Slavoj Žižek
The French and Dutch NO to the
project of European constitution was a clear-cut case of what in the
"French theory" is referred to as a floating signifier: a NO of
confused, inconsistent, overdetermined meanings, a kind of container in which
the defense of workers' rights coexists with racism, in which the blind
reaction to a perceived threat and fear of change coexist with vague utopian
hopes. We are told that the NO was really a NO to many other things: to the
Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism, to Chirac and the present French government, to the
influx of the immigrant workers from Poland who lower the wages of the French
workers, etc.etc. The real struggle is going on now: the struggle for the
meaning of this NO - who will appropriate it? Who - if anyone - will translate
it into a coherent alternate political vision?
If there is a predominant
reading of the NO, it is a new variation on the old Clinton motto "It's
the economy, stupid!": the NO was supposedly a reaction to Europe's
economic lethargy, falling behind with regard to other newly emerging blocks of
economic power, its economic, social, and ideologico-political inertia - BUT,
paradoxically, an inappropriate reaction, a reaction ON BEHALF OF this very
inertia of the privileged Europeans, of those who want to stick to old Welfare
State privileges. It was the reaction of "old Europe," triggered by
the fear of any true change, the refusal of the uncertainties of the Brave New
World of globalist modernization. [1] No wonder that the reaction of the
"official" Europe was the one of near-panic at the dangerous
"irrational" racist and isolationist passions that sustained the NO,
at a parochial rejection of openness and liberal multiculturalism. One is used
to hear complaints about the growing apathy among the voters, about the decline
of popular participation in politics, so worried liberals talk all the time
about the need to mobilize people in the guise of civil society initiatives, to
engage them more in a political process. However, when people awaken from their
apolitical slumber, it is as a rule in the guise of a rightist populist revolt
- no wonder many enlightened technocratic liberals now wonder whether the
hitherto "apathy" was not a blessing in disguise.
One should be attentive here
to how even those elements which appear as pure Rightist racism are effectively
a displaced version of workers' protests: of course there is racism in
demanding the end of immigration of foreign workers which pose a threat to our
employment; however, one should bear in mind the simple fact that the influx of
immigrant workers from the post-Communist countries is not the consequence of
some multiculturalist tolerance - it effectively IS part of the strategy of the
capital to held in check the workers' demands - this is why, in the US, Bush
did more for the legalization of the status of Mexican illegal emigrants than
the Democrats caught in the trade union pressures. So, ironically, the Rightist
racist populism is the today the best argument that the "class struggle,"
far from being "obsolete," goes on - the lesson the Left should learn
from it is that one should not commit the error symmetrical to that of the
populist racist mystification/displacement of the hatred onto foreigners, and
to "throw the baby out with the dirty water," i.e., to merely oppose
populist anti-immigrant racism on behalf of multiculturalist openness,
obliterating its displaced class content - benevolent as it wants to be, the
mere insistence on multiculturalist openness is the most perfidious form of
anti-workers class struggle...
Typical is here the reaction
of German mainstream politicians to the formation of the new Linkspartei for
the 2005 elections, a coalition of the East German PDS and the Leftist
dissidents of the SPD - Joschka Fischer himself reached one of the lowest
points in his career when he called Oscar Lafontaine "a German
Haider" (because Lafontaine protested the import of cheap East European
labor to lower the wages of German workers). It is symptomatic in what an
exaggerated and panicky way the political (and even cultural) establishment
reacted when Lafontaine referred to "foreign workers," or when the
secretary of the SPD called the financial speculators "locusts" - as
if we are witnessing a full neo-Nazi revival. This total political blindness,
this loss of the very capacity to distinguish Left and Right, betrays a panic
at politicization as such. The automatic dismissal of entertaining any thoughts
outside the established post-political coordinates as "populist demagoguery"
is the hitherto purest proof that we effectively live under a new Denkverbot.
(The tragedy, of course, is that the Linkspartei effectively IS a pure protest
party with no global viable program of change.)
It is not only that today's
political field is polarized between the post-political administration and
populist politicization; phenomena like Berlusconi demonstrate how the two
opposites can even coexist in the same political force: is the Berlusconi
movement Forza Italia! not a case of post-political populism, i.e., of a
mediatic-administrative government legitimizing itself in populist terms. And
does the same not hold to some degree even for the Blair government in the UK,
or for the Bush administration in the US? In other words, is populism not progressively
replacing the multi-culturalist tolerance as the "spontaneous"
ideological supplement to the post-political administration, as its
"pseudo-concretization," its translation into a form that can appeal
to the individuals' immediate experience? The key fact here is that pure
post-politics (a regime whose self-legitimization would have been thoroughly
"technocratic," presenting itself as competent administration) is
inherently impossible: any political regime needs a supplementary "populist"
level of self-legitimization.
Populism: From the Antinomies
Of the Concept...
The French-Belgian NO thus
presents us with the latest adventure in the story of populism. For the
enlightened liberal-technocratic elite, populism is inherently
"proto-Fascist," the demise of political reason, a revolt in the
guise of the outburst of blind utopian passions. The easiest reply to this
distrust would have been to claim that populism is inherently neutral: a kind
of transcendental-formal political dispositif that can be incorporated into
different political engagements. This option was elaborated in detail by
Ernesto Laclau. [2]
For Laclau, in a nice case of
self-reference, the very logic of hegemonic articulation applies also to the
conceptual opposition between populism and politics: "populism" is
the Lacanian objet a of politics, the particular figure which stands for the
universal dimension of the political, which is why it is "the royal
road" to understanding the political. Hegel provided a term for this
overlapping of the universal with part of its own particular content:
"oppositional determination /gegensaetzliche Bestimmung/" as the
point at which the universal genus encounters itself among its particular
species. Populism is not a specific political movement, but the political at
its purest: the "inflection" of the social space that can affect any
political content. Its elements are purely formal, "transcendental,"
not ontic: populism occurs when a series of particular "democratic"
demands (for better social security, health services, lower taxes, against war,
etc.etc.) is enchained in a series of equivalences, and this enchainment
produces "people" as the universal political subject. What characterizes
populism is not the ontic content of these demands, but the mere formal fact
that, through their enchainment, "people" emerges as a political
subject, and all different particular struggles and antagonisms appears as
parts of a global antagonistic struggle between "us" (people) and
"them." Again, the content of "us" and "them" is
not prescribed in advance but, precisely, the stake of the struggle for
hegemony: even ideological elements like brutal racism and anti-Semitism can be
enchained in a populist series of equivalences, in the way "them" is
constructed.
