie Hoffman. I didn’t live in the 1960s, but it seems to me very tragic that Abbie Hoffman and people like him promoted the idea that drug use was somehow revolutionary. (To his credit, Hoffman discouraged the use of heroin and methamphetamine — but on the other hand, he also claimed that cocaine wasn’t addictive). Abbie Hoffman seemed to truly believe that the 1960s youth culture, including (and maybe even especially) the aspects revolving around drugs, presented a radical challenge to capitalist society. In fact, the 1960s youth culture was easily co-opted by capitalist society, and continues to be sold today.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that the widespread use of marijuana and other drugs may have seriously reduced the revolutionary potential of US radicals in that time period.
Just as one example, I wonder to what extent the generally poor strategy and tactics of groups like the Weather Underground were attributable to drug use — and whether the people involved would have pursued more effective methods if they hadn’t been using drugs.
Again, I didn’t live in the 1960s, so it’s possible that my impressions are mistaken. But I read Abbie Hoffman as a teenager in the 1990s, and in retrospect, I kind of wish I could go back in time and give myself something better to read.
Tell No Lies said
I know this is a tangent, but I think the question of drugs can’t simply be reduced to how they impair peoples strategic judgement when they are high. The use of mind-altering substances is a universal feature of human cultures. That can play out in all sorts of ways and certainly did in the 1960s and 70s. For some people, obviously, drug use seriously interfered with their ability to function on any level, whether as revolutionaries or not. For others it was part of a process of breaking with a highly repressive dominant culture. Getting high went hand in hand with questioning all sorts of messed up aspects of this society. There are obviously security reasons why people involved in revolutionary organizations should be very careful about illegal drug use, but that is a separate question. I think it is possible to take seriously the dangers of chemical dependency as well as practical considerations (don’t play with automatic weapons on acid) without falling into blanket condemnation of all instances of drug use. Most people who use most recreational drugs do not have their lives ruined by them, though I can’t name anybody I know who had a healthy relationship with heroin.
spot said
It’s great that you want to question what you read, but it’s important to realize that no single source has all the answers; we never will have them all. Maybe a bit too meta for the discussion here, but to see so much discussion about whether or not Zizek would jam a few bars with us here is disheartening.
Everyone should collaborate with others to advance the common interest, but those interests will always be determined by masses of individuals. The mobilized mass, at least as I see it from what you have posted here on Nepal, is the political manifestation of individual antagonisms held in common.
Mike E said
[moved to its own thread]
Tell No Lies said
Mike, you should post that last piece as a separate article. It is I think a quite important point that is hard to see if you weren’t there.
sks said
@worker antagonism
Power is power. The structure of power is not ideological, the consciousness of the people in power is. Lacking a real alternative to challenge power, a concrete strategy is to use the power structures that exist.
It is not Euro-communism, Popular frontism, or whatever bullshit. It is in fact what the CNT-FAI did in Barcelona, and what the Bolsheviks did in St. Petersburg.
When we discard a method, we ghetto ourselves out of power.
And outside of power, all is illusion…
worker antagonism said
@sks
“Power is power. The structure of power is not ideological, the consciousness of the people in power is.”
your right the structure of power is not (just) ideological ( even though its reproduction through discourse can’t be separated from its material reproduction), it is the actual concrete content of bourgeoisie domination.
to imply that the specific historically determined structures of power are “neutral” and that the same currently hegemonic structures can serve opposing class ends on the basis of the subjective awareness of the individuals who hold executive positions within these structures is I think indicative of a technocratic managerial perspective on socialism, the same one which Lenin after his insights in 1917, slipped into over the course of the 20′s, where state capitalism is either reactionary or progressive and socialist depending on the mindset of who is in the driver’s set, regardless of the substantial identity in the content of the social formations themselves.
the exploited can only hold power for themselves through the creation of radically new and different structures, for example the tremendous emphasis in the early comintern on the Soviet as something radically different from parliament.
May9 said
Mike E writes:
“Well, yes…actually. You should respond to people’s actual arguments — not what you imagine them to be.
One of the problems we are having in this discussion is that you are far more sloppy with arguments and detail than others.You are constantly responding to arguments no one makes. And ignoring the arguments that people are actually making.
It would be a good habit for you to take people’s actual statements (which are sometimes nuanced, subtle, and carefully considered) and answer those actual words — rather than reducing it to what you imagine they said or believe.
And then you complain that our arguments are confusing, and seem contradictory to you. No, they aren’t confusing, they are just subtle. And you want to insist on simple and linear arguments.”
The usual condescending obscurantism from Mike E.
I didn’t distort or “simplify” (heaven forbid!) your argument. Your argument raises very obvious implications. You yourself have “distorted” my argument based on implications you invented, rather than words I said verbatim. As usual, the rules don’t apply to you. As usual, you engage in unabashed projection of your own fallacies onto others.
Mike E writes:
“This is an example of you asserting an argument that no one made. But in fact, no one said (and no one believes) that a person’s actions “do not matter.”
Do they matter to you in terms of assessing the usefulness or validity of their theory? No. You’ve made this point over and over. As usual, you hide behind semantics. Can you develop Marxist theory while being a counterrevolutionary in practice? According to you, yes, they absolutely can. So how does practice “matter” to you? Matters in terms of what?
