Having developed a Žižekian reading of the contours of global capitalism, I am now in a position to consider the possibilities of a Žižekian-inspired response to global poverty and environmental degradation. What is at stake here is both a reading of the role of psychoanalysis in politics and the viability of a Marxist response to capitalism in the 21st century. In terms of psychoanalysis, having thus far rejected the possibility of a collective sense of institutionalised normativity stemming from the Lacanian conception of shared social life, I can now offer an alternative Lacanian approach to the political, with particular reference to the pressing contradictions of global capitalism. Chapter Five established that Žižek’s construction of the political does not lead to a reductive or institutionalised approach to politics but, rather, the development of a range of strategic possibilities based around the singularity of the Real; a plurality of strategic responses in relation to the context of existing conditions (in this case, the question of global capitalism and surplus labour).
As constructed in the previous chapter, our time in history is such that we cannot simply posit alternative modes of being and hope that they will flourish. The strength of capitalism means that there is no outside space that is immune to its reach. Any point of otherness, whether resistant to capital or not, is drawn into the logic of capitalism. As a result, alternative understandings or practices only ‘make sense’ or ‘work’ if they fit in with the operation of capitalism. This historical positioning of capital produces a rather bleak picture of 21st century politics, at least for those who are on the sharp end of Western progress. Not only have I suggested that the central dilemmas facing humanity – absolute poverty and environmental degradation – are caused by capital through the opposing effects of the interactions of the wage-labour system and over-production but my reading of capitalism suggests that no alternative is currently possible. Nonetheless, although history appears ‘stuck’ in the self-revolutionising flows of capital I have been able to nominate a central fault line – surplus labour. By understanding surplus labour as both the central contradiction of capitalism as well as a modality of the Real – this understanding of the presence of the Real being constructed through Žižek’s reading of universality – a new possibility for disturbing the operation of capital is revealed. This possibility lies in the presence of an ‘extimate’ outside to capitalism in surplus labour. Excesses of labour are not strictly outside of capitalism – they play an intimate role in its functioning – but are nevertheless excluded from its official operation. As such, surplus labour has a threatening role within capital as an unruly element not entirely controlled by its operation.
Conversely, the troubling presence of an excess of labour does not suggest either a natural alternative form of social life – one in which this surplus is dissolved – or an predestined political response. Although the identification of labour as a potentially revolutionary site evokes images of the rise, and subsequent dictatorship of the proletariat, as well as the spectre of productivism, Žižek’s work strongly rejects such a reading of historical progress. Instead, the form of politics I have thus far attributed to Žižek is based upon an alternative sense of history, economy and class struggle.
Žižek’s reading suggests a strategic form of politics based on an expansion of the Lacanian ethical dialectic identified in Chapter Four. This dialectic produces a number of interpretations across political contexts. Here, given the material structure of our reading of history and the currently pressing contradictions of capital, I shall attempt to consider these strategic applications of a Lacanian dialectic in regards to capitalism and surplus labour. Such a reading implies that whilst this dialectic might have an established form, this subtext varies across the context in which it is applied. As such, this chapter makes reference to three distinct yet intertwined applications that feature through Žižek’s work: the act, subtractive politics, and the practice of concrete universality.
Although they each feature prominently throughout his work, Žižek has not explicitly labelled these positions as strategic alternatives. It is difficult, and somewhat undesirable, to attach an objective coherence to each of these strategies. Rather they are similar processes which relate back to the singular operation of the Real within ideology as identified throughout this thesis; they are processes more than objects. The danger here lies in reifying Žižek’s position to a form of methodologism through which each political strategy becomes a separate object. The intent in labelling these positions is to identify different possibilities in approaching the Real rather than pacifying the Real as a form of presence. Indeed, the manner in which each strategy attempts to avoid such a pacification – the very process it attempts to avoid – is a key focus of each construction.
Perhaps ultimately any reification of Žižek’s politics which does occur in this thesis is more a problem of the discourse of the university and the requirements of academia. These strong divisions would not occur in the messy practice of street level politics; it is only the level of abstraction required by the university and philosophical inquiry itself which creates these problems. Nonetheless, there is much advantage in the more subtle delineation of the distinctions between these approaches each produces differing responses to capitalism and for this reason in this chapter I will identify each of the act, subtractive politics, and of the practice of concrete universality as distinct strategies.
It is through these strategies that we shall respond to the issue that this chapter ultimately addresses, of how to translate Žižek’s work into a political response to the disavowed foundations of global capitalism. In response to this specific question, this chapter suggests that while ‘the act’ formulates the basic Žižekian political strategy by opposing activity to the revolutionary gesture which is the act, it remains too ‘crazy’ to be considered an effective political formulation. The miraculous transformation of the act may appear feasible in a subjective sense. It is, however, unable to resolve not only the limitations of psychoanalysis as a political force but also the difficulties of responding to the reign of global capitalism. More appropriate is the subtly of subtractive politics, which suggests that the grand reformation of the act can occur through subtle political movement. Žižek argues that in an age of cynical ideology based around fetishised objects, a withdrawal from this ideology is the most effective form of politics. In this chapter, however, I argue that the practice of concrete universality alone holds this potential on account of its utilisation of the tension evoked by surplus labour as the concrete universal within the abstract hegemonic horizon. This strategic positioning allows for the contradictions of surplus labour to intrude into capitalism itself in a manner which will not allow it to continue unhindered.
This position is not the final word on Žižekian politics, however. Recently, Žižek has also begun to make reference to Badiou’s notion of the communist hypothesis, a reference that invokes the presence of utopian theory and the work of Fredric Jameson. It through this reference that I shall return to the question of normativity, as well as the future and the value of Žižekian politics. For now though, I consider the historical positioning of capitalism that dominates his political approach.
Historicising Anti-Capitalism
Much of the critique of Žižek’s politics either disregards or rejects his reading of capitalism and of history. Prominent critics that have thus far been introduced in this thesis – including Laclau, Stavrakakis, Hardt and Negri, and Madra and Özselcuk – have all tended to assume that an alternative form of society or economy can flourish within or outside of capitalism. Under this approach the task of radical politics is to consider the form of the ideal society – no matter what the reading of ideal – and then construct the manner in which that society might come into being. Stavrakakis’ radical democratic ethos, for example, establishes the (partial) form of the ideal society and then rather meekly – suggesting a collective ‘productive mourning’ – considers how this society might be established (Stavrakakis, 2007: 274).
Žižek’s reading of the historical positioning of capitalism leads to a radically different approach, one that begins to reveal the value of the kind of politics developed thus far: a politics of change rather than of the ideal. Žižek has two central contentions in regards to capital, each of which was constructed in some detail in the preceding chapter. The first argument is that capitalism is a modality of the Real. Crucially, there is no operable outside from which to construct an alternative position to capitalism; any point of resistance that threatens capital is immediately brought into its logic. For this reason, Žižek considers suggestions such as Hardt and Negri’s ‘social wage’ or ‘global citizenship’ to be unfeasible for the same reasons that any free-market economist would – they are impractical within contemporary structures. They immediately invoke very practical questions of how these transformations might occur (Žižek, 2004c: 308).