It is clear now why Laclau
prefers populism to class struggle: populism provides a neutral
"transcendental" matrix of an open struggle whose content and stakes
are themselves defined by the contingent struggle for hegemony, while
"class struggle" presupposes a particular social group (the working
class) as a privileged political agent; this privilege is not itself the
outcome of hegemonic struggle, but grounded in the "objective social
position" of this group - the ideologico-political struggle is thus
ultimately reduced to an epiphenomenon of "objective" social
processes, powers and their conflicts. For Laclau, on the contrary, the fact
that some particular struggle is elevated into the "universal
equivalent" of all struggles is not a pre-determined fact, but itself the
result of the contingent political struggle for hegemony - in some
constellation, this struggle can be the workers' struggle, in another
constellation, the patriotic anti-colonialist struggle, in yet another
constellation the anti-racist struggle for cultural tolerance... there is
nothing in the inherent positive qualities of some particular struggle that
predestines it for such a hegemonic role of the "general equivalent"
of all struggles. The struggle for hegemony thus not only presupposes an
irreducible gap between the universal form and the multiplicity of particular
contents, but also the contingent process by means of which one among these
contents is "transubstantiated" into the immediate embodiment of the
universal dimension - say (Laclau's own example), in Poland of the 1980, the
particular demands of Solidarnosc were elevated into the embodiment of the
people's global rejection of the Communist regime, so that all different versions
of the anti-Communist opposition (from the conservative-nationalist opposition
through the liberal-democratic opposition and cultural dissidence to Leftist
workers' opposition) recognized themselves in the empty signifier Solidarnosc.
This is how Laclau tries to
distinguish his position both from gradualism (which reduces the very dimension
of the political: all that remains is the gradual realization of particular
"democratic" demands within the differential social space) as well as
from the opposite idea of a total revolution that would bring about a fully
self-reconciled society: what both extremes miss is the struggle for hegemony
in which a particular demand is "elevated to the dignity of the
Thing," i.e., comes to stand for the universality of "people."
The field of politics is thus caught in an irreducible tension between
"empty" and "floating" signifiers: some particular
signifiers start to function as "empty," directly embodying the
universal dimension, incorporating into the chain of equivalences which they
totalize a large number of "floating" signifiers. [3] Laclau mobilizes this gap between the
"ontological" need for a populist protest vote (conditioned by the
fact that the hegemonic power discourse cannot incorporate a series of popular
demands) and the contingent ontic content to which this vote gets attached, to
explain the shift of many French voters who, till the 1970s, supported the
Communist Party to the Rightist populism of the Front National [4] - the elegance
of this solution is that it dispenses us with the boring topic of the alleged
"deeper (totalitarian, of course) solidarity" between the extreme
Right and the "extreme" Left.
Although Laclau's theory of
populism stands out as one of the today's great (and, unfortunately for social
theory, rare) examples of true conceptual stringency, one should note a couple
of problematic features; the first one concerns his very definition of
populism: the series of formal conditions he enumerates are not sufficient to
justify calling a phenomenon "populist" - a thing to be added is the
way the populist discourse displaces the antagonism and constructs the enemy:
in populism, the enemy is externalized/reified into a positive ontological
entity (even if this entity is spectral), whose annihilation would restore
balance and justice; symmetrically, our own - the populist political agent's -
identity is also perceived as pre-existing the enemy's onslaught.
Let us take Laclau's own
precise analysis of why one should count Chartism as populism:
Its dominant leitmotiv is to
situate the evils of society not in something that is inherent in the economic
system, but quite the opposite: in the abuse of power by parasitic and
speculative groups which have control of political power - 'old corruption,' in
Cobbett's words. /.../ It was for this reason that the feature most strongly
picked out in the ruling class was its idleness and parasitism. [5]
In other words, for a
populist, the cause of the troubles is ultimately never the system as such, but
the intruder who corrupted it (financial manipulators, not capitalists as such,
etc.); not a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such, but an element
that doesn't play its role within the structure properly. For a Marxist, on the
contrary (like for a Freudian), the pathological (deviating misbehavior of some
elements) is the symptom of the normal, an indicator of what is wrong in the
very structure that is threatened with "pathological" outbursts: for
Marx, economic crises are the key to understanding the "normal"
functioning of capitalism; for Freud, pathological phenomena like hysterical
outbursts provide the key to the constitution (and hidden antagonisms that
sustain the functioning) of a "normal" subject. This is also why
Fascism definitely is a populism: its figure of the Jew is the equivalential point
of the series of (heterogeneous, inconsistent even) threats experienced by
individuals: Jew is simultaneously too intellectual, dirty, sexually voracious,
too hard-working, financial exploiter... Here we encounter another key feature
of populism not mentioned by Laclau: not only is - as he is right to emphasize
- the populist Master-Signifier for the enemy empty, vague, imprecise, etc.:
/.../ to say that the
oligarchy is responsible for the frustration of social demands is not to state
something which can possibly be read out of the social demands themselves; it
is provided from outside those social demands, by a discourse on which they can
be inscribed. /.../ It is here that the moment of emptiness necessarily arises,
following the establishment of equivalential bonds. Ergo, 'vagueness' and
'imprecision,' but these do not result from any kind of marginal or primitive
situation; they are inscribed in the very nature of the political. [6]
In populism proper, this
"abstract" character is furthermore always supplemented by the
pseudo-concreteness of the figure that is selected as THE enemy, the singular
agent behind all the threats to the people. One can buy today laptops with the
keyboard artificially imitating the resistance to the fingers of the old
typewriter, as well as the typewriter sound of the letter hitting the paper -
what better example of the recent need for pseudo-concrecy? Today, when not
only social relations but also technology are getting more and more
non-transparent (who can visualize what is going on inside a PC?), there is a
great need to re-create an artificial concrecy in order to enable individuals
to relate to their complex environs as to a meaningful life-world. In computer
programming, this was the step accomplished by Apple: the pseudo-concrecy of
icons. Guy Debord's old formula about the “society of spectacle" is thus
getting a new twist: images are created in order to fill in the gap that
separates the new artificial universe from our old life-world surroundings,
i.e., to “domesticate" this new universe. And is the pseudo-concrete
populist figure of the "Jew" that condenses the vast multitude of
anonymous forces that determine us not analogous to a computer board that
imitates the old typewriter board? Jew as the enemy definitely emerges from
outside the social demands that experience themselves as frustrated.
This supplement to Laclau's
definition of populism in no way implies any kind of regress at the ontic level:
we remain at the formal-ontological level and, while accepting Laclau's thesis
that populism is a certain formal political logic, not bounded by any content,
only supplement it with the characteristic (no less "transcendental"
its other features) of "reifying" antagonism into a positive entity.