Mike E writes:
“What several people are arguing is that you need to judge a philosopher mainly on the basis of his life’s work, and that his political activism is relevant but (in most cases) secondary. (I.e. dialectical arguments are being made about what is primary and what is secondary.”
Again, “life’s work” doesn’t include practice according to you, or am I “distorting” you again? I view his political activity as the most important part of his “life’s work”. You do not. You still think it has no bearing on whether Zizek’s theory is Marxist or is useful to Marxists. You’re being deliberately obtuse while claiming to be “nuanced”.
Mike writes:
“To say that something (like Zizek’s 1980s activism) is secondary is not an argument that his political practice “does not matter” — it is an argument that his philosophy should be examined in its own right, and his political practice should be evaluated (but in a specific context).”
Does it matter in terms of assessing the utility of his philosophy and assessing whether he can call himself a Marxist? You say no. That’s not a distortion. You can hand wave all you want about what you really said was that it should be assessed separately, but I am not distorting you. His practice does not matter to you when assessing his theory and status as a Marxist. Further, whether a theoretician is a Marxist also does not “matter”, to you. It is dismissed as “gotcha politics” and making checklists.
Mike E writes:
“Further we have argued that the main point isn’t to “evaluate” him anyway (in some simplistic up-or-down way) — but to understand his work in order to engage people influenced by (or attracted by) his views, and in order to understand whether there is something we can learn in the process.”
Right, so we should tolerate him calling himself a Marxist despite him being a counterrevolutionary in practice. Someone’s practice DOES NOT MATTER when it comes down to what we can learn from them theoretically (Again, I’m not “simplifying or distorting you”). We can “learn” from counterrevolutionaries. Fair enough, I don’t think counterrevolutionaries should inform our theory. Glad to see all of this talk about simplification and distortion, cardboard boxes, whatever is demagogic grandstanding and nothing more.
Mike E:
“You haven’t dealt with any of these arguments — you have just distorted them.”
I’ve dealt precisely with these arguments, you claim I’m distorting you when it’s crystal clear I am not. Claiming I’m distorting you is a clever method of shutting down any questioning of Zizek’s credibility.
Mike E:
“And now it comes out that the reason you don’t believe his philsophy should be considered is that you think philosophy is dead — and so we should all know that his philosophy is reactionary unless it repeats your own idiosyncratic version of dialectical materialism.”
A ridiculous distortion of my views. No matter, hypocrisy hasn’t effected you so far, why should it now. My argument, as you well know, is that I think his philosophy should not be considered primarily because he is a counterrevolutionary in practice. Secondarily because it is densely worded garble is useless for revolutionary practice. You are deliberately misrepresenting me all the while self-righteously beating your chest about me doing this.
Mike E:
“It is like your mind is a factory where a complex idea goes in, and a cardboard misunderstanding comes out. You accuse people of a stupid idea, and then denounce them for being so obviously stupid.”
Ironic considering your previous concoction of an absurd strawman argument that I never argued. You do seem to be fond of ad hominem attacks posing as “critiques of method” and silly metaphors.
Mike E:
“And that is why the question of direct quotes matters: Every nuanced, dialectical idea comes back (in your responses) reduced to nonsensical flatness.”
It is not reduced at all. Does practice matter when assessing theory or doesn’t it? You’ve already repeated my supposed “distortion” above. According to you it does not. Grandstand about semantics and verbatim quotes all you want. It doesn’t change anything.
Mike E:
“If you quoted what we were actually saying, it would be harder for you to be so distorting and confused.”
I’ve quoted everything you said here. Should be clear now.
Mike E:
“And when we say “all figures and events are complex, and you can’t judge a whole by simple sniffing at a small part” you reduce that too.”
And here you simultaneously claim that Zizek’s long and continuous counterrevolutionary practice is a “small part” of the whole, while insisting that you’re not “pooh-poohing” his practice. You’re talking out both sides of your mouth. Maybe that’s what you call “nuance”.
Mike E:
“So my analogy of Zizek’s occasional outrageous statements to Bakunin’s slavofilism or Marx’s anti-gay remarks, or Jefferson’s slave owning, you read that as a pooh-poohing. But that too is reductionism. No one is pooh-poohing anything. It is no minor matter that Jefferson owned slaves (he was a political representative of the slaveowning class!) Go back and reread what I said, I was arguing you couldn’t reduce Jefferson to his slave owner status, that he was more complex than that. I wasn’t pooh-poohing slave owning (nor do I think anyone should).”
Yet Jefferson’s political practice was largely dedicated to freeing slaves and calling for equality. Zizek’s political practice is dedicated to destroying socialism. You evidently don’t see the difference. This isn’t a small part of the whole, for Zizek. His whole life has been dedicated to opposing what we support! There’s nothing more complex about Zizek’s practice. He was and still is actively counterrevolutionary. This is not a simplification. It’s a fact. Show me where he has worked on the ground building socialism? You can’t.
Mike E:
“Here is how you disstort that discussion:
“That [Zizek's Slovenian activity] is on par with Bakunin making a racist remark, or Jefferson owning slaves, or MLK engaging in domestic violence, or some other personal imperfection or small foible. That it’s “dogmatic”, “religious”, akin to making political “checklists” to hold him accountable for this when he claims he’s a Marxist. As if all Zizek is doing is spouting off political positions, and not enacting these policies in reality.””