The second crucial point of Žižek’s reading of capitalism exists largely as a corollary of the first – at this point in history we are ‘stuck’ in the self-revolutionary cycle of capitalism. That is, any resistance that might emerge from the self-evident contradictions of capitalism does not produce the kind of dislocations which might lead to alternative modes of being. Instead, these points become intimate elements of capitalism as sources for profit in themselves: the social revolutions of the latter half of the 20th century did not truly threaten capitalism but, rather, became new segments of an expanded market place. Nor has increased awareness of the threat to the environment dislocated our understanding of capitalism – instead the ‘Green’ dollar, both in terms of consumption and the production of new technologies, has come to the fore.
For this reason, as a response to the pressing contraction between environmental degradation caused by overdevelopment, and the plague of poverty afflicting much of the globe, what is required is not the formulation of a new mode of the material reproduction of society which avoids this contradiction. Without a doubt, at some point such a form will be required. Yet at this time in history, when capitalism is reproducing this troubling contradiction and we cannot seem to reach beyond capitalism, this is not our task. Instead, the task today is not so much to conceive of what mode of production should replace capitalism but, rather, to consider how we might open up cleavage(s) within capitalism such that the seeds of the future will be able to flourish. Having articulated the ‘stuckness’ of capital, my task in these next two chapters is to consider how a reading of Žižek’s work might offer a manner in which these spaces might be unveiled. The central lever in this task is the interactions between the final two elements in Žižek’s construction of capitalism; the impossibility of class struggle and the presence of surplus labour. It is to these two points that we now turn.
Surplus Labour and Class Struggle
Contrary to his apparent construction of capitalism as an monstrous juggernaut, Žižek argues that four antagonistic points currently threaten capitalism: the possibility of ecological collapse; the contradictions between immaterial labour, intellectual property and private property; the development of new scientific technologies which are changing the nature of life in its barest form; and the new forms of political exclusion, which pertain to attempts to separate urban slum population from wealthier areas, both in within cities and across national borders (Žižek, 2008a: 420-427).
Under this construction it is the latter element that defines the group: the other three contradictions have been able to be included within the limits of capitalism. Environmentalism, despite the apparent radical possibility of a chaotic breech of nature, has become sustainable development. The contradictions of private property (the loss of scarcity through digital production and the associated difficulties of applying current property laws to intellectual and communicative production) have become a legal challenge and bio-genetics has developed into an ethical, or even scientific, struggle. For Žižek these three elements are part of the battle for the commons. Here Žižek follows Hardt and Negri in suggesting that the commons – particularly in the postmodern articulation of the commons in immaterial labour and knowledge – are increasingly being enclosed and privatised. In relation to these specific antagonisms, environmentalism equates to the commons of external nature, intellectual property to the commons of culture and bio-technology to the commons of internal nature. Whilst this enclosure and exploitation of what is common to all evokes the necessary use of communism, it is only the fourth symptom, that of exclusion, which adds the dimension of universality in that it is the element which constitutes the construction of capital.
The question that I have thus far deferred, however, is the relationship between this ‘part with no part’ and class struggle. The previous chapter suggested that the ultimate value of Madra and Özselcuk’s work is their identification of the structure of class struggle. This identification opposed Žižek’s conception of class struggle as a point of ideological absence: although class struggle had a symbolic presence as a signifier, it was felt as an absence in the imaginary. Through Madra and Özselcuk’s work, I do not seek to wholly reject this reading by filling out an imaginary sense of the class relationship. Rather, I argue that by expanding the symbolic contours of class struggle a deeper understanding of the relationship between class struggle and surplus labour within capitalism can be forged. This understanding is key to producing an operative strategic relationship to surplus labour that allows for greater political control.
In order to further articulate this relationship, it is necessary to return to an example regularly posited by Žižek and referred to towards the end of Chapter Five of this text; that of Levi-Strauss’ example from a tribal village. As a reminder, Levi-Strauss asked a group of villagers to illustrate a representation of the ground layout of their village. Some of the villagers drew a village divided by a linear split, others as divided into a central circle and an outside circle. Žižek takes Levi-Strauss to be suggesting that we should take neither a relativist reading of this split – each representation being a valid construction of really – nor seek an empirical truth but, rather, seek to understand the disavowed antagonism which is causing this division.
For Žižek, that antagonism is class struggle. He suggests that class struggle is the unrepresentable distorting point which is the (absent) cause within society; “class struggle as antagonism is, as it were, its own obstacle, that which forever prevents its own expression into clear symbolic or positive terms” (Žižek, 2004b: 100). As such, Žižek suggests that class struggle is a modality of the Real. If, however, we return to the ‘parallel’ construction of the Real suggested in Chapter Three, in which what might be an example of the Real within one discourse can be constructed symbolically within another, then an alternative point of construction becomes available. Through a ‘parallax view’ of the structure of global capitalism, we can understand the operation of class struggle within capitalism, identifying it with an exclusion of surplus labour.
If the expression of class struggle is always a reaction to the formal impossibility of itself, it nonetheless occurs. Class struggle may be a modality of the Lacanian Real but is not simply the Real – class struggle carries with it connotations of Marxism and productivism. Through Žižek’s work, however, it is unclear why class struggle is substituted for the Real. By rehabilitating class struggle as both a Marxist and Lacanian concept, we are in a more productive position to read the underlying weakness within capital.
The actually existing character of class struggle can be restored to the Žižekian interpretation of capital through Žižek’s own sense of universality. As Chapter Three has suggested, the split operation of the universal reveals the effect of the Real upon society. In order to expel the violent effects that the Real has upon symbolisation and the body – remembering that the Real itself is nothing but a reaction to the body entering symbolization – an imaginary coherence is attempted to be produced through the installation of abstract universal horizon, based around an empty signifier and competing ‘chains of equivalence’. This horizon attempts to construct an objective sense of social life but only through the exclusion of an exceptional element – it is this exclusion which allows for the abstract constitution of a universal set. Žižek, through Hegel, identifies this exceptional exclusion that constitutes the universal imaginary as the concrete universal. His point is not that the concrete universal is the true universal – although it opens up the path towards Truth – but, rather, that the site of universality proper is the gap between the abstract and concrete functions of the universal. This gap can also be identified as a modality of the Real.
The example of the tribal village is again illustrative here. A political battle would occur at this point over the ideological representation of the village. In order for one to constitute itself as an ‘objective’, universal, representation – each position would internally posit such a reading but it is likely that over time one position would become hegemonic – a point must be excluded from that representation. This exclusion, caused by the inescapable absence of the Real, becomes an extimate outside, registering the effect of the Real.
In regards to class struggle, this construction of the operation of universality suggests that class struggle operates as a universal gap within symbolization. As a gap, it cannot be symbolised but it nonetheless occurs: every instantiation of the economy produces an abstract conception of this gap – a conception that attempts to elide the presence of that gap – and a concrete remainder that emerges as a consequence of the exclusion from symbolization of that gap. Although hegemonic ideological forms within capitalism – such as justice, freedom or human rights – attempt to elide the gap that is class struggle, the surplus labour which constitutes the wage-labour system is a concrete remainder of its existence.
Thus, while there is no class relationship, the content of class struggle within capitalism can thereby be identified. This implies, however, that there is a universal structural form behind this content. At this point I return to the Marxist element of class struggle. Following Madra and Ozslecuk, class relationships are impossible but are nonetheless structured around the production, distribution and appropriation of surplus labour – class is thus understood as the politics of the mode of production. This formation of class, however, does not suggest that class relationships have an imaginary presence within capitalism. Instead, we can only distinguish the presence of class struggle via the exclusion it produces within capitalism; the concrete universal qua surplus labour.
