Hythlodaeus, over at the new blog Project Enlightenment, has revived the old debate about Zizek’s review of 300. Unfortunately I am unable to respond there as his blog does not accept anonymous comments and I do not have a Google account, so I’ll post a few words here. Hythlodaeus writes:
To my mind, the paroxysms of outrage that Zizek’s recent review of 300 provoked amongst certain members of the left academic blogosphere have only confirmed the basic truth of his argument that a truly progressive prioritization of values, in the current postmodern academic environment, is effectively impossible, because no one is willing to take responsibility for what a totally committed choice to pursue real social justice might actually entail–like, say, loss of job security. “If revolutionary action doesn’t include working full-time towards academic tenure–then no, thanks!”
I cannot speak for everyone regarding what motivated their concerns about Zizek’s valorization of sacrifice and discipline in this review, but for myself the issue was decidedly not one about the loss of job security. I take it as a given that any sort of revolutionary political change will involve significant transformations in how we consume and live. How could it not? Nor did it ever occur to me that somehow this issue has something to do with working full time or tenure. Rather, the issue had to do with convictions about the sorts of values we choose to valorize in revolutionary theory. All too often values of discipline and sacrifice, rhetoric of discipline and sacrifice, have been associated with fascist, dictatorial, and totalitarian regimes. Are these really the sorts of doors that we wish to open? Why not instead the valorization of values such as equality, justice, fraternity, freedom? What is at issue here are the sorts of master-signifiers that come to organize a movement and the manner in which these master-signifiers have a structuring effect on subsequent forms the movement takes. The issue is not one of concerns over giving up one’s hedonistic lifestyle, but about the way in which these master-signifiers function and resonate (see here and here) within a particular historical context. It is surprising that anyone informed by Lacan or Zizek would forget that language does not simply describe, but has a performative reality as well. The issue is not one of whether sacrifice and discipline ought or should or does take place in such movements– clearly it always does –but rather of how a particular movement comes to be structured and organized when signifiers such as this serve as the key, organizing, master-signifiers.
Hytholodaeus goes on to say:
LS writes:
I think this is a problem across the board in continentally influenced forms of theory, whether we’re talking about literary theory, political theory, philosophy, and so on. Often I find myself reading texts that are pervaded by some grand vision of revolutionary political transformation and I find myself thinking of my neighbors, my students, family members, existing infrastructure, etc., and I just wonder how such a grand vision can even be enacted concretely in practice. I then find myself suspecting that these political theories are more about ego and being superior, than about enacting any sort of real world change and are more about shoring up one’s academic standing and cred than the world.
Instead of continuing to parse Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, et al, perhaps we should start devoting some of our attention to the abundant situated literature that’s being produced by the very real social movements we academics for some reason continue to strenuously deny exist. For instance, you might check out some of the websites for the activist groups listed under the “Contacts” section of Naomi Klein’s website nologo.org. You might also check out web resources like SolidarityEconomy and Anarcho-Syndicalist Review.
The oppressed aren’t stupid and they aren’t mute. They don’t need speaking for. They’re not a given “in-itself” waiting for us hyper-educated academic “for-ourselves” to properly theorize into a meaningful project. It smacks of obscene arrogance to think that the marginalized, the exploited, the oppressed of the world are incapably of reflecting on their situation in a sophisticated and nuanced way. Let’s stop treating them as inert objects, and start listening to them, start recognizing what they have to say. And, who knows, maybe even enter into dialogue with them. This is where I part ways with Zizek and his advocacy of the top-down Leninist intelligentsia qua vanguard model. I’m with Sartre and Habermas, Hardt and Negri instead: mutual recognition + intersubjective communication amongst groups-in-fusion= common value formation, i.e. the only horizon of a truly democratic, emancipatory, and transformative praxis.