As such, populism by definition contains a minimum, an elementary form, of
ideological mystification; which is why, although it is effectively a formal
frame/matrix of political logic that can be given different political twists
(reactionary-nationalist, progressive-nationalist...), nonetheless, insofar as,
in its very notion, it displaces the immanent social antagonism into the
antagonism between the unified "people" and its external enemy, it
harbors "in the last instance" a long-term proto-Fascist tendency. [7]
In short, I agree with
Laclau's attempt to define populism in a formal-conceptual way, also taking
note of how, in his last book, he has clearly shifted his position from
"radical democracy" to populism (he now reduces democracy to the
moment of democratic demand WITHIN the system); however, as it is clear to him,
populism can also be very reactionary - so how are we to draw a line here? (One
can easily imagine a situation determined by a tension between the
institutionalized democratic power-bloc and the oppositional populist block, in
which one would definitely opt for the institutionalized democratic block -
say, a situation in which a liberal-democratic regime in power is threatened by
a large scale racist-populist movement.) So, again, is there a way to draw the
line at a formal-conceptual level? My wager is a yes.
Every construction of and
action on behalf of people as a political subject is not eo ipso populism. In
the same way that Laclau likes to emphasize how Society doesn't exist, the
People also doesn't exist, and the problem with populism is that, within its
horizon, people DOES exist - the People's existence is guaranteed by its
constitutive exception, by the EXTERNALIZATION of the Enemy into a positive
intruder/obstacle. The formula of the truly democratic reference to the people
should thus be a paraphrase of Kant's definition of beauty as Zweckmaessigkeit
ohne Zweck: the popular without people, i.e., the popular cut through,
thwarted, by a constitutive antagonism which prevents it to acquire the full
substantial identity of a People. That's why populism, far from standing for
the political as such, always involves a minimal DE-POLITICIZATION,
"naturalization," of the political.
This accounts for the
fundamental paradox of the authoritarian Fascism is that it almost
symmetrically inverts what Mouffe calls the "democratic paradox": if
the wager of (institutionalized) democracy is to integrate the antagonistic
struggle itself into the institutional/differential space, transforming it into
regulated agonism, Fascism proceeds in the opposite direction. While Fascism,
in its mode of activity, brings the antagonistic logic to its extreme (talking
about the "struggle to death" between itself and its enemies, and
always maintaining - if not realizing - a minimum of an extra-institutional
threat of violence, of a "direct pressure of the people" by-passing
the complex legal-institutional channels), it posits as its political goal
precisely the opposite, an extremely ordered hierarchic social body (no wonder
Fascism always relies on organicist-corporatist metaphors). This contrast can
be nicely rendered in the terms of the Lacanian opposition between the
"subject of enunciation" and the "subject of the enunciated
(content)": while democracy admits antagonistic struggle as its goal (in
Lacanese: as its enunciated, its content), its procedure is regulated-systemic;
Fascism, on the contrary, tries to impose the goal of hierarchically structured
harmony through the means of an unbridled antagonism.
In a homologous way, the
ambiguity of the middle class, this contradiction embodied (as already Marx put
it apropos Proudhon), is best exemplified by the way it relates to politics: on
the one hand, the middle class is against politicization - they just want to
sustain their way of life, to be left to work and lead their life in peace
(which is why they tend to support the authoritarian coups which promise to put
an end to the crazy political mobilization of society, so that everybody can
return to his or her proper work). On the other hand, they - in the guise of
the threatened patriotic hard-working moral majority - are the main instigators
of the grass-root mass mobilization (in the guise of the Rightist populism -
say, in France today, the only force truly disturbing the post-political
technocratic-humanitarian administration is le Pen's National Front.
Furthermore, it is not only
that today's political field is polarized between the post-political
administration and populist politicization; phenomena like Berlusconi
demonstrate how the two opposites can even coexist in the same political force:
is the Berlusconi movement Forza Italia! not a case of post-political populism,
i.e., of a mediatic-administrative government legitimizing itself in populist
terms. And does the same not hold to some degree even for the Blair government
in the UK, or for the Bush administration in the US? In other words, is
populism not progressively replacing the multi-culturalist tolerance as the
"spontaneous" ideological supplement to the post-political
administration, as its "pseudo-concretization," its translation into
a form that can appeal to the individuals' immediate experience? The key fact
here is that pure post-politics (a regime whose self-legitimization would have
been thoroughly "technocratic," presenting itself as competent
administration) is inherently impossible: any political regime needs a supplementary
"populist" level of self-legitimization.
This is also why it is
problematic to count any kind of Communist movement as a version of populism.
After evoking the possibility that the point of shared identification that
holds together a crowd can shift from the person of the leader to an impersonal
idea, Freud goes on: "This abstraction, again, may be more or less
completely embodied in the figure of what we may call a secondary leader, and
interesting varieties would arise from the relation between the idea and the
leader." [8] Does this not hold especially for the
Stalinist leader who, in contrast to the Fascist leader, is a "secondary
leader," the embodiment-instrument of the Communist Idea? This is the
reason Communist movements and regimes cannot be categorized as populist.
Linked to this are some
further weaknesses of Laclau's analysis. The smallest unit of his analysis of
populism is the category of "social demand" (in the double meaning of
the term: a request and a claim). The strategic reason of choosing this term is
clear: the subject of demand is constituted through raising this demand; the
"people" thus constitutes itself through equivalential chain of
demands, it is the performative result of raising these demands, not a
preexisting group. However, the term "demand" involves a whole
theatrical scene in which a subject is addressing his demand to an Other
presupposed to be able to meet it. Does the proper revolutionary/emancipatory
political act not move beyond this horizon of demands? The revolutionary
subject no longer operates at the level of demanding something from those in
power - he wants to destroy them...
Furthermore, Laclau calls such
an elementary demand, prior to its eventual enchainment into a series of
equivalences, "democratic"; as he explains it, he resorts to this
slightly idiosyncratic use to signal that a demand that still functions WITHIN
the socio-political system, i.e., a demand that is met as a particular demand,
so that it is not frustrated and, because of this frustration, forced to
inscribe itself into an antagonistic series of equivalences. Although he
emphasizes how, in a "normal" institutionalized political space,
there are, of course, multiple conflicts, but these conflicts are dealt with
one by one, without setting in motion any transversal alliances/antagonisms,
Laclau is well aware that chains of equivalences can also form themselves
within an institutionalized democratic space: recall how, in the UK under John
Major's Conservative leadership in the late 1980s, the figure of the
"unemployed single mother" was elevated into the universal symbol of
what is wrong with the old Welfare State system - all "social evils"
were somehow reduced to this figure (state budget crisis? because too much
money is spend on supporting these mothers and their children; juvenile
delinquency? because single mother do not exert enough authority to provide the
proper educational discipline; etc.).