It is not a distortion. You claimed I was holding Zizek to a checklist of political criteria. That was your distortion. I was arguing that his practice is not mere “political criteria”. It is not a checklist. He is an active counterrevolutionary and has been his whole life. This isn’t a rather bad segment of his life’s work, it’s his entire life’s work. But please proceed to claim it is me who is distorting you, and not vice versa.
Mike E writes:
“But I was arguing (again) that you can’t reduce a discussion of Jefferson to the simple (true) fact that he owned slaves. And some reductionists say “He owned slaves, what else do we need to know?!””
And once again, you don’t seem to be able to grasp the essential difference between Jefferson and Zizek, or even Bakunin and Zizek. Jefferson was a slaveowner who none the less in practice made initiatives to abolish slavery in Virginia. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence has been used by non-whites fighting against colonialism as a reasoned argument for why they are entitled to freedom and self-determination. Zizek’s practice is not so nuanced and complex, it is wholly reactionary. This is the difference.
Mike E:
“So whenever we say something carefully nuanced, you repeat it in reduced and garbled form. And when we correct your distortion, you complain that this is very confusing and we are contradicting ourselves.”
Where did I complain about it being confusion? I want verbatim quotes! I should have said that you’re playing word games and pretending that you didn’t mean what you did mean.
Mike E says:
“No, we aren’t contradicting ourselves — reality is itself contradictory and we are analyzing the unity of opposites that define all the things we are discussing. things are very rarely simply “this or that,” good or bad, progresssive or reactionary, heroic or disgusting. The world is not so flat, linear, static, essentialist.”
The cliched argument for complexity in all things, yet you haven’t been able to provide an example of where Zizek’s practice is as “complex” as you say it is.
Mike E says:
“For you a discussion is about a quick easy verdict. It is a quick doctrinaire checklist. A discussion about a person is about “holding them accountable” — are they one of us? Or are they not?”
Once again you distort me. For me being a counterrevolutionary is not – in the words of Stalin – a mere bagatelle. It is an important point. It should raise suspicions about the bill of goods they are trying to sell, packaged as “Marxism”. It is hilarious that I am called doctrinaire, someone with checklists, when the sole red line I issue is whether the person is a counterrevolutionary. You, king of nuance, complexity, and context, strip Yugoslavia and all “revisionists” from their status of being socialist countries for not abiding with your checklist. The world is flat – Yugoslavia is not socialist. My checklist, if I have one, is much less rigorous than yours. You have very selective demands for nuance and complex all-sided analysis.
“But life is far more complicated. OUr tasks are more complicated. And the people, political forces or events we are trying to understand are far more complicated than your worldview allows.”
Right, but assessing revisionism, it’s all very simple. Anyone who isn’t a darling of the Mao-era CCP is a capitalist! Complexity goes out the window. All sided analysis goes out the window.
Once again, Zizek’s practice is not complicated or nuanced. You see complexity where none exists.
May9 said
Mike E writes:
For someone who demands nuance and verbatim quotes, this is yet another gross misrepresentation of my views. You said it correctly originally, I said their ideas are not new. I did not say they were all wrong. Where did I say existentialism or pragmatism or even religious thought were wrong? No where. Nor did I say they had “no ideas”. Bizarre misreading. I said their ideas were not new. Surely you can pick up on that difference? You distort my view and then go on to distort it further by claiming that since I think all of this philosophy is wrong, that’s why I think Zizek is wrong. Absurd.
Mike E says:
“And then you write:
So far, all I get is an ad hominem barrage instead of any demonstration of how any of these ideas you listed are in fact, unique to the 20th century. If I’m so ignorant and I’m wrong about this, it should be rather easy to demonstrate. You seem to enjoy avoiding arguments in order to focus on ‘me’ as an individual. Kind of strange for someone with strict standards about method.
More attacks from Mike E:
Ok, so I’m religious, ignorant, a fundamentalist. What else? Will you actually get around to addressing the argument? I’m not holding my breath.
Mike E says:
Ok, and? You’re the one who insists on separating practice from theory. He theorized that the strategy for revolution must focus its efforts on attacking the hegemonic culture of the bourgeoisie and create a proletarian culture before it can organize to seize state power. These efforts will be led by intellectuals. So, based on Gramsci’s work organizing to seize state power, he came to the conclusion that these activities would backfire in western capitalist countries because of the influence of bourgeois culture.
Is my treatment of Gramsci’s actual theory untrue because he was in prison for political activity?
Mike E says:
Does he or does he not argue that we must move from a war of maneuver to a war of position – that is, civil society is too resistant to changes caused by economic crisis because of the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. Advanced western countries were akin to trench warfare – in which a war of position – was appropriate. Focusing on organizing to seize state power without first establishing hegemony over civil society is equivalent to – in a military sense – ferocious artillery attacks against enemy trenches. In appearance it looks as though the enemy trench is leveled, in reality the enemy still had a secure defensive position, so that when troops storm across the trench they are effectively resisted. Now, how is this proletarian control over civil society obtained? By having a vanguard of intellectuals – “organic intellectuals” – who are supposedly the people within each and every class that direct the ideas and aspirations of the class they belong to.
