We’re having a great vacation here at Dauphin Island. We spent the morning on the beach (now I’m a bit burnt), and ate blue crab we caught right of the ocean for lunch. Lizzie is having an amazing time, building sand castles, playing in the surf, and collecting shells. Tonight we’re doing a shrimp boil with fresh gulf shrimp, red potatoes, corn, and andouille. Clearly, for me, travel is always about the food.
At any rate, over at Object-Oriented Philosophy Graham has a post up on Zizek’s remarks about wikileaks in interview:
http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/wikileaks-2/
Graham writes:
My least favorite moment in Žižek’s Guardian interview (which I otherwise loved: see HERE) was the Wikileaks analysis, where he critiqued the “liberal” interpretation of Wikileaks as simply an augmented form of investigative journalism, and treated it instead as an “emperor has no clothes” moment for the whole of capitalism.
I have a slightly different take. I don’t think Zizek was attempting to disparage or dismiss the importance of Assange or wikileaks by any means. Rather, I think Zizek was trying to formulate why these events have been important. One of Zizek’s favorite moves is to talk about the “logic of the re-remark”. This is a very strange logic. With the re-mark, nothing new is articulated, the exact same thing is repeated, yet somehow the repetition changes everything. In the psychoanalytic setting, tye analyst might merely repeat what the analysand said, yet somehow the repetition of that phrase brings it to resonate differently. This has to do with the nature of repression. Repression does not mean, necessarily, that something is hidden or withdrawn. The repressed can be right there, on the surface, as in the case of Freud’s famous example of repression by negation in the “Negation” essay. The patient says “I don’t know who that woman was in my dream, but she definitely wasn’t my mother!” The repressed content is the patient’s mother. This content is entirely present in the patient’s speech, but is under the bar of repression through the negation. In a situation like this, the analyst might merely repeat “your mother” in an intonation that hovers ambiguously between question and statement. This repetition can have the effect of generating an entirely new series of association, indicating that the analytic intervention has hit the truth or mark.
The logic of the re-mark thus works through subtraction amd grafting, pulling something that is already inscribed yet repressed into presence. Consider some more familiar examples: an abusive alcoholic father and a gay son. In the first instance, everyone in the family knows the father is abusive and alcoholic, but it is never spoken or talked about. One day a distant aunt visits and, at dinner, after the father has behaved horribly, she casually remarks “you know he’s an abusive alcoholic, don’t you?” Even though everyone in the family knew this, they are nonetheless shocked and scandalized. The gay son is anfavorite popular example of this logic as well. Everyone in the family knows the son is gay, yet it is never spoken and the son himself doesn’t conceive himself this way either. One day a teacher, believing this was common family knowledge, says something about his homosexuality, shocking everyone.
The best example of acephalous knowledge and the logic of the re-mark is, of course, The Sixth Sense. Bruce Willis’s character clearly knows that he’s dead. We can see this because he studiously avoids anything that might remind him of his death. Yet this knowledge is acephalous in that he refuses to know what he knows, he represses this knowledge, and thisnrepressed signifier thereby determines all his actions. When the boy reveals that he’s dead at tye end of the film he re-marks this knowledge, lifting the bar of repression. Everything changes.
In these situations, nothing new is said, no new knowledge has become available, but the re-marking of this acephalous knowledge changes everything. I call this knowledge “acephalous” because it is “without a head”. It is there, but without being posited for the subject’s involved. It operates, but in an unfree fashion. Why unfree? Because everywhere this headless knowledge operates like an automaton, creating all sorts of compulsion repetitions characteristic of the symptom, without those involved being able to take up a position with respect to these signifiers. As Lacan argues in his commentary on Poe’s Purloined Letter, the letter, the signifier, determines the position of all the subject’s involved as an acephalous automaton that structures their relations. By re-marking the letter, freedom arrives or becomes available apbecause now we can take up a position with respect to these things and begin to work through them.
I believe this is what Zizek is getting at with respect to Assange. The radicality of Assange’s act is not what he revealed to us, but that he revealed it. Everyone knew that the government is corrupt, that it was covering things up, that it was making shady deals with corporations, etc. Yet this was never spoken… At least publicly in the media. What Assange did was re-mark this knowledge, inscribing it publicly. He attacked the key ideological prohibition upon which contemporary governmemts are based: speaking about their corruption. Instead, the standard ideological mode of operation consists in the narrative that states really are working on behave of the welfare of average people, that they really are struggling on behalf of the public good (rather than continuously making shady backroom deals with the wealtheists so as to advance their interests and the interests of these forces, both of whom seem to think their guys really are pursuing their interests and not just using them for their own aims). We all know this more or less (unless we’re ardent Obama supporters or blinkered members of the Tea Party) yet we’re never supposed to articulate it publicly. In comparing Assange to the boy in the Emperor’s story, I helieve he was giving him the highest praise, arguing that he occupies the position of the analyst, not the university in the four discourses. I somewhat get Graham’s point about the problem with saying governments are corrupt to the core, but I also believe that if we don’t adopt a realist position with respect to how monied interests structure governments and continually pull strjngs it’s impossible to engage in any effective politics. Would I prefer to be in the US as opposed to China? Of course. Does that change the fact that the system is rotten to the core? No.