Thus, class struggle is still conceived to be an irreducible stain upon society but we have now identified the structure of that mark. Each mode of production necessarily revolves around the impossibility of class struggle and as such will reproduce the failed class relationship in a particular way. Although the class relationship itself cannot be assigned an imaginary status, the extimate presence of an excluded concrete remainder of the mode of production signals the manner in which that class struggle has occurred. Within capitalism the remainder of the failure of the class relationship is surplus labour. Although both economic ideology – the justice of the ‘invisible hand of the market’ – and political ideology attempt to disavow the presence and status of surplus labour, through this analysis we are in a position to assert its violatile presence.
Such an identification allows for a more productive sense of the operation of surplus labour within capitalism. By suggesting that surplus labour is the evidence of class struggle in capitalism, we are no longer seeking to provide the ideal politics of class struggle – such a relationship is impossible – but, rather, a way of invoking this impossibility at the heart of capitalism. The lesson to be learned here is that class struggle is not simply a matter – as in traditional Marxist-Communism – of the excluded yet universal class overthrowing their capitalist masters, as is their historical destiny. Instead, class struggle relates to the disavowed and distorting affects of the Real within social life: we literally struggle with the impossibility of class justice. Nonetheless, these two positions are not entirely divorced. History does not require the proletariat to cast of their shackles. Yet it is their exceptional status – perhaps more appropriately attributed to the lumpenproletariat – that provides the central friction with capital.
Thus, class struggle refers to the presence of the Real within capital, both in terms of the formal gap provided by the impossibility of the class relationship and the exceptional exclusions created by attempts to elide this impossibility. To rephrase this vital point, class struggle is not only the impossible stain that prevents the full instantiation of society but because of the desire to fill out shared social life, class struggle also has a presence in the concrete remainder that occurs when ideological class relationships are formed, necessarily excluding an element in order to constitute themselves
As such, my Žižekian response to global capitalism focuses on evoking this Real element of capital: surplus labour and the impossibility of class struggle. I shall now turn to the strategic possibilities for operationising this disturbing interaction between class, universality, and the Real as embodied by this excess of labour.
Strategies of the Real and the Lacanian Dialectic
Žižek’s work does not provide a psychoanalytic conception of shared social life. Nor does it reject considerations of subjectivity under capitalist conditions. Rather it provides a number of political strategies that might be deployed in response to capitalism. These strategies, which should be read topologically rather than chronologically, are unique only in the sense that they each respond to the singularity of the Real. That is, there is no one Žižekian form of politics although each strategy is a response to Žižek’s ontological commitment to the Real. As such, Levi Bryant suggests:
rather than looking to Žižek’s various texts for a theory of practice or what we should do, we should instead read these texts themselves as a form of practice. That is, we should not ask whether Žižek’s interpretations are true or false but should instead ask what these interpretations do. (2007: 22)
If we regard Žižek’s strategic approach to be based around the Real, as discussed in the previous chapter, we can regard surplus labour – the constitutive excess of global capitalism – as an element of the Real. The Real is not only an absence but becomes embodied in an actually occurring element that holds an extimate position within the symbolic order. Attempts to suture this impossibility are rife throughout the imaginary register of ideological fantasy. In this chapter I consider that Žižek’s politics consists of strategic attempts to resist this imaginary coherence and instead evoke the intrusive tension of the Real in relation to this (named) excessive element. These strategies all relate to attempts to invoke the tension or anxiety present in the absence embodied the Real. If we can consider ideological formations to be structured to minimalise this absence and the resulting production of an exception – an effect discussed in Chapter Three, whereby attempts to mitigate against the impossibility of the Real result in an exceptional element which guarantees the coherence of the set – then Žižek’s political approach entails various attempts to consider how that fantasmatic coherence can be disturbed. In disturbing the fantasmatic formations that hold together global capitalism, it is hoped that gaps will appear in which action would occur that would be otherwise impossible within the current regime of global capitalism. I now turn to Žižek’s political construction of the Lacanian act.
The Act
The (Lacanian) act is perhaps the most controversial element of Žižek’s political strategy, coming to represent all that is conceived to be wrong with Žižek’s work. Indeed, the act stands as the universal procedure of Žižek’s political work; all other aspects of Žižek’s political interventions come down to the basic division he identifies between the act and activity in regards to capitalism. As Žižek states in regards to radical politics in the capitalist epoch:
What is needed is the assertion of a Real which, instead of being caught in the vicious cycle with its imaginary counterpart, (re)introduces the dimension of the impossibility that shatters the imaginary; in short, what is needed is an act as opposed to mere activity – the authentic act that involves disturbing (‘traversing’) the fantasy. (1999: 374, original emphasis)
The act is always radical; its basic form is action which reformulates a systematic logic such that it retroactively produces its own conditions of possibility – an act occurs when an action that was previously considered impossible happens, causing a change in the very co-ordinates of the situation. A true act occurs without any guarantee in the form of fantasmatic support from the big Other and for this reason at the moment of its occurrence the act always appears to be an act of madness. In this sense, the act is divorced from Laclau’s battle for hegemony, in which the development of new modes of being is achieved through discursive redevelopments of the existing, or traditional Marxist politics based upon the ideological unity provided by the instantiation of an alternative signifier such as Communism.
Nonetheless, we must not confuse the act with a drive for action at any cost. Žižek’s emphasis upon the act corresponds to a translation of Lacan’s ethics but also our historical positioning. We must avoid mere activity at a time in which we have little influence: it is better to think and reflect on the possibilities for action. When this opportunity comes, however, it is vital that we jump to the act without any regard for fantasmatic support from the big Other (Žižek, 2009a: 11). In this sense – given the restrictions on political activity within global capitalism identified thus far in this thesis – the act appears to be the necessary form of political strategy for any form of anti-capitalist politics.
Žižek uses the act to signify a distinction from the ‘politics as usual’ approach which dominates late modernity. Here, often in particular reference to the economic problems this thesis responds to, Žižek notes a prohibition on radical politics. Writing on the general rejection of Lenin as a political philosopher, he states, “the moment we show a minimal sign of engaging in political projects which aim seriously to challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately ‘Benevolent as it is, this will inevitably end in a new Gulag!’” (2002b: 168). This is a typical ideological response to global development issues: do not engage in radical politics, although they appear necessary to produce change, they will only end in genocide. Instead, the problem must be ‘managed’ through the administrative measures available within capital. Žižek heartily rejects this approach and instead insists that we must reject the system itself, suggesting the necessity of the act.
It is unclear, however, how this systematic transformation might occur. Žižek’s references to the act do not focus on the practicality of acts – instead the act appears to have a miraculous element, acts ‘just happen’. Indeed, Žižek describes the act as a miracle, a foreign body that invades with my control – an act ‘just happens’ (ibid.: 375).