Am I right or wrong about what he’s saying here?
You asked specifically about Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and whether it is a new idea. No it is not a new idea. Marx went to great lengths to refute the idea that ideational changes could take place solely in the realm of ideas, without changes in the base. Gramsci is restating earlier idealist accounts of social change. This is not novel.
Do you have anything to add besides calling me silly? How is Gramsci’s call for Kulturkampf a break from the German idealism that Marx was arguing against in the 1840s?
I don’t know what on earth this has to do with the question of whether philosophy has provided new ideas in the 20th century.
Except I’ve done the work. I’ve investigated these supposed “new ideas” and found them to be restatements of old ideas. Of the ones I haven’t investigated, you haven’t demonstrated how any of them are new to the 20th century.
No, it is not the ‘very same method’, since it was a different question. My ‘method’ for dismissing Zizek was based on his consistent counterrevolutionary practice. Now, you can and will use what I said about philosophy as a smokescreen for your defense of Zizek, to accuse me of being narrow-minded and ignorant, someone who doesn’t investigate what I criticize, or whatever else. But it’s clear from anyone who bothers to read my post that the sole point of that blog post was to question the credibility of Zizek as a Marxist based on his being an unabashed and unapologetic counterrevolutionary.
What led you to call my essay the “worst in ages” was an extremely defensive posture about intellectualism which is pervasive in many of your posts. A kneejerk reaction to respond with hysteria against anyone, no matter how remote on the blogosphere, who dares criticize do-nothing theorizing.
How else can you one explain how you responded to this unimportant blog post written two years with the rhetorical equivalent of a nuclear bomb – multiple lengthy blog posts and a barrage of continual ad hominem attacks?
rob said
chill out on may 9!
i dont know about everyone else, but how about psychoanalysis?
the oedipus complex etc seem pretty new, altho they may well have antecedents before that. zizek is interesting for his particular mix of marxism and psychoanalysis.
you may well disagree with what he says, or not find it interesting, or whatever. but that doesn’t make it worth studying.
too often it is marxists who have not realized that science has moved on since the time of marx, and so everything since marx must be wrong!
there are perhaps things in marxism which are wrong, such as the confused and confusing pseudo logic of dialectics, and materialism, which has surely changed from what marx meant with new discoveries in physics. i think a lot of what is wrong with zizek is actually wrong with marxism. with this so called logic of dialectics, one can put almost anything together and make it convincing.
Tell No Lies said
“Your argument raises very obvious implications.”
This seems to be your big problem. What you think is obvious, others don’t. But since its obvious to you you think it isn’t neccesary to explain it, you can simply assert it.
To take the most basic point, it is not obvious to me that Zizek has dedicated himself to “destroying socialism” because it is not obvious to me that what existed in Yugoslavia in the 1980s or 90s was socialism. You act as if this is a non-controversial claim that any idiot can see. But among socialists and communists it is actually passionately disputed.
Almost the entirety of the rest of your argument rests on this tendentious characterization of the Milosevic regime which you can’t be bothered to actually argue for.
If Milosevic isn’t a socialist or a revolutionary the characterization of Zizek as a hardened anti-socialist or counter-revolutionary falls apart.
“Right, so we should tolerate him calling himself a Marxist…”
If I had a nickle for every asshole I’ve met who called himself a Marxist I’d be rich. I don’t think anybody here has argued that they think Zizek is a good Marxist, whatever they might mean by that. People call themselves all sorts of things and we tolerate it because “not tolerating” things like that produces a very low level of discussion. Whether Zizek is actually a Marxist or not is simply not interesting. Whether what he says is correct or not or otherwise illuminating is what is interesting.
The question of the relationship of theory to practice is a complex one and looking for a one to one correspondence in individuals is a dicey proposition (and a mechanical understanding of how such things work). There are people with very bad political practice who are nonetheless very insightful when they speak or write. There are people who are verbally insufferably doctrinaire but who are excellent organizers with excellent political instincts. And there are many who are sometimes one and then the other. Marx’s work building the First International is not what makes the Theory of Surplus Value a correct theory. Maybe if he had spent less time working on the First International and more time finishing Vols. II and III of Capital they would be as good as Vol. I and we’d all have a much better understanding of how capitalism works and the world revolutionary process would be further along than it is. Who knows. Lenin and Mao were great revolutionary leaders whose greatest contributions to theory were the revolutions they led. They were middling philosophers at best. Writing Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was a waste of Lenin’s precious time IMHO. The fact that Heidigger was a Nazi is not all you need to know about him. It matters, but it isn’t sufficient basis for rendering a judgement on his philosophy, convenient as it would be if it were so.
The relationship between an individual’s political practice and their theoretical outlook and conributions is usually complex. Moreso if they have dedicated their lives to the development of their theoretical outlook but are (as is often the case in such situations) clumsy in navigating real-life political questions.
In short, you haven’t demonstrated that Zizek’s practice is anywhere near as terrible as you have claimed, but even if you had that wouldn’t tell us much about the stuff that compells people pay attention to him, namely his philosophy and what its implications are or aren’t for revolutionary theory.