What Laclau neglected to emphasize
is not only the uniqueness of democracy with regard to his basic conceptual
opposition between the logic of differences (society as a global regulated
system) and the logic of equivalences (the social space as split into two
antagonistic camps which equalize their inner differences), but also the full
inner entwinement of these two logics. The first thing to note here is how,
only in a democratic political system, the antagonistic logic of equivalences
is inscribed into the very political edifice, as its basic structural feature -
it seems that Chantal Mouffe's work [9] is here more pertinent, in its heroic
attempt to bring together democracy and the spirit of agonistic struggle, rejecting
both extremes: on the one side, the celebration of heroic
struggle-confrontation that suspends democracy and its rules (Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Schmitt); on the other side, the evacuation of true struggle out of
the democratic space, so that all that remains is the anemic rule-regulated
competition (Habermas) - here, Mouffe is right to point out how violence
returns with a vengeance in the exclusion of those that do not fit the rules of
unconstrained communication... However, the main threat to democracy in today's
democratic countries resides in none of these two extremes, but in the death of
the political through the "commodification" of politics. What is at
stake here is not primarily the way politicians are packed and sold as
merchandises at elections; a much deeper problem is that elections themselves
are conceived along the lines of buying a commodity (power, in this case): they
involve a competition among different merchandises-parties, and our votes are
like money which we give to buy the government we want... what gets lost in
such a view of politics as another service we buy is politics as a shared
public debate of issues and decisions that concern us all.
Democracy, it may seem, thus
not only can include antagonism, it is the only political form that solicits
and presupposes it, that INSTITUTIONALIZES it - what other political systems
perceive as a threat (the lack of a "natural" pretender to power),
democracy elevates into a "normal" positive condition of its
functioning: the place of power is empty, there is no natural claimant for it,
polemos/struggle is irreducible, and every positive government must be fought
out, gained through polemos... This why Laclau's critical remark about Lefort
misses the point: "/F/or Lefort, the place of power in democracies is
empty. For me, the question poses itself differently: it is a question of
producing emptiness out of the operation of hegemonic logic. For me, emptiness
is a type of identity, not a structural location." [10] The two emptinesses are simply not
comparable: the emptiness of 'people' is the emptiness of the hegemonic
signifier which totalizes the chain of equivalences, i.e., whose particular
content is 'transubstantiated' into an embodiment of the social Whole, while
the emptiness of the place of power is a distance which makes every empirical
bearer of power 'deficient,' contingent and temporary.
The further feature neglected
by Laclau is the fundamental paradox of the authoritarian Fascism, which almost
symmetrically inverts what Mouffe calls the "democratic paradox": if
the wager of (institutionalized) democracy is to integrate the antagonistic
struggle itself into the institutional/differential space, transforming it into
regulated agonism, Fascism proceeds in the opposite direction. While Fascism,
in its mode of activity, brings the antagonistic logic to its extreme (talking
about the "struggle to death" between itself and its enemies, and
always maintaining - if not realizing - a minimum of an extra-institutional
threat of violence, of a "direct pressure of the people" by-passing
the complex legal-institutional channels), it posits as its political goal
precisely the opposite, an extremely ordered hierarchic social body (no wonder
Fascism always relies on organicist-corporatist metaphors). This contrast can
be nicely rendered in the terms of the Lacanian opposition between the
"subject of enunciation" and the "subject of the enunciated
(content)": while democracy admits antagonistic struggle as its goal (in
Lacanese: as its enunciated, its content), its procedure is regulated-systemic;
Fascism, on the contrary, tries to impose the goal of hierarchically structured
harmony through the means of an unbridled antagonism.
The conclusion to be drawn is
that populism (the way we supplemented Laclau's definition of it) is not the
only mode of existence of the excess of antagonism over the
institutional-democratic frame of regulated agonistic struggle: not only the
(now defunct) Communist revolutionary organizations, but also the wide
phenomena of non-institutionalized social and political protest, from the
student movements in the 1968 period to later anti-war protests and the more
recent anti-globalization movement, cannot be properly called
"populist." Exemplary is here the case of the anti-segregation
movement in the US of late 1950s and early 1960s, epitomized by the name of
Martin Luther King: although it endeavors to articulate a demand that was not
properly met within the existing democratic institutions, it cannot be called
populist in any meaningful sense of the term - the way it led the struggle and
constituted its opponent was simply not "populist"... (A more general
remark should be made here about the One-Issue popular movements (for example,
the "tax revolts" in the US): although they function in a populist
way, mobilizing the people around a demand which is not met by the democratic
institutions, it does NOT seem to rely on a complex chain of equivalences, but
remains focused on one singular demand.)
...to the Deadlock of
Political Engagements
In 2004, George Lakoff, a
post-Chomskyian philosopher of language previously known mostly as a
"metaphor analyst," all of a sudden exploded into popularity in the
US Democratic Party by offering an elementary, "easy-to-use," account
of what was wrong with the Democratic politics and how should this politics be
redressed to resuscitate its mobilizing force. The interest of his project for
us resides in the fact that it shares as series of superficial features with
Laclau's edifice: the move from political struggle as a conflict of agents who
follow rational calculations about their self-interests, to a more
"open" vision of political struggle as a conflict of passions sustained
by an irreducibly metaphorical rhetoric. (For Laclau, metaphor is inscribed
into the very heart of the struggle for ideologico-political hegemony: the
fundamental operation of hegemony, the elevation of some particular content
into a direct embodiment of universality, literally enacts a metaphoric
short-circuit.).
One should remember here that
Lakoff is a true anti-Chomsky who believes in telling all the facts and in the
power of clear reasoning (no wonder there is professional and personal
animosity between him and Chomsky, his ex-teacher). Lakoff opts for a strangely
anti-Enlightenment vision which turns around the so-called
"rationalist-materialist paradigm" (RAM for short): people don't
follow rational calculations about their self-interests, they think in subconscious
narrative "frames" organized around central metaphors; their beliefs
are sustained by such frames, not by rational argumentation... we are back at
the old opposition of myth versus logos, rhetoric versus reasoning, metaphor
versus strict conceptual meaning. Lakoff's concrete analyses oscillate between
amusing apercus on how everyday rhetorical phrases are bundled with unspoken
assumptions (say, in the 2004 elections, the media as a rule referred to
Kerry's home building as his "estate," and to Bush's building as
"ranch") and rather primitive pseudo-Freudian decipherings - say,
apropos 9/11, he wrote: "Towers are symbols of phallic power, and their
collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power. /.../ the planes penetrating the
towers with a plume of heat, and the Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air,
penetrated by the plane as missile." [11] Lakoff reaches here the highpoint of the
absurdity of his pseudo-Freudian symbolistic reading, evoking the weird logic
of a phallus (plane) penetrating a phallus (the Twin Towers). In view of this
naïve Freudism, it should not surprise us that, for Lakoff, the central
organizing metaphors go back to warring visions of "idealized family structure":
conservatives see the nation as a family based on the "strict father
model," in which the head of the household orders his wife around and
beats his children, with the goal of fashioning them into disciplined and
self-reliant adults, while progressives prefer a "nurturing parents
model," in which two mutually supportive parents nurture their children.