From Hytholodaeus’ remarks, I cannot tell whether my position is here being criticized or endorsed. For the record, I am on exactly the same page as him regarding the need to focus on real social movements and the way they articulate themselves. I am deeply suspicious of hierarchicalized social movements where the “intellectuals” have the master-plan and set about designing society. On this blog, one of the things I’ve tried to focus on are the emergence of group formations, how they come to be, how they react on existing social structures, and how they come to transform social structures. In short, my view is that there needs to be less focus on critique, interpretation, and analysis, and more focus on those conditions under which groups emerge, nominate themselves, take on structuration, and begin to transform the social field. A political theorists work should be less about determining what is to be done, and more about what is being done, what these emergences are responding to, what potentialities they are introducing, and so on. It is for this reason that I have a certain fascination with fundamentalist religious movements in the United States, political blog collectives such as Moveon.org, Dailykos, Americablog, Atrios, etc, and so on. It is not that I share the politics of these particular groups. Clearly I do not. What interests me is how these groups emerged at all, what affects they mobilize, how they have managed to motivate people, what new sorts of subjectivities they produce, and how they have effectively challenged, and arguably transformed, various institutions whether at the governmental level or at the corporate level, and so on. This is what I find missing in so much of the political thought I read. “Okay okay okay, I agree with these positions and critiques, but… how do you mobilize people to enact these things?” What sort of media must be used to summon a people that don’t exist? What sorts of affects need to be crafted to summon a people that does not exist? What sorts of gatherings and institutions preside over the formation of these new subjectivities? What are the catalysts that lead people to form collectives, groups, movements? I see a lot of critique, I see a lot of analysis, but I don’t see a lot of concrete discussion concerning these very concrete details. Yet, as they say, it’s precisely with regard to these things that the rubber hits the road.
Zizek and Badiou have spent a good deal of time criticizing that variant of Marxist thought that talked endlessly about when the conditions for revolution are ripe. Zizek has characterized this form of thought as the position of the obsessional who is always preparing for the proper moment to make his advances on the woman without ever passing to the act, thereby revealing that his endless preparations are themselves a defense against the act. In this connection, Zizek has valorized the act as the proper corrective to this attitude, arguing that the act must initially fail to inscribe itself in the social field so as to become a signifier (the signifier always requires two, a repetition), thereby opening the field of radical transformation. The time will never be right, and certainly the elements populating the situation will never suggest that the time is ripe for revolution. Badiou has argued something similar with his conception of a completely ungrounded choice that decides membership of the event in the situation. I believe both of these views are positive correctives to a perspective that is always looking to the situation to find those ripe conditions. However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the truth-procedure is precisely that hard work of transforming the elements of the situation or engaging in those acts that recode, that evoke, that call for a people that do not yet exist.
January 6, 2010 at 6:51 am
Thanks for the comments, Hythodaeus. I find your emphasis on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason appealing due to Sartre’s emphasis on group rather than class spontaneity in political movements, and his suspicion against parties and the State as a solution to these sorts of political problems.
You write:
If “discipline” and “sacrifice” will have any meaningful role as signifiers, it will only with the horizon of a transformative and emancipatory praxis.
The problem as I see it is that all too often these signifiers stand directly opposed to transformative and emancipatory praxis, such that the group comes to be co-opted by the force of the State or the party. That is, these signifiers tend to lead inexorably, through their own immanent logic, to authoritarian regimes that end up further alienating the very people that were struggling for some sort of emancipation. History seems to provide numerous examples of this on both the right and the left. The question is not at all one of preserving the hedonism that you critique– not at all –but rather of seeking to develop an emancipatory and transformative politics that doesn’t fall into these authoritarian traps.
What I find interesting is attachment to these particular signifiers. Rather than organizing an emancipatory politics around such negative and authoritarian terms, why not develop a politics around a set of positive signifiers that offers the vision of an alternative life and community that is not organized around the sort of hedonism that you’re critiquing, and that offers a better way? Why choose a set of signifiers that have historically been so seductive and that have so often accompanied movements that come to treat human life as worth little or nothing, and therefore dispensable, and which have so often been mobilized in the name of the most egregious living conditions for people?
It strikes me as odd that I have continuously emphasized that any political movement necessarily involves discipline and sacrifice and a transformation of how we live, and have only criticized treating these signifiers as the key organizing signifiers of a movement. In connection to these observations, it is strange that those enamored with Zizek’s position in this article nonetheless continue to insist on the primary importance of these signifiers as if that were the important issue. Zizek has spilled a lot of ink romanticizing figures like Stalin, Paul, Robespierre, and now the Spartans, yet I do not think it is off-base to be leery of these particular models where emancipatory politics are concerned. He is correct in his observations that there is something amiss in the reigning liberal politics and tolerance of our day; but it seems to me that there is something deeply wrong in going in this other direction and resurrecting these particular models.