If you were paying attention you’d realize that most of us aren’t great proponents of Zizek’s thinking. Some have read some of his writings and gotten things from them and I wish we had heard more from them (I posted a link to the one piece of his that was important in a small way to my own political development). All of us I think are interested in the role he has played recently in promoting people looking into communist ideas. Down the road if some Zizekian trend emerges in the communist movement it might be something to fret about, depending I suppose on what elements in his thinking came to define it. But that is not the situation we confront. Rather he is presently encouraging thousands of people who otherwise would not be to pick up Lenin and Mao and to read them with fresh eyes. We think that is a good thing and hope that people who make contact with those works through Zizek will come around and check out discussions here on Kasama.
May9 said
Heh, I found an interesting quote by Gramsci ironically enough which is relevant here.
“‘One may term “Byzantianism” or “scholasticism” the regressive tendency to treat so-called theoretical questions as if they had a value in themselves, independently of any specific practice. … In short the principle must always rule that ideas are not born of other ideas, philosophies of other philosophies: they are a continually renewed expression of real historical development. . . . Identity in concrete reality determined identity in thought, and not vice-versa. It can further be deduced that every truth, even if it is universal and even if it can be expressed by an abstract formula of a mathematical kind (for the sake of theoreticians) owes its effectiveness to its being expressed in the language appropriate to the specific concrete circumstances. If it cannot be expressed in specific terms, it is a Byzantine and scholastic abstraction, good only for phrase mongers to toy with”
Now, it’s rather exhausting to have repeatedly point out that Zizek’s bad practice is not limited to the damn 1980s. I don’t know how many times this has been said. It’s apparent that no amount of commentary about Zizek’s politics in the 1990s and the present will satisfy you, so you can continue to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend that I’ve provided enough evidence.
Even if Yugoslavia wasn’t socialist according to your orthodoxy in the 1980s, it cannot be denied in any way shape or form that Zizek’s party, the party that he founded and helped led, the party on whose label he ran for President, the party with which he maintained contact and supported throughout the 1990s and 2000s, savagely privatized the Slovenian economy. They did this immediately with the Enterprise Act – which replaced social property relations with capitalist property relations; the Law on the Circulation and Disposal of Capital – which gave work councils the right to sell their companies to private owners; the the Law on Social Property which transformed socially owned companies into private companies through internal shares and buyouts; and the Law on the Transformation of Social Ownership – who provided for a wide variety of mechanisms by which property could be handed over to private control. This can’t be disputed. If it’s not a big deal to you, fine. But stop pretending this didn’t happen or that Zizek didn’t have a role in it. It’s equivalent of saying it’s not counterrevolutionary to support Yeltsin even Yeltsin gutted any vestige of publicly owned property in Russia, because, after all, Gorbachov’s USSR wasn’t ‘socialist’.
Zizek’s political party rapidly shifted the wealth of Slovenia into the hands of private owners. Fact. Stop harping on the 80s as if that’s where it all stopped. I don’t know how many times this has to be repeated before it sinks in.
Nothing Zizek writes, as a counterrevolutionary and enemy of socialism, can help build socialism. As a charlatan and entertainer, the best he can do is “raise awareness” about the theoreticians he claims to support. Fine. He raises awareness about the existence of Lenin and Mao among philosophy students. Great.
May9 said
And it continues to amaze that anyone on the left who dare try to justify reading Heidegger. I thought this question was put to rest decades ago, when an enterprising scholar documented in detail Heidegger’s longstanding commitment to National Socialism and the relationship between his politics and his philosophy. Heck, Heidegger even admitted his philosophy is tied to his belief in National Socialism.
http://heavysideindustries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/88-nazi.pdf
Is this how far people will go to de-link theory from practice?
observer said
May9 wrote:
Are you kidding? What is wrong with reading ANYBODY. Do you think ignorance is good, or “revolutionary”?
I’ve even read Hitler and a number of other fascists, and the history books put out by David Irving. You learn things by reading, including things by negative example.
How are you going to counter fascist arguments if you don’t even know what they are? How will you understand their appeal if you don’t study them?
No one needs to “justify” reading anyone, or apologize for doing so. Are you afraid of being contaminated?
I’ve read all of Ayn Rand (at times a daunting joyless task) but it didn’t turn me pro-capitalist. It did, however, come in handy in many political discussions with libertarians, including at least a few who I managed to turn to the left.
saoirse said
i may be totally off base here but I take May 9th point,
as an argument against revolutionaries utilizing Heidegger and trying to disentangle Heidegger the national socialist from Heidegger the philosopher.
There are many philosophers and authors I will read and re-read but I think its not unfair to suggest that a verdict, of sorts, can be made on the political and philosophical thinking of Heidegger or Rand, etc. I don’t see this as an argument for an anti-intellectualism.
Taking it further and again this my own reading of May 9th posts, they are arguing a similar verdict is now appropriate for Zizek’s work. That he has a long history extending back two decades of supporting bad politics. Of supporting organizations, policies and practices that are against liberation.
TNL has questioned the root of these politics, questioning:
Point taken.
I also agree with TNL that many folks call themselves Marxists and I am not about to start policing the people that do if they don’t fit my brand of Marxism.