(As it was already noted, both the "strict father" and the
"nurturing parents" model are family models, as if it is impossible
to detach politics from its familial fantasmatic libidinal roots.)
Lakoff's conclusion is that,
instead of abhorring the passionate metaphoric language on behalf of the couple
of rational argumentation and abstract moralizing, the Left should accept the
battle at this terrain and learn to offer more seductive frames. [12]
Near the end of his Don't Think of an Elephant!, Lakoff writes that
conservatives "have figured out their own values, principles, and directions,
and have gotten them out in the public mind so effectively over the past thirty
years that they can evoke them all in a ten-word philosophy: Strong Defense,
Free Markets, Lower Taxes, Smaller Government, Family Values." He proposes
a similar ten-word philosophy for liberals: "Stronger America, Broad
Prosperity, Better Future, Effective Government, Mutual Responsibility." [13]
The weakness of this alternative was also already noted: while the conservative
formula presents what appears as clear choices that demand from us adopting
strong and divisive positions (strong defense against the proponents of
disarmament; free markets against state regulation; lower taxes against
tax-and-spend social programs...), the liberal formula consists of general
feel-good phrases nobody is against (who IS against prosperity, better future,
effective government?) - what only happens is that violent-passionate engaging
rhetorics is replaced by shallow sentimental rhetorics. What is so strange here
is that Lakoff, a refined linguist, specialist in semantics, can miss this
obvious weakness of his positive formula, the weakness which can be precisely
formulated in Laclau's terms: it lacks the antagonistic charge of designating a
clear enemy, which is the sine qua non of every effective mobilizing political
formula.
So we are far from insinuating
that Lakoff proposes a "Laclauian" politics: on the contrary, it is
precisely the reference to Laclau that allows us to see Lakoff's limitations,
beneath the superficial similarities. Accordong to Senator Durbin, one of
Lakoff's supporters in the Democratic nomenklatura, he "doesn't ask us to
change our views or change our philosophy. He tells us that we have to recommunicate."
The Republicans have triumphed "by repackaging old ideas in all new
wrapping." The struggle is thus reduced to "mere rhetorics": the
ideas (and the "real" politics) remain the same as they were, it is
only a question of how to package and sell one's ideas (or, to put it in more
"human" terms, of establishing better communication). Insofar as he
endorses such a reading of his thesis, Lakoff doesn't take seriously enough HIS
OWN emphasis on the force of metaphoric frame, reducing it to secondary packaging
- in clear contrast to Laclau for whom the rhetorics is operative in the very
heart of the ideologico-political process, in establishing the hegemonic
articulation - although, sometimes, Laclau does seem to succumb to the
temptation of reducing the troubles of today's Left to a "mere
rhetorical" failure, as in the following passage:
/.../ the Right and the Left
are not fighting at the same level. On the one hand, there is an attempt by the
Right to articulate various problems that people have into some kind of
political imaginary, and on the other hand, there is a retreat by the Left into
a purely moral discourse which doesn't enter into the hegemonic game. /.../ The
main difficulty of the Left is that the fight today does not take place at that
level of the political imaginary. And it relies on a rationalist discourse
about rights, conceived in a purely abstract way without entering that
hegemonic field, and without that engagement there is no possibility of a
progressive political alternative. [14]
So the main problem of the
Left is its inability to propose a passionate global vision of change... is it
really that simple? Is the solution for the Left to abandon the "purely
moral" rationalist discourse and to propose a more engaged vision
addressing the political imaginary, a vision that could compete with the
neo-conservative projects and also with the past Leftist visions? Is this
diagnosis not similar to the proverbial answer of a doctor to the worried
patient: "What you need is a good doctor's advice!"? What about
asking the elementary question: what, concretely, would that new Leftist vision
be, with regard to its content? Is not the decline of the traditional Left, its
retreat into the moral rationalist discourse which no longer enters the
hegemonic game, conditioned by the big changes in global economy in the last
decades - so where IS a better Leftist global solution to our present
predicament? Whatever one holds against the "Third Way," it at least
tried to propose a vision which does take into account these changes. No wonder
that, as we approach concrete political analysis, confusion starts to reign -
in a recent interview, Ernesto Laclau made a weird accusation against me,
imputing me that I "claimed that the problem with the United States is
that they act as a global power and do not think as a global power, but only in
the terms of their own interests. The solution is then that they should think
and act as a global power, that they should assume their role of world
policeman. For somebody like Zizek, who comes from the Hegelian tradition, to
say this means that the United States tend to be the universal class. /.../ The
function that Hegel attributes to State and Marx to proletariat, Zizek now
attributes to the highpoint of American imperialism. There is no base for
thinking that things will be in this way. I do not believe that any progressive
cause, in any part of the world, could think in these terms." [15]
I quote this passage not to
dwell on its ridiculously-malicious interpretive twist: of course I never
pleaded for the US to be the universal class: when I stated that the US
"act globally and think locally," my point was not that, "then /entonces/,"
they should both think and act globally, it was simply that this gap between
universality and particularity is structurally necessary, which is why the US
are in long term digging their own grave... and, incidentally, therein resides
my Hegelianism: the "motor" of the historico-dialectical process is
precisely the gap between "acting" and "thinking": people
do not do what they think they are doing, while thought is formally universal,
the act as such is "particularizing," which is why, for Hegel
precisely, there is no self-transparent historical subject, all acting social
subjects are always and by definition caught in the "cunning of
reason," their fulfill their role through the very failure to accomplish
their intended task. Consequently, the gap we are dealing with here is also not
simply the gap between the universal form of thought and the particular
interests that "effectively" sustain our acts legitimized by the
universal thought: the true Hegelian insight is that the very universal form as
such, in its opposition to the particular content that it excludes,
"particularizes" itself, turns into its opposite, so there is no need
to look for some particular "pathological" content that smears the
pure universality.
The reason I quote this
passage is to make a precise theoretical point about the status of the
universality: we are dealing here with two opposed logics of universality to be
strictly distinguished. On the one hand, there is the state bureaucracy as the
universal class of a society (or, in a larger scope, the US as the world
policeman, the universal enforcer and guarantee of human rights and democracy),
the direct agent of the global Order; on the other hand, there is the
"surnumerary" universality, the universality embodied in the element
which sticks out of the existing Order, which, while internal to it, has no
proper place within it (what Jacques Rancière calls the "part of
no-part"). Not only are the two not the same, [16] but the struggle is ultimately the
struggle between these two universalities, not simply between the particular
elements of the universality: not just about which particular content will
"hegemonize" the empty form of universality, but a struggle between
two exclusive FORMS of universality themselves.