July 19, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Americans are so literal-minded. The point is not always what your individual personal ‘intention’ or motivation is, but rather how your statements (and position of enunciation) function within a larger political context (regardless of how your ego understands why you’re saying it).
“I cannot speak for everyone regarding what motivated their concerns about Zizek’s valorization of sacrifice and discipline in this review, but for myself the issue was decidedly not one about the loss of job security…. Nor did it ever occur to me that somehow this issue has something to do with working full time or tenure.”
This is really a defense response that stops talking about political and starts talking about ego and ‘mere opinion’ (which everyone in america has a ‘right’ to, because opinions are meaningless politically. You can say almost anything (especially on a blog), but try to actually *do* anything politically, even something non-radical like run as a third party candidate, and see what happens)
In other words, the political point is not the ego-derived rationalisation of your behaviour or position. It’s not that academics sit around literally thinking to themselves: “i can’t become politically effective because that will ruin my career.” The closest we might come to that thought is to consider our work in a professional light (ie: in terms of our disciplinary norms and the respect of our peers). The point for Zizek is that political action takes a risk and a profound commitment that is not ironic, tentative, but fundamental. Not the attitude of tolerance, humility and compromise that seems to be emphasised in america everywhere on the level of statement and nowhere on the level of enunciation. if these “master signifiers” were really politically effective, would your government be so obviously non-democratic? They are practically laughing in the citizens faces with the things they are coming out with now. It actually seems like people are still listening the the line of iran being an immanent threat.
The point is that do be politically effective, it might mean risking what you have right now. This comment misses the point:
“I take it as a given that any sort of revolutionary political change will involve significant transformations in how we consume and live. How could it not?”
The point isn’t that you ‘never thought of it,’ and since you reply you did think of this, that the criticism has no validity. Again, taking a political issue to be a psychological and personal one. No one cares what thoughts you have had. The point is not to have the idea that in some abstract future point ‘after’ sovereignty, life will be different. Rather, it is that right now, to actually do anything, you have to put at risk what you actually have here and now.
“All too often values of discipline and sacrifice, rhetoric of discipline and sacrifice, have been associated with fascist, dictatorial, and totalitarian regimes. Are these really the sorts of doors that we wish to open? Why not instead the valorization of values such as equality, justice, fraternity, freedom?”
All i can say to this is, are you not paying attention to what is going on around you? Those values you ‘don’t want to open’ are already open and everywhere. The question is then what are you going to do about it? “Tolerate” it like good liberals? The ‘right’ already explicitly holds these values dear. Another of Zizek’s points is that the ‘master-signifiers’ of democracy, equality, justice, fraternity, freedom need to be given up or at least rethought. They need to be overcome as the ultimate limit of our political thinking. Those signifiers are doing nothing but playing the nice/soft side to american imperialism. Talk about them all you want as your government kills almost a million people in iraq so far. Maybe some discipline and sacrifice on the american left would be a good thing. Instead of being scared of these things and pretending like you have the choice to ‘open them’ or not, realise that they are already the current terms of your political situation.
July 19, 2007 at 3:20 pm
This is a rather odd and snide remark, filled with marvelous generalizations about Americans.
What is it that grants you any more of a privileged position with regard to your speech than myself? Are you expressing your “intentions” or motivations in these remarks? How, by the lights of your own arguments, are you able to do this? How are these remarks not a function of the larger political context in which your speaking, inevitably reinforcing that political context?
Clearly you care enough to write this heated and scornful diatribe on my blog.
This strikes me as indicating a very poor understanding of Zizek. One of Zizek’s most common moves is to show how two apparently opposed positions are, in fact, identical. You point out, rightly, that talk of discipline and sacrifice is already all over the place in the political spectrum, and then call for a leftist version of this. The proper Zizekian gesture would not be that of becoming the mirror of these reactionary positions, but to locate the real that unsettles that opposition altogether. Why do you assume that any critique of Zizek’s position automatically entails adopting the position of “liberal tolerance”?