Still Kasama is a revolutionary website. If we’re making the basic point that revolutionaries should read more theory including Zizek. I agree. And we can go deeper on that tip. But again I think this at some point its okay to render some verdicts and move ahead. I don’t think this is unreasonable. That said when I first read Judith Butler’s gender trouble 15 years ago I had a different take on her theory of the “performity of all gender expression” than I do today. my views have changed but I have also had many years to see how her rather challenging to read theory has impact to political landscape of the LGBTQ community. In a similar way I think recognizing the potential that our verdicts might change on a think like Zizek is important too.
worker antagonism said
It continues to amaze me, that anyone on the “revolutionary left” still calls the PRC “People’s China”, its rather indicative of a concept of “socialism” none too far removed from the “national” variety.
Mike E said
Saoirse writes:
Thanks, sister, for drilling sharply into some of the key questions. Let me a bit contrarian in hopes of sharpening things up.
Some people here on this thread have argued something like this (I’m paraphrazing):
That is my understanding of the argument.
And I just want to say that every part of this, piece by piece, argument by argument, seems mistaken.
Particularly starting with two assumptions:
a) That our main job is to “evaluate” Zizek — i.e. walk away from this investigation with a summation of him (is he reactionary, is he progressive, should we include him on all study plans, should we ignore his work?)
b) That our main method of evaluation should be his participation in southern Slav politics (especially of the late twentieth century).
This is not JUST about each of us reading more theory
Saoirse writes:
On one level, yes, of course, most revolutionaries are really larguly untrained about theory of any kind — and yes, our movement (as a whole) could read more theory (and more news, and more history, and more economics…).
But to reduce our discussion to that advice is a bit primitive.
For what purpose are we suggesting to read more theory? Do we have a division of labor? ARe we just urging everyone to “read everything” in some aimless self-cultivating way? No.
As we develop a revolutionary movement and revolutionary practice, we also need to engage in theoretical creative development (in its own right), which does not mean reading random theory (for its own sake).
Our point around theory is not to “take it all in” — but to end up “putting something OUT” — i.e. the revolutionary theory that will serve our attempt to destroy imperialism.
So that sharpens the argument of WHY we should all “read more theory” and also WHAT theory we should read, and also WHAT (precisely) we should do (collectively, not individually) with this theory we are putting in front of ourselves.
So yeah, read more theory. And don’t restrict it to your canon of “five head classics.” But that is not really even the start of understanding our task.
Mike’s view: This is not about “each of us read more theory.” Our goal is to CREATE a new coherent updated communist theory, not just “read” what others have created. We need to be WRITING, not just READING, theory. And we need to WRITE it in order to guide a revolutionary practice that (currently) does not have a SUFFICIENT communist theory to animate it.
Our Main Job is Not Grading Writers as if They are Schoolchildren & as if We are the Teachers.
Our main task in the reading is not to “evaluate” the various figures.
We will (inevitably) develop some evaluations (which will not be binary up-or-down). But thinking that evaluation of the person is the main thing that we are here to do would leave us equally impoverished, especially if our standard of appraisal was simply do they agree with some self-invented pre-existing checklist of what is true.
If you start and end your “evaluations” by comparing everyone to a checklist of your already-existing ideas — then (by the nature of your process) you will learn nothing. You will simply be asking “are they already one of us, or not?”
And if someone has a very new, shocking and innovative insight — your method will force you to treat it with a conservative hostility and suspicion. And what good is that?
Mike’s View: Our main task is two fold:
First to understand (collectively, not each of us individually) the theoretical work, innovations and questions raised. (Not just in philosophy, but in political economy, history, revolutionary strategy, science, etc.) And extract from that innovative ideas and insights that we should critically assimilate into our own attempt to “know things to change things.” This is mainly a learning and critical assimilation process for us.
Our second task is to understand influential ideas (whether we “like them” or not) in order to be able to constructively engage other forces, who are animated by, attracted by and influenced by non-communist forms of radical thought.
This is not a Call for Perpetual Mass Study of Academic Marxism
I don’t think most revolutionaries need study and engage Zizek. I don’t think the communist project is now to become an endless study circle of dozens of theoretical thinkers and their life’s work.
People who are dogmatists often think you should only read bible (or if they are secular they think you should only read the selected great thinkers).
So when creative communists suggest reading Lacan, or Zizek or Mao, the dogmatists assume that all these people are now your new gods, to be worshiped equally and treated as “heroes.”
(I was amazed when someone above thought that reading Zizek meant you had now made him a hero. Think of the implication of those assumptions.)
In fact we should restlessly read the views of many (often flawed) people — revolutionary, insightful, scientific, reactionary, pro-communist, anti-communist etc. — and learn to break down and assimilate their work (like metabolizing something), and learn to critically engage their arguments. And reading them doesn’t make them a hero, nor does it mean that EACH communist now has to read every one.
But as a movement, as a collective, moving through this complex changing world — we need to be tuned into the ideas of our times.
Many people will not have the time (or the training) to assimilate (say) Alan Badiou. It is true (as some have said) that the work by specialists is often written in the professional language of their specialty. And it is often not easy to engage that work on the level and in the form it is written.