It is this theological element of the act which provokes the strongest criticism. Critics have focused upon the ‘crazy’ – in the sense of being without justification – aspect of the act, unable to conceive of it as a considered strategic intervention. Žižek’s examples of the act, particularly in his earlier work, do not help here. It is difficult to consider a reasoned strategic response to capitalism from shooting one’s own family, as is the example Žižek gives in The Fragile Absolute (2000d:149-150) of Keyser Soeze in the movie The Usual Suspects. Neither can we seek political inspiration from Mary Kay, the teacher convicted of raping her 13-year old student. Žižek describes her as taking an ‘authentic subjective stance’ – the authentic act of being in love (1999: 385-386, original emphasis). Here, for Žižek the act is not intentional – there is no subjective or ideological control – but the subject must nonetheless take responsibility for a truly ethical act, positing themselves as the cause of the act:
The paradox of the act thus lies in the fact that although it is not ‘intentional’ in the usual sense of the term of consciously willing it, it is nevertheless accepted as something for which its agent is fully responsible – “I cannot do otherwise, yet I am none the less fully free in doing it”…The paradox is thus that, in an authentic act, the highest freedom coincides with the utmost passivity, with a reduction to a lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures. (ibid.: 376)
The key point for Žižek’s act is that it has a subject but no agent; “the agent is not ‘on the level of its act’, that he himself is unpleasantly surprised by the ‘crazy thing he has just done’, and unable to come to terms with it” (ibid.: original emphasis). As such, Žižek deems Kay to be an ethical subject because she remains faithful to her desire. What he ignores is the cause of Kay’s desire: is she acting pathologically through her unwavering fetishistic attachment to her young lover, or is she ‘refusing to give way to the cause of her desire’ at the expense of everything else? In either case, Kay’s faith to her cause provides little political inspiration and indeed contradicts Žižek’s original point – such blind faith is more likely to suggest ideological activity, not the act.
At best, what Žižek is suggesting here is a reformulation of the co-ordinates of the situation based upon a momentary suspension of the symbolic logic[1] such that new opportunities for action become available. In this sense, both Soeze and Kay can be seen to have acted in a manner which has no justification within its given structure. Here, we must agree that such an action does reconstitute the situation, yet not only is it difficult to translate this action from the subjective to the collective but it appears to strongly push aside any aspect of political consideration, reducing Žižek’s politics to the kind of empty formalism that his critics love to address.
Although the form of the act restricts the possibilities of its content, the act remains a formal intervention into the political. Moreover, it appears to be an entirely subjective, rather than collective, form of action. An act may occur to the subject but it is difficult to reconcile this notion with a political revolution which Žižek calls the elementary political form of the act. A revolution does not just happen but is rather made through strategic intervention. Žižek’s point, however, is that a revolution cannot occur with the support of ideological fantasy: for it to be a true revolution or act it must come from outside of this hegemonic position, traversing its co-ordinates. In terms of the subject, this is a feasible position: an act can just occur to an individual body. In terms of politics and global capitalism, revolution ‘just happening’ is the worst kind of optimism.
Psychoanalysis, in this sense, is a practice of grand movements rather than subtle progression. Although its aims are modest, almost cynical, the implications of entering into the Lacanian discourse are nothing but radical. That there is no indication of what might follow this radical act of destitution, except an assumption of difference is the risk of psychoanalysis: it provides no positive ethical or moral guidelines for shared social life outside of the dangers of ideology and jouissance. The act, like all the strategic positions to be discussed in this chapter is ethical only in a Lacan sense – it provides an opportunity to reconstitute politics and subjectivity – but this ethics is the ethics of a moment, not of a political formation.
The act suggests a kind of avant-garde faith that the new will be inevitably better than the present. When we speak of global capitalism, there may be some truth to be held here but as a form of politics it is not difficult to see why Žižek[2] looks to a form of (materialist) theology to supplement his approach. Moreover, because the act cannot be referenced to any sense of Good – the act is strictly in excess of the Good and the Law – it is difficult, if not constitutively impossible to distinguish the act from evil (Eagleton, 2009:.282).
This is ultimately the issue with the translation of Lacanian ethical dialectic into politics, as suggested in Chapters Three and Four. Not only are the exigencies of the body difficult to reconcile with those of the interactions of bodies but an ethics which takes its guidance from the Real makes little distinction as to the content of shared social life; the basic form of politics. Waging war or saving the poor could be equally justified, the former more easily than the latter. The question is how this form can be transposed into the context to which I speak and in particular Marxist politics.
In addition to this normative lack, another of the central reproaches against the act and Žižek in general, is the apparent blindness to strategic opportunities for action outside of total revolutionary transformation. Critics contend that Žižek creates his own deadlock against which the act is the only solution (see Devenney, 2007: 59). In doing so, they argue, Žižek is ignorant to all the strategic opportunities that arise that do not require the risk of evil and creation ex nihilo. Although there is some validity in this criticism – in the sense that the direction of Žižek’s work is not towards the kind of political reforms which are so often immensely beneficial to so many people – this reading ignores Žižek’s patient construction of the ontic contours of capitalist political economy and increasingly explicit demands to move beyond capitalism. For Žižek, progressive policy platforms are beneficial in themselves, yet they hold no radical potential.
Perhaps the more pertinent point concerns the possibility that Žižek’s politics are restricted by his limited conception of the act itself. It is clear for Žižek what the act is not; however, it is not clear as to what conditions or actions might produce an act. Instead, the act appears as a random event outside of politics and history. Sarah Kay, for example, claims that Žižek’s understanding of the act is “incompatible with political calculation” (2003: 154). It is unclear how a political movement might utilise the logic of the act. In particular, in regards to our question of global sustainability and surplus labour, it becomes unclear how an act might occur, or be forced into occurring.
The concern about the limitations of the act extend also to identity of given political initiatives. Does, for instance, Hardt and Negri’s demand for a social wage and global citizenship constitute an act? I have previously dismissed these ideas as impractical because they contradict the logic of capitalism. Nonetheless, this is the very gamble of the act – if a social wage were to be ‘somehow’ instituted an act would have occurred, as the very rules of the game would have changed. For Žižek, however, such demands move away from the away the act because they come with a political guarantee: they are already understood as part of an established political matrix. This fantasmatic location takes away from the radical impetus required to produce an act, even though the content – a impossible demand – may remain the same. The political difficulty, therefore, is the attempt to invoke a revolutionary act without any sense of what is to follow.
Is, however, the act such a crazy intervention? Žižek denies this accusation, claiming that we can distinguish a genuine act from the kind of example given in the previous paragraph. We can make a distinction between the good terror of the French Revolution and the bad terror of the Nazi Germany by a purely formal reference to the structure of fantasy and the symptom. For Žižek, a true act occurs at the point of symptomal torsion, such that the underlying fantasmatic structure of either the subject or ideology is radically disturbed. As such, the September 11 attacks were not an act because they did not invoke a suspension of fantasy, of either the attackers or the attacked but, rather, cemented existing relations (see Žižek 2003). Thus, while the act cannot prescribe an ideological position to come – indeed such a position would act as a ‘guarantee’ that which subvert the operation of the act – it will always be radical, rather than conservative.
Let us consider the structure of an act in terms of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. There are two clear sides in this debate, each with their own underlying ideological fantasy. The first, which can be considered to be politically conservative, remains sceptical of the consequences of human activity upon the climate. The underlying ideology here is of an infinite capitalist cornucopia, whereby human activity has no impact upon the environment. On the opposite side of the debate are the environmentalists who firmly believe that science has proven beyond doubt that human activity is having a negative impact on the environment. The fantasy at play here is that carbon emissions are the key factor in climate change and these emissions can be reduced through technological measures which do not fundamentally change the structure of the economy.