July 19, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Since we are working with Lacanian schema in posing these political questions, it’s also worthwhile to recall that for Lacan “we get our own message in inverted form.” If, for instance, an analysand perpetually finds himself being rejected despite efforts to the contrary, we are to conclude that this rejection is the unconscious intent of one’s actions. Given the response to Zizek’s 300 piece, one might thus wonder about it’s unconscious intent. In this context, its aim would perhaps be a failed political strategy so that it might continue to desire and protect its jouissance.
July 19, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I am sorry to burst in on a discussion on a blog that i’ve never posted to or read before. i just came upon it today. Do not take the comments too personally, this is politics after all. Polemics are appropriate sometimes.
Even though there’s no substantive response to the comments i made about US politics, and political action, i will respond to the minor point about interpreting Zizek. The point about two opposed sides being identical is not that they literally make the same statements, but rather that the position of enunciation is the same. So, the ‘other side’ to the discipline/sacrifice’ rhetoric is the ‘freedom/tolerance’ rhetoric. Zizek often says an effective (if limited) political strategy is to take the ‘master signifiers’ at their word. “This is democracy? Okay, then let’s allow anyone who wants to run for president (without the prereq of being a member of the ruling elite).” Liberal tolerance breaks down at this level too. We are so tolerant, well, okay, then tolerate a religious fundamentalist who wants to teach your kids creationism, and that they are going to hell. What do you do? explain to them how much better being a tolerant liberal is? Good luck. My point is that the american state is non-democratic, vicious to citizens and non-citizens, and completely rogue. i don’t understand why we have all this talk that is apparently about politics, but that still seems to be caught in the fantasy that you live in democracy, or that your opinion will matter the the powers that be. You say the we need to ‘locate the real,’ well, this is the real of the political situation. No action, Talk only.
I don’t necessarily endorse Zizek’s position. this is just a debate afterall, opinion-sharing, and all that.
July 19, 2007 at 4:22 pm
I suggest you poke around the blog a bit. I have made no claims about tolerance or democracy such as you here discuss, though your remarks do speak a good deal to the structure of your transference. It’s hard to even engage in polemicizing when you attribute a position to another that that person does not even endorse. Indeed, I share your concerns regarding how liberal tolerance functions and the problems with democracy. But hey, if someone disagrees with Zizek’s position that must mean they adopt the opposite facile position of liberal politics, right? And, of course, if that person is from America they must endorse the form that American party politics takes and believe that’s the right system, right?
July 20, 2007 at 12:11 am
“What sorts of affects need to be crafted to summon a people that does not exist?”
Do people make themselves coalesce, or allow themselves to do so? Going to war seems like a collective disciplinary arena you’d have to force yourself to engage in. But it’s likely that humans have an innate capacity for extracting pleasure from violence. Warfare establishes a system of meanings, an economy, and a social milieu; together they form a wartime reality that releases violence from its usual cultural restraints. The new recruit, still embedded psychologically in civilian reality, may have to force himself to remain vigilant, to hunt down the enemy, to pull the trigger. But it doesn’t take long for the reality of the war zone to permeate the psyche, and the soldier begins actively to participate in the fusillades of jouissance that crisscross the field of combat.
Fundamentalist Christianity seems like another disciplinary endeavor, demanding the subjection of individual pleasures to the moral code and to the collective. But in the New Testament ethos, motivation to coalesce comes not from enslaving yourself to the Law and the social order but from letting yourself be controlled by a Spirit of fellowship that comes into you from outside yourself.
Equity, justice, fraternity, freedom — you refer to them as values. Does the pursuit of values demand the disciplined subjection of our drives and the renunciation of our pleasures? Or is it better to regard these values as refined drives that seek their own refined pleasures if we let them?
July 20, 2007 at 1:40 am
Great comments Ktismatics
Do people make themselves coalesce, or allow themselves to do so?