And we have many things to assimilate over time — since the current communists movements have often been quite negligent for several decades, and really ignored the work going on right along side them.
Just think of the things we have allowed to pass us by….
Here we have been talking about a rather minor figure (Zizek), but there are other quite profound theorists to engage: Alan Badiou, or Foucault, or Gramsci, or Prachanda, or Mariategui, or Althusser, or Wilhelm Reich, or Herbert Marcuse, or Hegel, or Plato, or Leontiev, or Lev Vigotsky, or Leon Trotsky, or Tony Cliff, or Abimael Guzman, or the African Maoist A.M. Babu, or Samir Amin, or…
And (on the mention of Trotsky) isn’t it true that the Communist movement rejected Trotsky (and for many good reasons), but that very very few communists have any sense of what was wrong with the theory of permanent revolution, the assumptions of “parallelogram of forces,” a generalized program of transitional demands, the view that you can’t have socialism in one country, or that capitalist restoration is tied with the conservatism of a bureaucracy? Here is an example of an influential theoretical body of work that has lived (and developed) right alongside of us, but was never really engaged deeply or publicly. And I mention that one (trotskyism) just because it is an example of a theory that i think is NOT correct, and one that is not particularly current or urgent, but that underscores how long we have been lagging in taking our communist theoretical responsibilities seriously.
Sure It’s Hard, It’s Obscure — but Does That Make It Gibberish?
After the 60s upsurge, some currents of academic left thought embraced obscure and non-popular forms of expression — in part as a reaction to the dumbed down popularization that characterized much of the mass movements. We can criticize this trend toward obscurantism (in form) — but that does not mean that these works have nothing to teach us (nonetheless). And we also need to respect that sometimes the difficulty of these works is not obscurantism — but is the necessary precision and language of a developed field (and Badiou is the example of someone famous for clarity and precision who is, nonetheless, very difficult for non-specialist readers to understand). And in those cases, it is quite possible that the communist investigations of those specific works should be assigned (especially) to those comrades who have such specialized training.
In short: For us to say there is value in studying Hegel or Badiou, does not mean that every recruit or organizer or communist should set aside days and weeks to study his works. (That is, once again, so binary and primitive a view. Non-strategic and simplistic.)
This is a Theortical Project that Serves a New Revolutionary Practice
A theoretical project means that as a revolutionary movement we should see what we have to learn from a surrounding world of investigations, debate and creative work. This can mean teams of specific people extracting what is of value — giving the time to go deep.
It doesn’t mean (as someone assumed in an almost cartoonish way) that Zizek is now “our hero” and has replaced Lenin, and now we hand everyone his key works and portrait.
(Again, dogmatists see others through their own eyes. If some of us read Zizek they assume he must be our new idol and hero. Because THEY view the writes they read as “heroes,” idols and icons. If we find value in Althusser, they believe we must now be his “followers.” And so one. It is an impoverished and religious outlook, where you don’t examine examine ideas you don’t intend to worship, and where there is no sense of ‘one divides into two.”
But, on the contrary, I can learn from Darwin or Stephen Jay Gould without becoming their acolytes, or making them into iconic heroes. I’m not a big fan of Zizek’s work, so far, but I am intrigued by his methods for going viral and reaching new audiences (and isn’t that alone something to learn?) I have found elements of Badiou very helpful (his theory of event, void, truthprocess etc.) while I think his too-sweeping rejection of the party-state (as a form of power) is a bit naive about the real necessities of real revolutions (past and future).
IN other words, we need critical assimilation (both affirmation and negation) — or (as Mao put it) “one divides into two.”
It is not like we want to emerge with some grade school pass/fail report card: “Samir Amin is a petty bourgeois, Leontiev is an orthodox Marxist Leninist like us, Althusser is half communist but too intellectual, and Badiou doesn’t seem to like the party state.”
Such fractures and infantile mini-verdicts are useless (and by that I mean, useless to the process of making real-world revolution). And we can add to that: the method of judging theoretical works by the episodic political activism of their writers is a bad method (Althusser was not enthusiastic about the riots of May 1968, Zizek was initially for the secession of Slovenia, Marx/Engels supported Germany in the Franco-Prussian war, Lenin liked the American Taylor system for factories, Bill Hinton initially supported the revisionist coup in China, Carl Oglesby slept with female students when he was a professor, Mao’s foreign ministry felt compelled to recognized Pinochet’s new government, and so on.) If you want to judge a theoretical body of work by resurrecting specific episodes, it is a cheap and easy method of proving whatever you want. this is not to say that specific political episodes are “irrelevant,” they aren’t — but it is to say that you have to judge theory-as-theory.
This is about revolution
The snide remarks about “armchairs” are revealing and lame: Yes, people who actually read sit in armchairs. Just like people who fish sit in boats.
But revolutionary communists, activists and leaders are people who read. And if you don’t have an armchair, you prolly will have a hard time helping rebuild a new revolutionary movement.
Let’s put it like this, soberly:
There is (now) no well-defined revolutionary movement. There is (not yet) a sufficient, creative, identified and well defined revolutionary communist theory (with strategy, tactics, program, analysis of the enemy, approaches to internationalism etc.) for the work that we urgently need to start. There is no existing country-wide core of organized revolutionaries — with common approaches, and a commitment to a common project.
