From “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as the New
Opium of the Masses” part 1
http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm
[…]
1. Ecology:
In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an
acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new
field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk
involved fundamentally precludes a market solution - why? Capitalism only works
in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the
objectivized/"reified" mechanism of the market's "invisible
hand" which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the
competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are
in the midst of a radical change. Till now, historical Substance played its
role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever
social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated,
overdetermined, by the historical Substance. What looms on the horizon today is
the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene
directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by
way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a
nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on
the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds
that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history,
the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even
interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today
that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived
"not only as Substance, but also as Subject." This is why, when
confronted with singular catastrophic prospects (say, a political group which
intends to attack its enemy with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer
can rely on the standard logic of the "Cunning of Reason" which,
precisely, presupposes the primacy of the historical Substance over acting
subjects: we no longer can adopt the stance of "let the enemy who
threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby self-destruct himself" -
the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too high since, in
the meantime, we may all perish together with the enemy. Recall a frightening
detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to
nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a
Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth
charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a
nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the
conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three
officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to
sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. "A guy named
Arkhipov saved the world," was a bitter comment of a historian on this
accident.
2. Private Property:
The inappropriateness of private property for the so-called "intellectual
property." The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is
thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the
logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free
circulation of music)? And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point
in the same direction? Phenomena are emerging here which bring the notion of
property to weird paradoxes: in India, local communities can suddenly discover
that medical practices and materials they are using for centuries are now owned
by American companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic
companies patentizing genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves,
our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others...
The crucial date in the history of cyberspace is February 3 1976, the day when
Bill Gates published his (in)famous "Open Letter to Hobbysts," the
assertion of private property in the software domain: "As the majority of
hobbysts must be aware, most of you steal your software. /.../ Most directly,
the thing you do is theft." Bill Gates has built his entire empire and
reputation on his extreme views about knowledge being treated as if it were
tangible property. This was a decisive signal which triggered the battle for
the "enclosure" of the common domain of software.
3. New Techno-Scientific Developments:
The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments
(especially in bio-genetics) - Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that the
biogenetic interventions into human nature are the most serious threat to his
vision of the End of History.
With the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which
it is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of the
scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the
rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects
amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus
"desubstantialized," deprived of its impenetrable density, of what
Heidegger called "earth." This compels us to give a new twist to
Freud's title Unbehagen in der Kultur - discontent, uneasiness, in
culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to
nature itself: nature is no longer "natural," the reliable
"dense" background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile
mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.
4. New Forms of Apartheid:
Last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September
11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th,
1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9th announced the "happy '90s,"
the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history," the belief that
liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent
of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the
obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and
contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp
that their time is over). In contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the
forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and
the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.
So what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in
the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades,
especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin
American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and
Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. It is
effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old
Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are
"free" in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic
proletariat ("freed" from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free
space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a large
collective, forcibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation where
they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of
any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic
life-forms.
While today's society is often characterized as the society of total control,
slums are the territories within a state boundaries from which the state
(partially, at least) withdrew its control, territories which function as white
spots, blanks, in the official map of a state territory. Although they are de
facto included into a state by the links of black economy, organized crime,
religious groups, etc., the state control is nonetheless suspended there, they
are domains outside the rule of law. In the map of Berlin from the times of the
now defunct GDR, the are of West Berlin was left blank, a weird hole in the detailed
structure of the big city; when Christa Wolf, the well-known East German
half-dissident writer, took her small daughter to the East Berlin's high TV
tower, from which one had a nice view over the prohibited West Berlin, the
small girl shouted gladly: "Look, mother, it is not white over there,
there are houses with people like here!" - as if discovering a prohibited
slum Zone...
This is why the "de-structured" masses, poor and deprived of
everything, situated in a non-proletarized urban environment, constitute one of
the principal horizons of the politics to come. If the principal task of the
emancipatory politics of the XIXth century was to break the monopoly of the
bourgeois liberals by way of politicizing the working class, and if the task of
the XXth century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia
and Africa, the principal task of the XXIth century is to politicize - organize
and discipline - the "de-structured masses" of slum-dwellers. Hugo
Chavez's biggest achievement is the politicization (inclusion into the
political life, social mobilization) of slum dwellers; in other countries, they
mostly persist in apolitical inertia. It was this political mobilization of the
slum dwellers which saved him against the US-sponsored coup: to the surprise of
everyone, Chavez included, slum dwellers massively descended to the affluent
city center, tipping the balance of power to his advantage.