In the first case, what would account for an act would be an acknowledgment that human activity has to be altered in order for human civilisation to continue. Such recognition would not allow this conservative discourse to continue in the same fashion; an admission from a prominent member of the Republican party – Sarah Palin, for instance – would be cause for a momentary rethinking of the movement. It is quite possible that in this circumstance Palin would be divorced from the ideological structure but as Žižek has repeatedly stated (in contradistinction to the appeals of his opponents) what is important here are the moments after the act, how the act is able to create its own conditions of possibility (Žižek, 2008a: 307).
In terms of the second ideological position, an act might well occur were a prominent actor (such as Al Gore) or organisation to state that environmental problems cannot be solved within capitalist political economy. Here we can imagine that the political dislocation from such an acknowledgement from the United Nations would be significant. Equally, however, a recanting of belief in ‘climate science’ would also have the effect of an act. The point here is that the act is not a overwhelming or infinite action that changes everything but can be quite limited in its scope – as long as it stems from a symptomatic point. Moreover, an act can occur with strategic timing but not with guarantee – we can plan how to upset the pie cart but not how those pies might fall.
In regards to our climate example then, the effect of an act is always radical in terms of its relationship to fantasy – it is always disruptive, rather than cohesive – but it does not have any fundamental political positioning. Instead it remains strategic, if not ethical in Lacanian terms. Moreover, Žižek keenly insists against his critics that the act is not simply crazy – although it may appear to have this form at its time – but, rather, retrospectively creates its own conditions of possibility such that what is of upmost political importance is the day after.
Nonetheless, the biggest problem with the act is that it does not suggest the tools for the kind of transformation it suggests. Particularly in regards to the complex power matrix of capitalism, the theological madness of the act appears entirely unsuitable. If we return to the symptomatic axis of capital (surplus labour) then an applicable of the act appears to invoke a Marxist revolutionary narrative, except without either the support of history or political calculation. Although there is no predestined relationship between the act and the proletariat, as the symptomal point within global capitalism, the proletariat appears to be the most likely point of transformation. It is not, however, a point of revolutionary calculation: there is nothing scientific about the revolutionary narrative. Instead, an act would occur when those in the position of excess in regards to the wage-labour system disregarded that they had nothing to lose but their chains and took on the task of revolution anyway. Although the proletariat come from a strategically operable position, without strategic consideration this attempt at the act appears entirely impotent. A subjective act can only break down internal barriers but such a transformation may not have any effect upon the structures of the symbolic world. For this reason a properly political sense of action must involve a strategic – and normative – imperative from start to finish. The problem is that both the strategy and the normativity suggest a fantasmatic apparatus wholly at odds with the miraculous risk inherent in the act.
Yet, from what I have thus far discussed, what is required to produce the kind of political action which would count as a meaningful response to the pressing problematic of global sustainability is radical action which produces systematic change. The question is how this might occur, as Žižek’s notion of the act does not considerably further our understanding of this question. It provides a formal matrix of what counts as an act and in doing so suggests how this might be achieved, largely by discounting that which does not fit into its category. In response, the remainder of this chapter shall consider two strategic positions which reproduce the formal aspects of the act and its political direction but perhaps provide a stronger methodological basis. The first of these is ‘subtractive politics’.
Subtractive Politics
Žižek began to develop subtractive politics with The Parallax View (2006d), later in In Defence of Lost Causes (2008a) and, finally, in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009a). Subtractive politics was initially characterised by the stubborn ethics of ‘Bartleby’, the central character in Herman Melville’s novella, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Žižek’s considers Bartleby’s disciplined refusal to do his duty – ‘I would prefer not to’ – as a model for a withdrawal from the political co-ordinates of the capitalist matrix, one that has a potentially devastating effect. Žižek holds that taking no position, actively not-participating, or perhaps un-participating in the capitalist order, is the most powerful position possible.
Because capitalism has proven remarkably able to combine resistance and power, Žižek’s solution is to withdraw from visible forms of resistance-as-participation in order to provide a different kind of subversion. Consequently, Žižek’s subtractive politics reverses Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis; “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it”. Instead Žižek argues:
the first task of today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: ‘What can one do against Global Capital?’) but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. (2006e: 238)
The goal of subtractive politics is to question these coordinates in a manner which exposes and produces a crack in their disavowed foundations. This is not a matter of inactivity but, rather, a more strategic withdrawal. For Žižek (2008a: 388-391) as well as jjJohnston (2007) this is best achieved by identifying and exposing the symptomatic element of ideology, the part that does not quite fit, which, once disturbed, provides the potential to be the catalyst for major change. The hope of this ‘active quietism’ is that “this minimal measure, while in no way disturbing the system’s explicit mode of functioning, effectively ‘moves underground’, introduces a crack into its foundations” (Žižek, 2008a: 391). The proper task of subtraction is not simply to refuse to participate in ideology but, rather, attempt to subtract the ideological defences away from the symptomal point such that it is without fantasmatic support.
Thus, in contrast to the act, subtraction focuses on the relationship between ideology and its symptom. The basic formula of subtraction is a rejection of the fundamental dualism that rules our spontaneous ideological consciousness. Following the example given previously of Levi-Strauss’ interpretation of the split representations of the tribal village, the first step in the politics of subtraction is to reject the hegemonic dualism as an obscuration of the true point of antagonism. Subtractive politics thus becomes an interpretative practice of initiating a space from which a radical transformation could occur.
In the Copenhagen climate conference example given above, for example, the primary dualism is between sceptics and techno-environmentalists. What this apparent contradiction elides as a disavowed antagonism; that climate change is caused by the scale of the economy, a scale which cannot be reduced within capitalism. The practice of subtraction is withdrawal from this opposition to reveal the antagonism upon which it is constituted (Žižek, 2008a: 384).
We might conceive of environmentalist debate to be itself structured around the exclusion of surplus labour. That is, on one side of the discourse are the ‘developmentalist-technologists’ who argue that the global economy needs to go on developing and climate issues can be dissolved through the use of ‘green’ technology which becomes a market in itself. On the other side are the more radical ‘anti-consumptionists’ who advocate reducing consumption as the only way to mitigate against climate change. What both these discourses must exclude is the position of surplus labour; the first fails to note that those who suffer the most from climate change are the extreme poor who will remain in this position through the developmental narrative, the second elides the effect of a reduction in production would have on the global poor.
The emphasis on subtraction and minimal difference appears quite divorced from the grandiose politics of the act but the aim remains the same; radical political change. What is different is the strategic positioning of the Real. By contrast to the ‘miracle’ of the act, subtractive politics appears a much more subtle affair. The difference – a minimal one – is that the Real no longer exists as a bewildering exterior but, rather, an excessive absence within the existing.
In addition, the politics of subtraction allow the naming of the Real as the excluded third term, the antagonism holding ideology together as one. By contrast, the act rejects any such naming. What this naming of the point of symptomal torsion allows – in stark contrast to the common place critique of Žižek’s work – is a more subtle and strategic politics that takes into account not only the subversive tension inherent in a particular point but also the complex ideological procedures through which this tension is kept in check. Politics is not a crazy risk but, rather, deliberative ideological critique which seeks to withdraw the correct ‘peg’ to make the structure collapse. The risk remains – the politics of subtraction do not predict the future any more than the act – but the form of analysis is more political than theological.