We have to build ALL of that.
And it simply won’t do to think our main task is to rush toward routinized, ill-considered activism — and give these tasks of re-creation just a passing nod.
We are passing through a period where every revolutionary has to take responsibility for building a movement of revolutionaries (not just a mass base for low-level resistance).
Think about it. We have major tasks, new tasks (that this generation has not really thought about deeply), and that some people just don’t want to allow anyone to think about.
Some think we can grab snippets of theory and graphic icons (from the comintern, or the old CPUSA, or a few classics) and jump back into “being the best organizer in the social movements.”
This will lead (literally) nowhere — except the repetition of deadends that have been explored over and over in past generations. It’s like someone insists on going into that part of the maze where all the passages lead to dead ends.
We have specific tasks for uncovering how to initiate and guide practical revolutionary work that fuses communism with oppressed people. (We are not just a propeller that “stirs up” the oppressed. We actually have to fuse a new revolutionary movement with the oppressed.)
And we have initial ideas, and directions, and proposals…. it’s not like we start with blank slates and dull eyes.
And to do those tasks, we have to be awake, thinking critically, engaged, open-minded, well-read, aware of the world around us, organized into a division of labor, and not consumed by familiar rutted routines of stereotypical “activism.”
Tell No Lies said
I’m moving Heidegger up on my reading list.
I’ve read almost no Heidegger. I’m embarrassed to say that as someone who considers themself pretty well read. But its true. He’s a major 20th century thinker who was a major influence on many thinkers I hold in quite high regard (Marcuse, Foucault, Badiou). But I haven’t gotten around to reading more than a couple short pieces from a collection of essays that I don’t remember understanding very well.
I don’t think we are entitled to “verdicts” on the works of writers we haven’t read. We can choose for various reasons not to read them and indeed we have to make such choices all the time. But when we do we give up the right to speak authoritatively on those works.
I have no problem passing a verdict on Heidegger’s politics. He was undisputably a Nazi. And as John Belushi said, “I hate those guys.” But on his philosophy, ít would be ridiculous for me to pass such a verdict. Even if we stipulate that there is a relationship between his politics and his philosophy, as one should presume. But that tells us practically nothing. Of course they are “related.” The question is how and what are the implications for his various philosophical views. And of course there is no way to determine that without understanding what his views are and that, in turn, requires that one read him.
Like Mike, I don’t think its incumbent on every communist to read the whole canon of 20th century continental philosophy. I believe that a division of labor is neccesary and inevitable. But I also believe that we should promote a general ethos of reading broadly which includes reading writers who various reasons might be noxious. Most communists don’t need to read Heidegger OR Zizek. But they should probably take a stab at Gramsci and Althusser after they have read some Marx. And those who WANT to read Heidegger should be encouraged to do so, so that as a movement we have some folks in our ranks who are literate in such an important figure.
saoirse said
On a lighter note. This is a pretty funny video. on reading Heidegger in the proper german. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSdHoNJu5fU
b_y said
i’m a little surprised that so much effort has been made to defend zizek and capital T theory in this space in general.
as exciting as i find much of heidegger’s thinking to be, and the critical use that people like jean-luc nancy and derrida have made of his work; ontology as politics is an incredibly problematic rabbit hole to find oneself traveling down, and i think there’s little urgency behind developing literacy of his work for polemical or concretely political purposes. but if you’re inclined to dirty your hands with “nazi theory”, i’m surprised that carl schmitt has not been mentioned yet. his work is of central importance to foucault’s thinking on biopolitics, particularly in his 1975-’76 lectures ‘society must be defended’, and schmitt’s 1962 ‘theory of the partisan’ engages with lenin and mao. the connection between schmitt and maois politics is further explored in michael dutton’s book ‘policing chinese politics’.
Matthew said
After reading a large number of these posts, I would like to thank Harriet for repeatedly providing links which have convinced me that Lacan is a racist. I was a fan of Lacan, and I dismissed a number of Harriet’s links for reasons I felt sound.
But the persuasive link, which I could not ignore, concerned his characterization of the Roma population.
To me, he lied about the situation, or misrepresented it in order to present an ‘authentic’ Slovenian voice to service his argument against multiculturalism.
It exposed to me a side of Zizek which I cannot tolerate. I was very happy, and even enjoyed Zizek’s contradictory assertions. Even the occasionally errors in his work (as in his plot description of Rashomon in ‘The Parallax View’) did not deter me, as his work was innovative in putting cultural phenomenon into a Lacanian perspective in an entertaining way.
But it is risible for such a social agitator like Zizek to resort to the type of support of openly racist locals in Slovenia in their Nazi scare tactics on the Roma there. And it suggests to me a certain model of bravo machismo, leaving out all the nationalism, socialism or whatever, that rings all too familiar.
Lacan, yes. Perhaps his early interest in the National Front puts him into question also, but his work is sufficiently apolitical for that not to have exposed itself as an issue (if I were to find such sympathies, then gone). Heidegger, for me, was stupid politically. This is not to excuse his collaboration with the Nazis and betrayel of colleagues. But for me, he has been sufficiently de-Nazified.
I think its time for Zizek to undergo a similar process.