This is why Laclau misses the
point when he opposes "working class" and "people" along
the axis of conceptual content versus the effect of radical nomination: [17]
"working class" designates a preexisting social group, characterized
by its substantial content, while "people" emerges as a unified agent
through the very act of nomination - there is nothing in the heterogeneity of
demands that predisposes them to be unified in "people." However,
Marx distinguishes between "working class" and
"proletariat": "working class" effectively is a particular social
group, while "proletariat" designates a subjective position. (Which
is why Laclau's critical debate about Marx's opposition between proletariat and
lumpenproletariat also misses the point: their distinction is not the one
between an objective social group and a non-group, a remainder-excess with no
proper place within the social edifice, but a distinction between two modes of
this remainder-excess which generate two different subjective positions. The
implication of Marx's analysis is that, paradoxically, although
lumpenproletariat seems more radically "displaced" with regard to the
social body than proletariat, it effectively fits much more smoothly the social
edifice: to refer to the Kantian distinction between negative and infinite
judgment, lumpenproletariat is not truly a non-group (the immanent negation of
a group, a group which is a non-group), but not a group, and its exclusion from
all strata not only consolidates the identity of other groups, but makes it a
free-floating element which can be used by any strata or class - it can be the
radicalizing "carnivalesque" element of the workers' struggle,
pushing them from compromising moderate strategies to an open confrontation, or
the element which is used by the ruling class to degenerate from within the
opposition to its rule (the long tradition of the criminal mob serving those in
power). The working class, on the contrary, is a group which is in itself, AS A
GROUP within the social edifice, a non-group, i.e., whose position is in itself
"contradictory": they are a productive force, society (and those in
power) need them in order to reproduce themselves and their rule, but,
nonetheless, they cannot find a "proper place" for them...)
This brings us to Laclau's
basic reproach to the Marxian "critique of political economy (CPE)":
it is a positive "ontic" science which delimits a part of substantial
social reality, so that any direct grounding of emancipatory politics in CPE
(or, in other words, any privilege given to class struggle) reduces the
political to an epiphenomenon embedded in substantial reality... Such a view
misses what Derrida called the "spectral" dimension of Marx's CPE:
far from offering the ontology of a determinate social domain, the CPE
demonstrates how this ontology is always supplemented by "heauntology,"
science on ghosts - what Marx calls the "metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties" of the universe of commodities. This strange
"spirit/ghost" resides in the very heart of economic reality, which
is why, with the CPE, the circle of Marx's critique is closed: Marx's initial
thesis, in his early works, was that the critique of religion is the starting
point of every critique; from here, he proceeded to the critique of state and
politics, and, finally, to the CPE which gives us the insight into the most
basic mechanism of social reproduction; however, at this final point, the
movement becomes circular and returns to its starting point, i.e., what we
discover in the very heard of this "hard economic reality" is again
the theological dimension. When Marx describes the mad self-enhancing
circulation of the capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches
its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures, it is far too
simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that
pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an
ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this
abstraction, there are real people and natural objects on whose productive
capacities and resources the capital's circulation is based and on which it
feeds itself like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this
"abstraction" is not only in our (financial speculator's)
misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise
sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the
fate of whole strata of population and sometimes of whole countries can be
decided by the "solipsistic" speculative dance of the Capital, which
pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference with regard to how
its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental
systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct
pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer
attributable to concrete individuals and their "evil" intentions, but
purely "objective", systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the
Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: "reality" is the
social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the
productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable "abstract"
spectral logic of the Capital that determines what goes on in social reality.
Furthermore, let us not forget
what the very term CPE indicates: economy is in itself political, so that one
cannot reduce political struggle to a mere epiphenomenon or secondary effect of
a more "basic" economic social process. This is what "class
struggle" is for Marx: the presence of the political in the very heart of
economy, which is why it is significant that the manuscript of Capital III
breaks precisely when Marx would have to deal directly with class struggle -
this break is not simply a lack, the signal of a failure, but, rather, the
signal that the line of though bends back into itself, turns to a dimension
which was always-already here. The "political" class struggle
permeates the entire analysis from the very beginning: the categories of
political economy (say, the "value" of the commodity "working
force," or the degree of profit) are not objective socio-economic data, but
data which always signal the outcome of a "political" struggle. (And,
incidentally, in dealing with the Real, Laclau seems to oscillate between the
formal notion of Real as antagonism and the more "empirical" notion
of the Real as that which cannot be reduced to a formal opposition:
/.../ the opposition A-B will
never fully become A - not A. The 'B-ness' of the B will be ultimately
non-dialectizable. The 'people' will always be something more than the pure
opposite of power. There is a Real of the 'people' which resists symbolic
integration. [18]
The crucial question, of
course, is: which, exactly, is the character of this excess of
"people" over being the "pure opposite of power," i.e.,
WHAT in 'people' resists symbolic integration? Is it simply the wealth of its
(empirical or other) determinations? If this is the case, then we are NOT
dealing with a Real that resists symbolic integration, because the Real, in
this case, is precisely the antagonism A - non-A, so that "that which is
in B more than non-A" is not the Real in B but B's symbolic
determinations.)
"Capitalism" is thus
not merely a category which delimitates a positive social sphere, but a
formal-transcendental matrix that structures the entire social space -
literally, a MODE of production. Its strength resides in its very weakness: it
is pushed into constant dynamics, into a kind of permanent emergency state, in
order to avoid confronting its basic antagonism, its structural imbalance. As
such, it is ontologically "open": it reproduces itself through its
permanent self-overcoming; it is as it were indebted to its own future,
borrowing from it and forever postponing the day of reckoning.
The Turkish March
The general conclusion is
that, although the topic of populism is emerging as crucial in today's
political scenery, it cannot be used as the ground for the renewal of the
emancipatory politics. The first thing to note is that today's populism is
different from the traditional version - what distinguishes it is the opponent
against which it mobilizes the people: the rise of "post-politics,"
the growing reduction of politics proper to the rational administration of the
conflicting interests. In the highly developed countries of the US and Western
Europe, at least, "populism" is emerging as the inherent shadowy
double of the institutionalized post-politics, one is almost tempted to say: as
its supplement in the Derridean sense, as the arena in which political demands
that do not fit the institutionalized space can be articulated. In this sense,
there is a constitutive "mystification" that pertains to populism:
its basic gesture is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation, to
reduce it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete "enemy" figure
(from "Brussels bureaucracy" to illegal immigrants).