Moreover, Žižek’s turn to subtractive politics is a response to the changes he identifies in the form which contemporary takes. He states that in today’s ‘post-ideological’ world, ideology has more of a fetishistic shape than its traditional symptomatic form. The symptomal form of ideology is structured by repressed symptoms which threaten ideology as the embodiment of the lie around which it is structured. By contrast, the fetish is an accepted lie which allows for the continued functioning of ideology (Žižek, 2009a: 65). Žižek states,
That is to say, symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance the point at which the repressed other scence erupts while fetish is the embodiment of the lies which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth (Žižek, 2007b: 251)
In the case of the symptomal functioning of ideology, when the symptom can no longer be repressed, ideology comes face to face with its disavowed truth and collapses. In terms of fetishism, ideology collapses when this fetish is no longer able to hold – a collapse which is often more total. It is not that 21st century subjects are somehow more able to hold onto grizzly truths – it remains the wager of psychoanalysis that “the subject cannot openly admit and really assume the truth about what s/he is doing” (ibid.: original emphasis) – but the structure of ignorance has changed. For Žižek, it is the fetishitic mode that is more prevalent in today’s cynical society. We know very well of the corruption of our political system and the false promises of consumerism, yet we act as if we do not. Instead, we withdraw to the safety of fetishistic jouissance, whether through cultural identity process of commodity consumption. The cynic truly believes but acts as if they do not. As a consequence, speaking Truth to knowledge and power has lost its efficiency – the journalist exploration of the likes of Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Naomi Klein may reveal previously hidden Truths but they has lost the ability to shock and disturb. We are no longer shocked by political corruption or poverty, or, if we are it has no effect of our actions. Marx may have believed that knowledge of their exploitation would be enough for the proletariat to throw off their chains but today, not only is objectivity considered impossible but truth itself appears to have lost its efficiency. For Žižek, awareness no longer automatically leads to transformation, although the possibility still remains.
The everyday case of bottled water example is a pertinent case of this cynicism at work. We all know that bottled is no better than tap water, in developed areas at least yet continue to purchase this product at increasing rates, all the while aware of our stupidity yet apparent powerless to change. A more powerful political example comes from American imperialism and torture. When the presence of Guantanamo Bay and other images of the consequences of the ‘War on Terror’ emerged in the public domain, there was a degree of shock at the distance between these images and the official ideology of the American global project; the spread of justice, freedom and democracy. At one stage of the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency, there appeared to be a genuine shock to the system, as hearings were held and debate raged about the role of torture and American global exceptionalism (New York Times, 2008). At some point, however, the debate changed. The occurrence of these elements were no longer denied but, rather, cynically endorsed, as if there were no other option – this being the fetish that allowed the American public to largely accept the administrations sins against itself.
Perhaps the most salient exemplar of the cynicism of social life today is the television show, The Simpsons. Produced by the notoriously conservative Fox television network, the show regularly satirises many aspects of contemporary society, from religion, to politics and popular culture. One of the most prevalent subjects of mockery is the Fox network itself, along with its arch conservative owner, Rupert Murdoch. Rather than taking umbrage at this subversion, the network turns a blind eye. Whilst The Simpsons’ subversive satire is taken to be a healthy – almost radical – aspect of American democracy, it holds no radical potential. Instead it signals the limitations of subversive politics today. Ultimately, the show is a source of profit for the network, who are content to be made fun of, so long as money is made. Moreover, it signals the strong cynicism of the viewing public, who are aware of the failure of their institutions – it is not shocking to have The Simpsons openly display corrupt politicians or evil corporations, as we all know that this is the case. Žižek’s point in regards to this cynicism, is that whilst we know of this failure, we continue to act as if we do not know. Furthermore, the kind of social commentary provided by The Simpsons – produced in the name of profit – allows the contemporary subject to believe that they are resisting (post)modern life, without having to change their compliant behaviour – it is as if the Other provides the critique for us[3]. The question, for Žižek, is how to subvert this process.
The only time dislocation has any affect is when it begins to threaten the efficiency of capitalism. No global problem is too big to ignore, except when it begins to threaten capitalism itself. No one expects aid promises to be delivered on, or climate treaties honoured (it is the promising, not the delivering, which provides the required servicing of ideology) but once the financial sector was threatened, an infinite amount of money was instantly found and used. As such, Žižek comes to suggest that we can no longer rely upon traditional ideological critique – in which the symptom is presented to ideology – but instead enact a form of subtractive politics which attempts to remove our ideological fetishes. In doing so ideological critique takes aim at the fetishes which structure our defence against the contradictions of our society. As a political practice, Žižek’s subtractive politics actively seeks to avoid these fetishistic points, refusing, for example, to engage in charitable aid. Here we can see why Žižek’s politics are so often displayed as conservative – not only does his reading of the structure of capitalism often conform with its apologists (the operation of markets, the need for business to consider profit as the primary driver of its activities) but he refuses to posit any form of activity which would mediate against the harshest elements of capitalism. This form of quiteism is not far removed from any number of apologists for capitalism. There is a subtle, minimal difference, however, between the different forms of ‘doing nothing’. Here we again return to the distinction between activity and the act.
Daly calls this political art ‘the subversion of subversion’;
the development of forms of subversion that do not condone or comply with existing logics of subversion but which seek rather to undermine and repudiate the latter and to thereby open up new spaces of political possibility and creativity (2009: 294).
Nonetheless, Žižek remains concerned that in searching for minor gestures with the potential to produce grand results, subtractive politics risks the perpetual postponement of the act (Žižek, 2008a: 391). He is still committed to radical change and the scale of the act – it is just that subtractive politics changes the form of intervention. Žižek states in this regard:
In other words, one should not forget that, in politics, “major repercussions” do not come by themselves: true, one has to lay the groundwork for them by means of patient work but one should also know to seize the moment when it arrives’ (ibid.: 392).
The question in relation to both subtractive politics and the act is whether successful action depends on identifying points from which this overwhelming action might occur or a more critical task of forcing open cracks within ideology itself from ‘below’, from the point of exclusion. The first appears to draw us back into a Marxist-communist revolutionary narrative in which the surplus of labour will eventually overwhelm the system in which it is contained. Not only can we reject the historical naturalism inherent in this approach but as I have previous emphasised in some detail, the state and power of capitalism is such that any ‘naturally’ arising resistance is already countered within the system. The act will not just suddenly occur without warning (although it might on ‘their’ side). We will not awake to the overthrow of the White House and a communist utopia. Rather, any form of political intervention that insists upon revolutionary change must consist of a strategic reading of both sides of the symptomal knot. Any political strategy which seeks to unravel its grip upon shared social life must untie the ideological knot which holds global capital together. The act does not undertake this task. Ironically, it is the active quietism of subtractive politics which appears to avoid the political passivity – waiting for the miracle – which troubles the politics of the act.
Nonetheless, subtractive politics has attracted as much criticism as the notion of the act. It does so for opposite reasons, however. If the act appears too radical, asking for too much to be done, to Žižek’s critics, subtractive politics, and in particular the image of Bartleby, appears overly patient at best and just lazy, ineffective and ultimately conservative at worst. If Žižek’s work reminds us of the urgency of acting against capitalism – and this appears to be the central injunction of his demand to act – Žižek’s suggestion of withdrawal seems quizzical. As we have constructed in this section, the politics of subtraction do not involve a mere refusal to engage but, rather, active attempts to expose the ideological foundations around which we engage, in the hope that this minor measure will invoke major change. The goal is the same as the act but the method quite different.