How do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a qualitative
difference between the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included and
the other three antagonisms, which designate three domains of what Hardt and
Negri call "commons," the shared substance of our social being whose
privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent
means, if necessary: the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms
of "cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of
communication and education (if Bill Gates were to be allowed monopoly, we
would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would
have literally owned the software texture our basic network of communication),
but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post,
etc.; the commons of external nature threatened by pollution and exploitation
(from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal
nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity). What all these struggles share
is the awareness of the destructive potentials, up to the self-annihilation of
humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed
a free run. It is this reference to "commons" which justifies the
resuscitation of the notion of Communism - or, to quote Alain Badiou:
The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see
any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth
doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of
communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political
becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own
affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right,
as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of
their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the
existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first
form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is
imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new
mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.
So where do we stand today with regard to communism? The
first step is to admit that the solution is not to limit the market and private
property by direct interventions of the State and state ownership. The domain
of State itself is also in its own way "private": private in the
precise Kantian sense of the "private use of Reason" in State
administrative and ideological apparatuses:
The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it
alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one's reason,
on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly
hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one's reason I
understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading
public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil
post or office which is entrusted to him.
What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there
is a privileged social group which, on account of its lacking a determinate
place in the "private" order of social hierarchy, directly stands for
universality: it is only the reference to those Excluded, to those who dwell in
the blanks of the State space, that enables true universality. There is nothing
more "private" than a State community which perceives the Excluded as
a threat and worries how to keep the Excluded at a proper distance. In other
words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the Included and
the Excluded is the crucial one, the point of reference for the others; without
it, all others lose their subversive edge: ecology turns into a "problem
of sustainable development," intellectual property into a "complex
legal challenge," biogenetics into an "ethical" issue. One can
sincerely fight for ecology, defend a broader notion of intellectual property,
oppose the copyrighting of genes, while not questioning the antagonism between
the Included and the Excluded - even more, one can even formulate some of these
struggles in the terms of the Included threatened by the polluting Excluded. In
this way, we get no true universality, only "private" concerns in the
Kantian sense of the term. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks continue
to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union
activities; the trick is that they sell products that contain the claim of
being politically progressive acts in and of themselves. One buys coffee made
with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one
buys from companies that provide good benefits for their customers (according
to the corporation's own standards), etc. Political action and consumption
become fully merged. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and
the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the
greatest humanitarian fighting against poverty and diseases, and Rupert Murdoch
the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media
empire.
When politics is reduced to the "private" domain, it takes the form
of the politics of FEAR - fear of losing one's particular identity, of being
overwhelmed. Today's predominant mode of politics is post-political
bio-politics - an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can
easily be unpacked: "post-political" is a politics which claims to
leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management
and administration, while "bio-politics" designates the regulation of
the security and welfare of human lives as its primal goal. It is clear how
these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what
remains is only the efficient administration of life... almost only that. That
is to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration
and coordination of interests as the zero-level of politics, the only way to
introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through
fear, a basic constituent of today's subjectivity.
No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology
of fear, fear of a catastrophe - human-made or natural - that may deeply
perturb, destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan
measures that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the
chances of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global
capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion: it
takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on an
unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is
constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not Cartesian subjects extracted
from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a bio-sphere which vastly
transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are
borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as
something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally,
that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we should trust, not
dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our bio-sphere, it is
unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will
run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists are
all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying
this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of
progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of
triggering a catastrophe.
It is this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic
ideology, since it echoes the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of
large collective acts. This distrust unites religious leaders and
environmentalists - for both, there is something of a transgression, of
entering a prohibited domain, in this idea of creating a new form of life from
scratch, from the zero-point. And this brings us back to the notion of ecology
as the new opium for the masses; the underlying message is again a deeply
conservative one - any change can only be the change for the worst - here is a
nice quote from the TIME magazine on this topic:
Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic
life is the intuition that nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds.
Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature's creations are
perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do - be it animals that see,
hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed on the sun's rays, exuding bright
floral colours to attract pollinators.
This reference to Darwin is deeply misleading: the ultimate
lesson of Darwinism is the exact opposite, namely that nature tinkers and
improvises, with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited
success - is the fact that 90 percent of the human genome is 'junk DNA' with no
clear function not the ultimate proof of it? Consequently, the first lesson to
be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency
of our existence. There is no Evolution: catastrophes, broken equilibriums, are
part of natural history; at numerous points in the past, life could have turned
into an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy (oil) is
the result of a past catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. One should thus
learn to accept the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm
foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. "Nature
doesn't exist": "nature" qua the domain of balanced
reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris,
brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion, is man's fantasy; nature
is already in itself "second nature," its balance is always
secondary, an attempt to negotiate a "habit" that would restore some order
after catastrophic interruptions.
With regard to this inherent instability of nature, the most consequent was the
proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: since nature is
changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of
humanity impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity
should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth
ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth's change, so that
its ecology will remain basically the same, thus enabling humanity's survival.
This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology.