"Populism" is thus by definition a negative phenomenon, a phenomenon
grounded in a refusal, even an implicit admission of impotence. We all know the
old joke about a guy looking for his lost key under the street light; when
asked where did he lost it, he admits that it was in a dark corner behind; so
why is he looking for it here, under the light? Because the visibility is much
better here... there is always something of this trick in populism. So not only
is populism not the area within which today's emancipatory projects should
inscribe themselves - one should even go a step further and propose that the
main task of today's emancipatory politics, its life-and-death problem, is to find
a form of political mobilization that, while (like populism) critical of
institutionalized politics, will AVOID the populist temptation.
Where, then, does all this
leave us with regard to Europe's imbroglio? The French voters were not given a
clear symmetrical choice, since the very terms of the choice privileged the
YES: the elite proposed to the people a choice which was effectively no choice
at all - people were called to ratify the inevitable, the result of enlightened
expertise. The media and the political elite presented the choice as the one
between knowledge and ignorance, between expertise and ideology, between
post-political administration and old political passions of the Left and the
Right. [19] The NO was thus dismissed as a
short-sighted reaction not aware of its own consequences: a murky reaction of
fear of the emerging new postindustrial global order, an instinct to stick to
and protect the comfortable Welfare State traditions - a gesture of refusal
lacking any positive alternative program. No wonder the only political parties
whose official stance was No were the parties at the opposite extreme of the
political spectrum, le Pen's Front National at the Right and the Communists and
Trotskytes at the Left.
However, even if there is an
element of truth in all this, the very fact that the NO was not sustained by a
coherent alternative political vision is the strongest possible condemnation of
the political and mediatic elite: a monument to their inability to articulate,
to translate into a political vision, the people's longings and
dissatisfactions. Instead, in their reaction to the NO, they treated the people
as retarded pupils who did not get the lesson of the experts: their
self-criticism was the one of the teacher who admits that he failed to educate
properly his pupils. What the advocates of this "communication"
thesis (the French and Dutch NO means that the Enlightened elite failed to
communicate properly with the masses) fail to see is that, on the contrary, the
NO in question was a perfect example of communication in which, as Lacan put
it, the speaker gets from the addressee its own message in its inverted, i.e.,
true, form: the enlightened European bureaucrats got back from their voters the
shallowness of their own message to them in its true form. The project of
European Union that was rejected by France and Netherlands stood for a kind of
cheap trick, as if Europe can redeem itself and beat its competitors by simply
combining the best of both worlds: by beating the US, China and Japan in
scientific-technological modernization through keeping alive its cultural
traditions. One should insist here that, if Europe is to redeem itself, it
should, on the contrary, be ready to take the risk of losing (in the sense of
radically questioning) both: to dispel the fetish of scientific-technological
progress AND to get rid of relying on the superiority of its cultural heritage.
So, although the choice was
not the choice between two political options, it was also not the choice
between the enlightened vision of a modern Europe, ready to fit the new global
order, and old confused political passions. When commentators described the NO
as a message of confused fear, they were wrong. The main fear we are dealing
with here is the fear the NO itself provoked in the new European political
elite, the fear that people will no longer so easily buy their
"post-political" vision. For all others, the NO is a message and
expression of hope: hope that POLITICS is still alive and possible, that the
debate about what the new Europe shall and should be is still open. This is why
we, from the Left, should reject the sneering insinuation by the liberals that,
in our NO, we find ourselves with strange neo-Fascist bed-fellows. What the new
populist Right and the Left share is just one thing: the awareness that
POLITICS proper is still alive.
There WAS a positive choice in
the NO: the choice of the choice itself. The rejection of the blackmail by the
new elite which offers us only the choice to confirm their expert knowledge or
to display one's "irrational" immaturity. The NO is the positive
decision to start a properly POLITICAL debate about what kind of Europe we
really want. Late in his life, Freud asked the famous question Was will das
Weib?, What does the woman want?, admitting his perplexity when faced with the
enigma of the feminine sexuality. Does the imbroglio with the European
constitution not bear witness to the same puzzlement: which Europe do we want?
The unofficial anthem of the
European Union, heard at numerous political, cultural and sportive public
events, is the "Ode to Joy" melody from the last movement of
Beethoven 9th symphony, a true "empty signifier" that can stand for
anything. In France, it was elevated by Romain Rolland into the a humanist ode
to the brotherhood of all people ("the Marseillaise of humanity"); in
1938, it was performed as the highpoint of Reichsmusiktage and later for
Hitler's birthday; in China of the Cultural Revolution, in the atmosphere of
rejecting European classics, it was redeemed as a piece of progressive class
struggle, while in today's Japan, it achieved a cult status, being woven into
the very social fabric with its alleged message of "joy through suffering";
till 1970s, i.e., during the time when both West and East German olympic teams
had to perform together, as one German team, the anthem played for the German
gold medal was the Joy song, and, simultaneously, the Rhodesian white
supremacist regime of Ian Smith which proclaimed independence in the late 1960s
in order to maintain apartheid also proclaimed the same song its national
anthem. Even Abimael Guzman, the (now imprisoned) leader of the Sendero
Luminoso, when asked what music he loves, mentioned the forth movement of
Beethoven's Ninth. So we can easily imagine a fictional performance at which
all the sworn enemies, from Hitler to Stalin, from Bush to Saddam, for a moment
forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic
brotherhood... [20]
However, before we dismiss the
fourth movement as a piece "destroyed through social usage," let us
note some peculiarities of its structure. In the middle of the movement, after
we hear the main melody (the Joy theme) in three orchestral and three vocal
variations, at this first climax, something unexpected happens which bothers
critics for the last 180 years after the first performance: at bar 331, the
tone changes totally, and, instead of the solemn hymnic progression, the same
"Joy" theme is repeated in the marcia Turca ("Turkish
march") style, borrowed from the military music for wind and percussion
instruments that 18th century European armies adopted from the Turkish
Janissaries - the mode is here that of a carnivalesque popular parade, a
mocking spectacle... [21] and after this point, everything goes
wrong, the simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never
recovered: after this "Turkish" part and in a clear counter-movement
to it, in a kind of retreat into the innermost religiosity, the choral-like
music (dismissed by some critics as a "Gregorian fossil") tries to
render the ethereal image of millions of people who kneal down embraced,
contemplating in awe the distant sky and searching for the loving paternal God
who must dwell above the canopy of stars (ueberm Sternezelt muss ein lieber
Vater wohnen); however, the music as it were gets stuck when the word muss,
first rendered by the basses, is repeated by the tenors and altos, and finally
by the sopranos, as if this repeated conjuring presents a desperate attempt to
convince us (and itself) of what it knows is not true, making the line "a
loving father must dwell" into a desperate act if beseeching, and thus
attesting to the fact that there is nothing beyond the canopy of stars, no
loving father to protect us and to guarantee our brotherhood. After this, a
return to a more celebratory mood is tempted in the guise of the double fugue
which cannot but sound false in its excessively artificial brilliance, a fake
synthesis if there ever was one, a desperate attempt to cover up the void of
the ABSENT God revealed in the previous section. But the final cadenza is the
strangest of them all, sounding not at all as Beethoven but more like a puffed
up version of the finale of Mozart's Abduction from Seraglio, combining the
"Turkish" elements with the fast rococo spectacle. (And let us not
forget the lesson of this Mozart's opera: the figure of the oriental despot is
presented there as a true enlightened Master.) The finale is thus a weird
mixture of Orientalism and regression into the late 18th century classicism, a
double retreat from the historical present, a silent admission of the purely
fantasmatic character of the Joy of the all-encompassing brotherhood. If there
ever was a music that literally "deconstructs itself," this is it: the
contrast between the highly ordered linear progression of the first part of the
movement and the precipituous, heterogeneous and inconsistent, character of the
second part cannot be stronger - no wonder that already in 1826, 2 years after
the first performance, some reviewers described the finale as "a festival
of hatred towards all that can be called human joy. With gigantic strength the
perilous hoard emerges, tearing hearts asunder and darkening the divine spark
of gods with noisy, monstrous mocking." [22] (Of course, these lines are not meant as
a criticism of Beethoven - quite on the contrary, in an Adornian mode, one
should discern in this failure of the fourth movement Beethoven's artistic
integrity: the truthful indexation of the failure of the very Enlightenment
project of universal brotherhood.)