The question linking the act, subtractive politics and the practice of concrete universality (to which we shall turn) remains that of how the Real foundation of capitalism might be exposed, that of surplus labour. If the act relies too heavily upon the Real in its pure form and a revolutionary process that requires a miracle, subtractive politics focuses upon the shape of contemporary ideology that holds back the destabilising effect of the Real. If the act relies on the collective and miracle intervention of a crazy risk, subtractive politics is too patient, almost cynical in itself. Whilst both these strategies may be effective in other political circumstances, against the material contradictions of capital they do not appear to offer much cause for hope.
Subtractive politics does not focus on the symptom itself but itself attempts to attack the fetish which prevents its full affects. This strategy is much easier to apply to environmental problems than surplus labour, as the former appears to hold on a much stronger fetishistic structure. The central fetish in environment debate is technology; political responses to ecological degradation tend to focus upon technological solutions even if there is political debate around the appropriate and effective means of their deployment. Here the subtractive strategy is not to posit an alternative approach, such as suggesting that technology is the root of the problem but, rather, actively attempting to undermine and subtract from the proposed solutions to remove the efficiency of the nodal fetish. When a government announces the development of a new wind farm, a subtractive approach will critique this development but not posit an alternative, the goal being to expose the Truth behind the fetish. This may be a particularly effective approach for Green politics. It is clear that any truly sustainable approach to the material reproduction of society will require the total overall of our way of life on a scale that no progressive or technological solution is currently feasible. Indeed, the strength of capital is such that any solution of this kind, such as a radical reduction in levels of consumption, can only be understand through the lens of capital, and considered unfeasible – and rightly so.
When the focus shifts from environmental issues to that of the capitalist economy, surplus labour appears to have retained a symptomatic tension within capitalism. Although the presence of extreme poverty has been documented on a level well beyond cynicality, its link to global capitalism, consumption, and environment problems remains disavowed. Importantly, Žižek signals this point in his consideration of the four antagonisms which currently haunt capitalism. Not only does he identify political exclusion of surplus populations as holding the most radical potential but Žižek places the emphasis on the exclusion of these populations through the production of new walls (whether physical or ideological). That these populations have to be excluded – rather than openly accepted by way of a fetish – suggests that tension remains.
Indeed, we see this structure in the symbolic deadlock over refugees and illegal immigrants. As noted earlier in this thesis, Australia has seen these migrants become an increasingly emotive political issue, one that is discussed primarily in terms of keeping ‘them’ away from ‘here’. The most successful solution in this regard has been the Rudd governments’ establishment of a ‘processing’ centre on Christmas Island, at the furthest extent of Australian territory, to detain would be migrants. Such a desire to exclude and separate these populations suggest that there remains something Real about their presence. More fetishtic – and cynical – in this regard is the previously noted treatment of inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Here the American public know that many of the prisoners are not terrorists, nor enemy combatants, and their treatment is largely unjust. Nonetheless, until it was threatened by the Obama administrations’ attempt to shut down the camp, a strong fetishtic commitment to the security of the ‘American way of life’ remained.
The issue, therefore, is whether this ‘active quiteism’ is the horizon for anti-capitalist politics today or if there is something more to be said about the relationship between capitalism and its inherent contradictions. In response, I turn to the final Žižekian political strategy, that of ‘practicing concrete universality.
Practicing Concrete Universality
Chapter Three established the concrete universal as being the universal exception, the other side of the abstract universal horizon. The abstract universal is the point at which ideology creates a sense of universal applicability, of cohesion and fullness; it is the empty mediating point around which various particular elements battle for ideological hegemony. By contrast the concrete universal embodies the distance between the abstract universal and its particular elements – the concrete universal is the failure of the abstract universal to achieve universality – and is the element which features (by way of its exclusion) in every attempt to constitute the abstract imaginary. As Žižek states in regards to Lacan:
not only is universality based upon an exception; Lacan goes a step further: universality is its exception, it “appears as such” in its exception…the exception (the element with no place in the structure) which immediately stands for the universal dimension. (Žižek, 2006d: 30)
The concrete universal is thus the embodiment of the Real: it is the (necessary) point of impossibility that cannot be included within the set. As such, this exceptional point maintains the status of the Real – it has a presence only as an absence from ideology – but nonetheless exists. What is important in this conception of universality, however, is that universality is neither the concrete universal nor the abstract universal but is rather constituted by the tension between the two; the battle – not of particular signifiers to become the master signifier which dominates ideology – between the abstract universal and its symptomal lie embodied in concrete universality is universality itself.
Thus far in this thesis I have identified the concrete universal of capitalism as surplus labour – the part with no part within global capitalism. Therefore universality in capitalism is a battle between this exceptional point and its ideological masking. As was noted in Chapter Six in regards to economy, this ideological mask – the abstract universal – is not economic in nature but, rather, a socio-political response to the impossibility of class struggle. The ideological universal takes a political or cultural form, with reference to freedom, equality or progress. It is not as if we can label a singular signifier which embodies capitalism, rather the ideological approach of capitalism and liberal democracy is constituted by the struggle over its meaning[4]. This is the error Devenney (2007) – in response to Žižek’s call to ‘traverse the fantasy’ in identifying with the symptom – makes when he demands that Žižek identify the fundamental fantasy of global capitalism. Capitalism is now the impossible background to which ideology responds; one cannot identify a singular ideological fantasy of capitalism anymore than capitalism can be considered a form of civilisation. Instead, political hegemony and the structure of ideological fantasy – around whatever nodal point it might be based, whether freedom, justice or any number of other empty notions – must always be interpreted in relation the existence of the exception.
The practice of concrete universality involves the identification of the concrete universal and attempts to force its intrusion around its point of exclusion. This position has been best considered in The Parallax View (Žižek, 2006d). Through the notion of the parallax, Žižek suggests that we can ‘practice’ the concrete universal by “confronting a[n] [abstract] universality with its ‘unbearable’ example” (ibid.: 13). This unbearable example is, of course, the concrete universal. The concrete universal has an existence, although it is not a positive one within the hegemonic domain of abstract universality. Rather, it appears as the Real; a gap within the order of being. Nonetheless, by taking a parallax view – a view in which both the exception and its point of exception are kept in view, such that the gap between them is revealed – the presence of this excluded exception becomes clear.
What is important about the parallax view is not the positive existence of the exception. The exception always finds expression within the ideological form of the abstract universal in a palpable form. Poverty, for example, does exist within the ideological formations that support capitalism. Indeed its re-presented presence is often excessive, taking the form of meaningless statistics and images over-ridden with super-ego guilt – in this form it can be cynically dismissed. What makes surplus labour into the concrete universal or constitutive exception is the relationship with contemporary political horizons. The excess of labour are ontologically excluded not because their presence cannot be acknowledged but, rather, because they cannot be acknowledged as an intimate (or rather, extimate) part of universality itself.