I’m not sure I would characterize things in such a stark opposition. Moreover, your emphasis here seems to be on conscious choices made by an autonomous ego. We can also focus on the unconscious processes involved in such movements. Nonetheless, I think the key question here is, as you rightly imply, that of coalescence. What are the conditions for the possibility of coalescence or group formation. Given that the actors that make up a group are often extremely diverse, having different interests, coming from different backgrounds, having different geographical locations, etc., what are the conditions under which such a diversity or multiplicity comes to see itself as the same? Benedict Anderson has done fascinating work on this question with regard to nationalistic movements and media technologies in Imagined Communities, as has Appadurai with regard to globalization and how new subjectivities are formed as a result of information technologies.
Going to war seems like a collective disciplinary arena you’d have to force yourself to engage in.
I’m not so sure. Here you seem to suggest that soldiers and the mobilization of a people for war comes from the top down, or from a power on high. While I’m sure this is a part of it, militarism also seems to be a desire that emerges at the collective level as well. I’m not sure whether you’re from the United States or not, but here, following 9-11, there was the palpable emergence of a series of affects throughout the social space. One of the common refrains heard following 9-11 was that America had become united. Where before it was divided among all sorts of conflictual and antagonistic groups with competing interests, after 9-11, it was said, the American people came to see themselves as one. This would be an instance where some sort of coalescence takes place, where group relations– in a very sad way –were reconfigured and a new subjectivity came into being.
Warfare establishes a system of meanings, an economy, and a social milieu; together they form a wartime reality that releases violence from its usual cultural restraints.
I’m inclined to invert this formulation and say, rather, that warfare requires, as a condition for its possibility, establishing a system of meanings, an economy, and a social milieu.
Equity, justice, fraternity, freedom — you refer to them as values. Does the pursuit of values demand the disciplined subjection of our drives and the renunciation of our pleasures? Or is it better to regard these values as refined drives that seek their own refined pleasures if we let them?
I don’t know that I think this is the right way of framing the question as it presupposes that there is a set of pre-existent drives that are then subsequently repressed. I take it that developmental psychology and psychoanalysis very compellingly demonstrate that drives always take on specific form as a result of the social milieu in which we exist, such that there cannot be said to be any ultimate “real form” that drives would have independent of culture. Just as there’s no such thing as a clay that is shapeless, but rather all clay has some sort of shape as a function of its interaction that surrounds it, there’s no such thing as a formless clay. For me the question thus isn’t one of whether or not pleasure is renounced. Clearly any economy forms and structures pleasures in a variety of ways. For me the question is purely at the level of discourse. What sorts of subjectivities and social configurations do we produce when we place signifiers such as discipline and sacrifice at the top of that hierarchy? What sort of subjectivity and collective do we produce when discipline and sacrifice are treated as the primary values? The question is one of how master-signifiers organize a discourse and generate all sorts of effects at the level of practice, not whether or not a social formation could be formed that didn’t involve a renunciation of pleasure.
I don’t feel I’m getting this point across very clearly, so maybe an analogy would help. Suppose that we treat the signifier “author” as central to the study of literature. That is, suppose we see the study of literature as primarily a study of what the other thinks. Clearly placing this signifier at the top of our list is going to have all sorts of effects as to how we read novels, interpret novels, and what we’re going to pay attention to and what we’re going to ignore. For instance, in interpreting a novel we might focus on the author’s biography and look for parallels between the author’s life and events that take place in her novels. Here the signifier author has an organizing effect on all the other signifiers.
Now suppose, instead, we place “diacritics” at the top of our hierarchy… That is, the idea that meaning is produced as an effect of difference or opposition among terms. As a result of the selection of this signifier, the author fades into the background, as does historical setting, and instead we look for oppositions among elements in the novels and how they relate to one another. Again, a particular master-signifier here has a structuring or organizing effect on what’s focused on in the act of reading. Just like a hologram, some things come to the forefront, whereas other things pass into the background. Similarly, if we place the signifier “history” at the top, we now look for ways in which the novel communicates with its historical setting, and so on.
It could be said that the master-signifier has “holographic” effects. A hologram reveals different pictures or images depending on how I turn it. Similarly, the master-signifier produces different organizations in a material, social body, text, etc., depending which signifier occupies pride of place. A very different United States, for instance, exists depending on whether the key organizing signifier is “homeland” or whether it is “equality”. “Homeland” already organizes opposition to an other, whereas “equality” tends to minimize the importance of national boundaries.