Larval Subjects . 
July 19, 2011 at 10:43 am
I agree with the effect of repetition that can disturb the whole logic of the power system. But another important aspect of Wikileaks is that it exhibits the fragility of power. Whence the truth is concealed, and the public is able to pretend that “there is nothing rotten”, they may behave as if “nothing lacks”. However, whence revealed by some subject from outskirts of the power system, it might give an alarm about noneffective dimension of power. Does not phallus signify the lack?
This might be read side by side with the Maoist metaphor of tiger paper that he had used for imperialism once upon a time:
“In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of; it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe that is nothing but a paper tiger.”
July 19, 2011 at 11:59 am
this is why the kind of practices/disciplines that Foucault was working on around fearless speech are so important because while such pronouncements of the unspoken can be pivotal/cathartic events in and of themselves they do not produce lasting change, old habits/predispositions/orientations must be replaced with new ones.
such that all of the folks who get their jollies off of pointing out other peoples’ room-elephants or the emperor’s new clothes without having plans for some experimental alternative relationships are not in the change business.
just as gossip (the bread and butter of most political blogs) can relieve the very anxiety that might be a spur for change “critical” thinking can be a similar trap/addiction.
July 19, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Ditto dmf.
Žižek’s remarks should no doubt be contextualized by this article he wrote for the London Review of Books earlier this year: http://bit.ly/nj9VL4. He makes it clear he’s thinking of Foucault when he says:
“What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal functioning of power. The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc) – as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it, WikiLeaks ‘challenged power by challenging the normal channels of challenging power and revealing the truth’.[*] The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy.”
I think Žižek’s exploration of the shifting field of power is weakest where he seems to rely on “empirical” readings of repetition (the re-remark, “first as tragedy…”) as they manifest discursively—as if to remind us that, yes, he’s read his Deleuze (“empirical” in the sense that he reminds us that repetition is difference, okay, but confines it to the discursive domain). Stronger, albeit shorter, are his claims about the “disappearing” of public space—however, this does not, as he seems to imply, entail that privacy is not disappearing (“the reality is the opposite,” he says of the wane of privacy). Google no doubt “privatizes” the experience of a public library by means of directed content, just as Facebook’s directed ads penetrate the public social sphere. But could this not be in the service of a “one-two” whereby these social networks capitalize on this “enforced insularity” (the dearth of unexpected, interest-piquing encounters) by means of their own supposed function as social networks, as a medium for public engagement? A cancerous repetition.
I don’t think a (IMO) folk-psychological diagnosis of the “shame” that WikiLeaks makes “more shameful” by publicizing will suffice—it implicitly separates WikiLeaks from its work. One of the most notable aspects of the leaks, in the case of the logs and cables, is the sheer size of the archive. I think it is incumbent on commentators to explore how the great lithic bodies of information can be transformed, by way of visualization or other means, from a given number of factoids, “dirty details,” into its own recombinant language from which we can deconstruct the ways in which public space is enclosed and action stymied, and begin the process of reconstructing a milieu.
July 20, 2011 at 12:37 am
Beautifully explained, Levi, and with your usual psychoanalytic eloquence of example. However, here is your shared point with Zizek with which I still disagree: “In these situations, nothing new is said, no new knowledge has become available, but the re-marking of this acephalous knowledge changes everything.” I don’t agree that nothing new was said by Assange. We all might have known in vague terms that “there is corruption,” but that corruption is never *infinite*. It takes specific forms, and there is always an element of surprise in just what forms it takes.
For example, was it not surprising (a non-Wikileaks example) that Rod Blagojevich was trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat? Yes, I think it was surprising. I had no particular reason to think that Blagojevich was that sort of character, nor is there reason that all Governors sell Senate seats in that brazen a fashion (yes, I know that big money has invaded American politics, but there’s still a difference between that and outright bribery). As I see it, if someone had reacted to the Blagojevich news by saying: “No great shock, I’m not surprised by anything that politicians do,” then this is the wrong reaction. It’s a failure to allow one’s expectations to be shaped by the blows of experience, by way of an a priori immunization against political surprise.
My worry is that the gesture of “we knew it all along” levels all political activity onto the same cynical plane– the wrong sort of flat ontology. But then again, you’re considerably more pessimistic about liberal democracy than I am (and certainly Zizek and Badiou are). Fair enough.
July 20, 2011 at 12:38 am
“nor is there reason that all Governors sell Senate seats” = nor is there reason TO BELIEVE that all Governors sell Senate seats
July 20, 2011 at 1:18 am
[…] Levi has an interesting post HERE supporting Žižek's take on Wikileaks. I think his account of Žižek's view is accurate, I simply […]
July 20, 2011 at 3:07 am
I believe Graham was objecting to Slavoj’s disparagement, not of Asange, but of a supposed “liberal” interpretation of Wikileaks.