Although Žižek has not significantly developed this identification with concrete universality – his interest quickly turned to subtractive politics – it holds much in common with his earlier notion of ‘identifying with the symptom’. This is the political equivalent of identification with the sinthome, the final stage in Lacan’s approach to ethics as introduced in Chapter Four. Illustrative of this approach was the ‘We are America’ campaign in the United States, initially a protest movement which began as a response to a backlash against illegal, ‘alien’, immigrants. Against their representation as intruders, the groups protest emphasised their status as constitutive of the nation and its economy. Not only is the United States an immigrant nation but illegal immigration forms the backbone of the economy, operating as surplus of labour which takes the ‘dirty’ jobs that citizens are unwilling to take on. Without this labour, the US economy and in particular the service and agricultural sectors, could no longer function – not only would wage prices rapidly increase but the underground economy of cleaning, maintenance and other such menial jobs would collapse.
This movement, however, signals the danger inherent in such protests. Rather than remaining as a dislocatory point, the tension inherent in their protest was disabled by liberal ideology which integrated the protest into a human rights discourse. It now exists as a ‘get out and vote’ alliance, well integrated into the system which keeps them at bay[5]. A more radical approach would have stemmed from a combination of subtraction and concrete universality. The protestors could have refused any such integration into the system, instead calling into question the system itself by way of their exclusion from it. This would have been a radical approach, one that could well have failed – as much by state violence as anything else – and actually left the ‘aliens’ in a worse position than when they started. In these circumstances, we cannot blame individuals for taking pragmatic decisions. When it comes to capitalism and its symptoms, however, we are well past pragmatism.
The case of the ‘We are America’ campaign highlighted another important issue: the possibility of violence suggests that some tension remains in the gap between surplus labour and its managerial function in capital. It may be that a cynical acknowledgement of poverty is possible but at this stage it appears as a last taboo – along with the inalienable link between capitalism and climate change – of global capitalism. We can acknowledge all sorts of political corruption, cultural and commercial imperialism but the blood of production is yet to fall at the feet of consumers. For this reason we can suggest that in response to the global sustainability problem, the practice of concrete universality appears the most effective response from within Žižek’s politics.
This practice, one not far divorced from subtractive politics, or the act, involves actively insisting upon the repetitive presence of the exception, thrusting it into the face of ideology as an example of its failure and accepting no alternative, no positivisation, of the problem. In this regard, Žižek has previously suggested that
This identification of the part of society with no properly defined place within it (or which rejects the allocated subordinated place within it) with the Whole is the elementary gesture of politicization, discernible in all great democratic events from the French Revolution (in which le troisieme etat proclaimed itself identical with the Nation as such, against the aristocracy and clergy) to the demise of East European socialism (in which dissident “fora” proclaimed themselves representative of the entirety of society against the party nomenklatura). (Žižek, 2008a: 415-416).
In regards to surplus labour, every articulation of ideology and progress in the West should be strategically met with its remainder, of the exclusion that occurs in surplus labour, without any sense that such surplus can be included in the global economy. The problem might be exclusion but the solution is inclusion only in the sense of the impossible intrusion of this point into ideology. The art of this practice, therefore, is to mobilise the point or exclusion whilst retaining the anxiety of the Real.
It is this anxiety, as caused by the presence of the Real, which offers the best prospect of destabilising capitalism. The power and structure of capitalism is such that not only is the global economy fundamentally unsustainable within capitalism but no form of alternative society is currently available. We cannot simply rally behind a new signifier, hoping in vain that a new world is possible. Nor can capitalism be bent in a new direction through a hegemonic battle for a new mode of being. Not only is there no alternative mode of subjectivity but capitalism hits a hard limit with the impossibility of class structure such that any form of politics tackling the question of global sustainability must address the ideological knot of capitalist class relations. It is this task that we have taken on in this chapter.
The Žižekian translation of Lacanian ethics into strategic political responses to capitalism reveals the following. The act – although forming the background for Žižekian political engagement with capitalism – does not translate well to the collective sphere. The ‘crazy’ risk of transforming subjectivity found no equivalent outside of the kind of all-out revolutionary approach rejected long ago. Second, and alternatively, subtractive politics offers a more subtle approach to politics. Although the hope of grand transformation is not lost, it suggests that this can be achieved through smaller – more strategic – gestures. It particular, subtractive politics responds to the cynicism evident in ideology today. This response attempts to withdraw the fetishistic object to which we cling to prevent the anxiety of the Real. As such it is an effective approach but because it does not speak directly to the Real, it is an approach with limitations.
Thirdly, in relation to the act and subtractive politics, practicing concrete universality – an active contrasting of exception with the system it constitutes – emerges as potentially the most effective strategic response to the contradictions of global capitalism. This approach embodies much of the wisdom of subtraction – the withdrawal from political action, the breakdown of fetishism – but seeks to utilise the tension provoked by concrete universality in a more productive manner. Constructing the Real through the lens of universality allows for such a reading.
Nonetheless, although this position is a powerful form of critique, it retains a negative form. This reading of Žižek’s politics suggests that Žižek has been unable to reconstitute a form of Marxist politics and is instead stuck within a reconsideration of the politics of psychoanalysis within the Marxist tradition. Not only is there nothing in Žižek’s work which would excite policy wonks but there is nothing that would inspire those on the street.
For much of Žižek’s work this position appeared to be the limit of his work; a powerful critique of capitalism but nothing more. Žižek himself suggested that this was the necessary condition of both politics under capitalism and the work of a Lacanian philosopher; he conceived the limitations of his practice to be the provoking of new questions, not providing the kind of answers that would both satisfy his critics and provide a new horizon for the radical left. As we have seen in this chapter, this has not made his work conservative but neither has it provided a response that his much life beyond academia.
Recently, however, Žižek has begun to identify, following Badiou, with the communist hypothesis. Here he has begun to explicitly identify the ‘communist hypothesis’ as the political horizon of our time. We must consider, however, how this approach is different from any of the political positions Žižek has previously rejected; in the following chapter I shall consider how Žižek has been able to hold this idea as a reconstitution of Marxist politics without falling prey to the traps inherent in any normative expression of the good. Firstly, I draw on the notion of the communist hypothesis and Žižek’s interpretation. In doing so I will suggest that Žižek’s understanding of the communist hypothesis does provide a new horizon for the Left – not through its explicit content but, rather, by reference to Fredric Jameson’s notion of utopia. This reference to utopia has the potential to not only allow the communist hypothesis to be used in a manner which avoids the difficulties of holding on to such a ‘big idea’ via the concrete universal but, in doing so, provides the possibilities of going beyond critique and offering the kind of affective identification which avoids the cynicism which dominates politics today.
[1] Or, more importantly, imaginary coherence is based on the subjective guarantee of objet a.
[2] As well as Alain Badiou in his related notion of the event (Badiou, 2003)
[3] Another interesting example of the Other changing for us comes from the recent rise of McDonalds restaurant. Coming under increasing attack at the beginning of the 21st century as the embodiment of both ‘Big Corporations’ and the fast food industry posited to be the cause of an increase in levels of Western obesity, McDonalds responded by introducing a new range of ‘healthy’ alternative foods. Recently, it was announced that McDonalds profits had been restored to pre-crisis levels not, however, on the basis of increases in sales of these healthy alternatives. Instead, it seems that these alternatives have allowed the consumer to believe they are engaged in healthier eating practices, without actually having to eat the alternative products themselves. It is as if the Other is eating healthy for us. (Adams, 2010)
[4] Nonetheless, a basic analysis can see that notions such as ‘liberty’, ‘progress’ and national identity are the most common signifiers.
[5] See www.weareamerica.org
