In his introduction to the work of Mao, Žižek writes,
The true victory (the true ‘negation of negation’) occurs when the enemy talks your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat: it occurs when one’s specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by the enemy. (Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao On Practice and Contradiction, 17)
In what sense is this to be understood as the true victory? After all, the simple fact that the enemy is using your “language” does not count as much of a victory if the structure of power remains the same. However, perhaps we can understand Žižek’s point in terms of making alternatives available, of creating possibilities within the social space that were not there before.
This thesis can be illustrated in terms of games. For the last thirty years it could be said that the reigning economic assumption behind American politics has been that of Friedmanian, unregulated, free trade economics. The net result is that all sides engaged in economic discussions surrounding the political assume this framework as the ground of their policy proposals. Here only one option is available and participants take stands within the framework of this set of rules. The situation is thus analogous to a game of chess. Within a game of chess, the rules themselves aren’t up for debate or discussion. Rather, the rules are themselves agreed upon and remain largely invisible for the players. If a debate does take place, this debate takes place not in terms of a dispute over the rules of the game, but over the tactics as to how best play the game within the framework of those rules. Such has been the case with non-academic political discourses in the United States.
A shift in the game thus does not occur at the level of a single game, but only when an entirely new game becomes available, challenging the discourse of the existing game. In this regard, Republicans made a strategic blunder when they chose to brand Obama as a socialist during the last election. In situating Obama as a socialist within the context of the current economic meltdown, they implicitly suggested that another game, another set of possibilities was possible. Rather than simply suggesting that Obama plays the game of chess (neoliberal economics) poorly, they instead suggested that Obama plays an entirely different game, perhaps go, composed of entirely different rules (socialism). In making this move, they undermined their own claim, built up painstakingly over the course of economics, that capitalism today reigns supreme and there are no other credible alternatives.
My suggestion here isn’t that Obama is a socialist or that he will depart from neoliberal economic policies (I’m skeptical). Rather, what I find interesting is that news shows, editorials, and various pundits are suddenly raising questions of whether unfettered capitalism is the best possible system. What we increasingly hear today is a popular space in which capitalism is being contested or questioned, and a halting groping towards other possibilities is unfolding. It is only when the game itself becomes an object of critique, when it comes to be seen as contingent or something that could be otherwise, that it becomes possible to overturn that game. Absent that we simply have competing tactics within one and the same game, assuming the same rules, goals, and aims.
November 17, 2008 at 6:56 pm
I agree with you, Sinthome, and I think Zizek says something similar in his recent LRB article. However, I wonder what you think the significance of someone like David Sirota lambasting the bailout as socialist, but with the liberal sense of totalitarianism, of going “back to the USSR.” Is it enough that “socialist” is a word with cache again, when both liberals and conservatives resort to it as derogatory?
I mean, Marx applied “socialism” to a variety of political/economic/social formations that he otherwise rejected (cf. Socialist and Communist Literature), many of which pre-date Marx anyway. There’s a nuance to Marx’s critique of Capitalism and political economy that I’m not sure we get back just because we can say socialism again. I think the case could be made that Sirota is correct in saying the bailout was a socialist move, but what Marx called “conservative or bourgeois socialism.” To that end, I think socialism may only have come back onto the scene because it has been sufficiently mystified.
November 17, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Hi Joe,
I don’t at all disagree with you. I am certainly not making the suggestion that somehow all problems are solved, but am making the very modest suggestion that new openings are becoming available. One of the things I find frustrating about political theory is the search for panaceas, where we encounter questions like “how can we overcome capitalism?” In Deleuzian terms I would say that such questions are poorly formed or articulated because capitalism is not a thing, but a network or assemblage that has to be dealt with as such.
Perhaps an analogy to Badiou’s understanding of truth-procedures can help make this point. The truth-procedure following from an event is not a panacea. It doesn’t guarantee that the co-ordinates of a situation will be transformed. Moreover, the knowledge or encyclopedia governing the organization of a situation will rebound on the nomination of the event and the truth-procedure, denying that the event took place and coding the recoding of the elements of the situation in terms of the event as pure, meaningless chaos. Now, I do not mean to imply that the re-emergence of discussions about managed economy are an event in Badiou’s sense of the term– far from it –but there is something similar at work here. The presence of such an opening guarantees nothing, but it does provide an opening whereby the terms of discussion might begin to be changed and a new game might be introduced. It’s entirely possible that it could fail and that references to socialism can ultimately be occluded by spurious references to the Soviet Union.
November 17, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Yes about political panceas. That’s kind of my point too, but in reverse. Socialism as a kind of monolithic system, just another thing, which happens to also be called Communism in the Cold War sense, is the mystification of socialism as the re-working of networks and already existing structures for the sake of the working-class. It’s only one possible way of framing the issue, of course, but it has too much visibility for my comfort.
This gets to what Zizek said in his first LRB article on the financial crisis:
While shifting the conversation to what kind of state intervention is important, it’s still only half the battle. To this end, I take what you mean by “games” to mean what we might otherwise call political struggle. Being able to finally fight for state intervention doesn’t guarantee who ends up winning that struggle, but at least it is out in the open again. However, my point about the mystification of socialism, like the mystification of commodities, is that to me it signals that this new opening for discussion, like the marketplace, may not be what it seems.
November 18, 2008 at 2:17 am
This statement was very true “In what sense is this to be understood as the true victory? After all, the simple fact that the enemy is using your “language” does not count as much of a victory if the structure of power remains the same. However, perhaps we can understand Žižek’s point in terms of making alternatives available, of creating possibilities within the social space that were not there before.”
November 18, 2008 at 3:34 pm
While I think I agree with you vis-a-vis Republican “message” undermining itself and suggesting that the alternative is possible, I wonder if it was the intended thought-through effect or a simple by-product of a chaotic campaign? I mean, there is a historical of anti-socialist propaganda in the US and the message would be very strong if it was disciplined: “Obama is proposing to switch from the capitalist game to a socialist game which is certainly impossible because capitalism is the only game in town, i.e he intends to destroy our way of life etc etc” The fact that Republicans threw so many accusations at Obama offset any positive effects of any of those accusations. I think in the end everyone assumed that “socialism is bad” and even Obama had to respond with reasserting that all he wanted to do was to give a tax break and that it was done before which in the time of economic crisis was like saying “I want to give you money and if it’s socialism, then I guess I am a socialist” in a kind of a sarcastic way…
November 18, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Mikhail, I’d certainly agree that it was a by-product of a chaotic campaign, certainly not something intended. On the other hand, from a psychoanalytic perspective one could feasibly argue that unconscious anxieties of the Republicans were at work. In other words, the fact that they jumped to the really dated “socialist” charge suggests that they were dealing with anxieties about the failure of their own economic philosophy.
November 18, 2008 at 8:31 pm
It would be great to get a good psychoanalytic perspective here – in a sense, all the accusations thrown at Obama, while irreconcilable as a group (a socialist Muslim? a terrorist who wants to spread the wealth? unknown celebrity?), show a kind of interplay of all the possible fears – are you saying that all of these accusation were basically about one deep fear of potential failure of capitalism?
November 18, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I wouldn’t go that far. I do think they are sensing that they’re losing cultural hegemony (the demographic shifts don’t indicate a glowing future for this group) and that serious cracks in Friedmanian economic theories have begun to be revealed.
December 2, 2008 at 2:41 am
[…] to name what image will appear on the wall next), and instead leap into an entirely different game. It was this that I tried to argue in my article “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures” […]
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