This, I think, is where Hythlodaeus misses the point underlying concerns with Zizek’s choice to privilege signifiers like “discipline” and “sacrifice”. As Hythlodaeus’ interpretation of the interests motivating concern about this choice indicate– tenure, consumption, pleasure, etc –it is clear that s/he is reading the debate at the level of content rather than the surface of discourse. Any content that the discourse produces is strictly an effect of empty and nonsensical master-signifiers that have a meaning producing and organizing effect. The question isn’t one of pleasure versus sacrifice, but rather a question of what master-signifiers ought to organize a political movement. It’s a no brainer that any political or group formation involves forms of sacrifice and discipline. To be a social being necessarily involves sacrifice, as we don’t simply act on whatever whim might happen to cross our minds. To participate in any movement involves a variety of disciplinary formations and technologies. This goes without saying. What is perplexing is why these signifiers should be made the organizing signifiers of a particular movement, rather than another set of signifiers that have a far less noxious history and set of organizing effects.
July 20, 2007 at 5:21 am
What is perplexing is why these signifiers should be made the organizing signifiers of a particular movement, rather than another set of signifiers that have a far less noxious history and set of organizing effects.
There’s a simple and straightforward answer to that one: that set of Master signifiers is the only one that Dr. Zizolina has ever known, and he tested them in practice, too!
July 20, 2007 at 8:04 pm
larvalsubjects–
Thank you for your comments on my post. I’ve posted a few thoughts in response back over at my blog. I would have submitted them here as comments, but they ended up being too long, and they only deal with your original post, not the ensuing discussion. I did want to say here though, in response to your subsequent remark
“This, I think, is where Hythlodaeus misses the point underlying concerns with Zizek’s choice to privilege signifiers like ‘discipline’ and ’sacrifice’. As Hythlodaeus’ interpretation of the interests motivating concern about this choice indicate– tenure, consumption, pleasure, etc –it is clear that s/he is reading the debate at the level of content rather than the surface of discourse.”
I’d say that’s fairly accurate. I am concerned with the debate at the level of content. I wouldn’t, however, say that in doing so I’m missing the mark. My objective, in both my original post and in my latest one in response to yours, is to revive the old existentialist thesis that the only real determinant of value is choices made in total involvement in a concrete situation. Our current situation implicates our “hedonism” in the exploitation of others. That, to me, makes it untenable. If “discipline” and “sacrifice” will have any meaningful role as signifiers, it will only with the horizon of a transformative and emancipatory praxis. Ironically, the only effect they’ve had so far has been to shut down any talk of praxis. And THAT, I think, is mistaken. So to your statement:
“Any content that the discourse produces is strictly an effect of empty and nonsensical master-signifiers that have a meaning producing and organizing effect.”
I’d have to say I don’t agree–a discourse only produces meanings and effects (if at all) when correlated with non-discursive practices in a field of real social and political relations. The political imperative here, then, is take responsibility for the alignment of discourse and practice. It is up to us, through mutual exchange and common praxis, to determine what discipline and sacrifice mean (if anything), while recognizing that our determinations will always provisional. Otherwise yes, our values will remain abstract, and, as Sartre said, Evil is the abstract.
July 20, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Larvalsubjects, you note in your original reply that you are interested in group formation etc… This line of research and investigation certainly seems fruitful (especially vis-a-vis the seemingly common interest in this discussion as to what sorts of praxis should or could be brought in being).
I wonder though – has there been any research on the lack of group formation or obstacles to group formation? I’m especially thinking of the sort of apathy or complacence (say in voting in elections, for example) among various political populations or groups.
As a neophyte, I can confess to understand little of the technicalities of all that you guys have discussed here. Yet, in light of Hytholdaeus’ interest in taking responsibility (at the individual level?), I wonder if this could be more productively paired with some discussion moving beyond the individual’s responsibility to thinking about something like how to bring about solidarity.
October 5, 2007 at 8:01 am
[...] is also another issue which has been discussed somewhat recently – that of capitalist comfort and discipline. Žižek’s article about Zack Snyder’s film [...]