July 20, 2011 at 6:13 am
“The radicality of Assange’s act is not what he revealed to us, but that he revealed it”
Maybe there is another way to look at that: governments thrive on past stories. They rule the present exactly because they can represent, now, massive past experience: relations of power, laws, social agreements… They are the closest thing to a total Self, a fantasy of a complete subject. It seems to me that we sometimes look on governments to stop time. To offer us a harbor, a way out from the everyday mobility – instability. In this respect, wikileaks is a gift from heaven for the temporality of governments. Massive governments leaks remind us that we are so hopelessly out of the main deals, the crucial decisions. We get to see, openly, all the schemes and methods, they call us to interpret them, to remain in awe, even to flatter us if and when we managed to reproduce them ourselves.
In other words, the fact that “the government is corrupt, and this is spoken publicly in the media” does not make any real difference, as we get to live government actions in much more complex and delicate ways.
July 20, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Yeah, I believe liberal democracy is fundamentally broken and largely impossible at this point in time due to the way in which money is treated as free speech in this country. That money, I think, makes it fundamentally impossible for elected officials to do their jobs. We get a choice between parties on social politics and that’s something, but the reigning economic philosophy is largely the same in both parties. Economic philosophy determines one’s position with respect to nearly every other policy (it’s never simply about jobs and incomes, but influences how all sorts of programs are structured and organized; viz, privatization and deregulation as the reigning aim in all programs). So what we get is warp speed class stratification from republicans, and full impulse power stratification from the democrats (for the Star Trek geeks out there). As a consequence, voting increasingly loses it’s status as a form of political engagement as it approaches a choice between coke and pepsi. The only thing left becomes general strikes like we saw in Wisconsin.
July 20, 2011 at 4:06 pm
[…] has written a response to my last post over at Object-Oriented Ontology here. He writes: [ADDENDUM: Levi has an interesting post HERE […]
July 20, 2011 at 11:03 pm
I see your point Levi, and I do understand your Obama disappointment (though mine’s not *quite* as sharp; the oil spill is where I thought he came up most short). However, I do still think it was a very big non-incremental breakthrough for the U.S. to elect a non-white President for the first time (and I believe even Noam Chomsky agrees with me here).
July 20, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Graham,
I thinks that’s like suggesting that electing Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman would be some sort of huge victory because we finally elected a woman to office. I think economic politics is so fundamental and that Obama’s performance in this area has been so upsetting and misguided, that this is a Pyrrhic victory at best. Economics is the root out of which all our issues grow. For me BP is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to what a profound disappointment he’s been. But it’s deeper than that. Returning to the issue of the re-mark, Obama has performed the remark in the opposite fashion. Through his embrace of rightwing policies he’s legitimized them and rendered them ordinary operating precedure in the way that only a democrat could do.
July 21, 2011 at 11:39 am
Thank you Levi for this post.
However, allow me to propose this: information is not the issue. The issue is what we do with it, and it seems that Wikileaks, in this sense, does not change anything.
This goes back to the debate between Chomsky and Foucault in the seventies, and of course to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (which I’m riffing off of here). The problem isn’t “concealed” information that is kept from us (of course that is a fundamental aspect, but not the crucial one for our interests here), the belief that as soon as “we the people” will know the truth we will make things better, build a better society devoid of evil. This is not the case, and raises further implication for the, aptly named in this sense, “information society”.
People are killed. War never changes. We now this. We demonstrate against it. But what good does it do if millions march wearing gas masks protesting war, if billions of others still don’t care, or still vote in favour of war? What good does all this information do if it doesn’t allow the demonstrations or public protests to affect policy?
Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent is as important and paradoxically obsolete today as it was when it came out. We know what happens, and this is, again, a crucial aspect. Fine. But does it affect us more to actually get the detailed reports of how the invading military slaughter civilians, or if we are shown pictures of it daily? No, we switch the channel and watch Dancing with the Stars or, at tops, press a “Like!” button or “join” “groups” on our “social” networks.
The problem is still unconscious investments of fascism, and the inability of our democratic societies to publicly affect policy, which I doubt Wikileaks will ever change.
July 21, 2011 at 2:15 pm
I’m sorry to add this, forgive my double post. But I have to stress the importance of what Zizek says and how you Levi have presented it here. It is a very interesting twist of the re-remark that goes beyond (but not far enough, as I would argue) the critique against Wikileaks, that we haven’t learnt anything new. But as Zizek argues, the fact that Wikileaks puts it out in the public discourse, via the revolutionary technology that is the internet, changes everything.
But I’m still not convinced. Remember in The Dark Knight, when the Joker says he’s like a dog chasing cars, “I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it!” If The Dark Knight spoke a lot about our culture that we’re living in today, this quote perhaps speaks the most: we are chasing information with absolutely no idea what to do with it when we catch it. “Release” it? “Publish” it? Then what? Our plans seems to suddenly stop at this point.
The question we should be asking is “what to do” instead of just “what”.
August 2, 2011 at 12:02 am
[…] in a fascinating discussion about Zizek’s treatment of Assange/Wikileaks (GH here, LB here and here), the critical question being one of whether the making public of information that […]