Beethoven's Ninth is thus full
of what Nicholas Cook called "unconsummated symbols: [23] elements which are in excess of the
global meaning of the work (or of the movement in which they occur), which do
not fit this meaning, although it is not clear what additional meaning they
bring. Cook lists the "funeral march" at bar 513 of the first
movement, the abrupt ending of the second movement, the military tones in the
third movement, the so-called "horror fanfares," the Turkish march,
and many other moments in the fourth movement - all these elements
"vibrate with an implied significance that overflows the musical
scenario." [24] It is not simply that their meaning
should be uncovered through an attentive interpretation - the very relation
between texture and meaning is inverted here: if the predominant "musical
scenario" seems to set into music a clear pre-established meaning (the
celebration of Joy, the universal brotherhood...), here the meaning is not
given in advance, but seems to float in some kind of virtual indeterminacy - it
is as if we know THAT there is (or, rather, HAS to be) some meaning, without
every being able to establish WHAT this meaning is.
What, then, is the solution?
The only radical solution is to shift the entire perspective and to render problematic
the very first part of the fourth movement: things do not really go wrong only
at the bar 331, with the entrance of the marcia Turca, they go wrong from the
very beginning - one should accept that there is something of an insipid fake
in the very Ode to Joy, so that the chaos the enters after the bar 331 is a
kind of the "return of the repressed," a symptom of what was wrong
from the very beginning. What if we domesticated too much the Ode to Joy, what
if we got all too used to it as a symbol of joyful brotherhood? What if we
should confront it anew, reject it in what is false in it? Many of today's
listeners cannot but be struck by the empty pompous character and
pretentiousness of the Ode, by its somewhat ridiculous solemnity - recall what
we see if we watch its performance on TV: fat, self-complacent, well-dressed
singers with strained veins, making a great effort, accompanied by ridiculous
waving of hands, to get their sublime message through as loudly as possible...
what if these listeners are simply right? What if the true obscenity is what
takes place BEFORE the marcia Turca, not after it? What if we shift the entire
perspective and perceive the marcia as a return to everyday normality that cuts
short the display of preposterous portentousness and thus brings us back to
earth, as if saying "you want the celebrate the brotherhood of men? Here
they are, the REAL humanity..."?
And does the same not hold for
Europe today? After inviting millions, from the highest to the lowest (worm) to
embrace, the second strophe ominously ends: "But he who cannot rejoice,
let him steal weeping away. /Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle weinend sich aus
dem Bund./" The irony of Beethoven's Ode to Joy as the unofficial European
anthem is, of course, that the main cause of today's crisis of the Union is
precisely Turkey: according to most of the polls, the main reason of those who
voted NO at the last referendums in France and Netherlands was their opposition
to Turkish membership. The NO can be grounded in rightist-populist terms (no to
the Turkish threat to our culture, no to the Turkish cheap immigrant labor), or
in the liberal-multiculturalist terms (Turkey should not be allowed in because,
in its treatment of the Kurds, it doesn't display enough respect for human
rights). And the opposite view, the YES, is as false as Beethoven's final
cadenza... So, should Turkey be allowed into the Union or should it be let to
"steal itself weeping out of the union /Bund/"? Can Europe survive
the "Turkish march"? And, as in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, what
if the true problem is not Turkey, but the basic melody itself, the song of
European unity as it is played to us from the Brussels postpolitical
technocratic elite? What we need is a totally new main melody, a new definition
of Europe itself. The problem of Turkey, the perplexity of European Union with
regard to what to do with Turkey, is not about Turkey as such, but the
confusion about what is Europe itself.
What, then, is Europe's
predicament today? Europe lies in the great pincers between America on the one
side and China on the other. America and China, seen metaphysically, are both
the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless
organization of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe has been
conquered technically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you
like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast
as you like; when, through the TV "live coverage," you can simultaneously
"experience" a battle in Iraqi desert and an opera performance in
Beijing; when, in a global digital network, time is nothing but speed,
instantaneity, and simultaneity; when a winner in reality TV-show counts as the
great man of a people; then, yes, there still looms like a specter over all
this uproar the question: what for? - where to? - and what then? [25]
There is thus a need, among
us, Europeans, for what Heidegger called Auseinandersetzung (interpretive
confrontation) with others as well as with Europe's own past in all its scope,
from its Ancient and Judeo-Christian roots to the recently deceased
Welfare-State idea. Europe is today split between the so-called Anglo-Saxon
model - accept the "modernization" (adaptation to the rules of the
new global order) - and the French-German model - save as much as possible of
the "old European" welfare-state. Although opposed, these two options
are the two side of the same coin, and our true is neither to return to any
idealized form of the past - these models are clearly exhausted -, nor to
convince Europeans that, if we are to survive as a world power, we should as
fast as possible accommodate ourselves to the recent trends of globalization. Nor
is the task what is arguably the worst option, the search for a "creative
synthesis" between European traditions of globalization, with the aim to
get something one is tempted to call "globalization with a European
face."
Every crisis is in itself an
instigation for a new beginning; every collapse of short-term strategic and
pragmatic measures (for financial reorganization of the Union, etc.) a blessing
in disguise, an opportunity to rethink the very foundations. What we need is a
retrieval-through-repetition (Wieder-Holung): through a critical confrontation
with the entire European tradition, one should repeat the question "What
is Europe?", or, rather, "What does it mean for us to be
Europeans?", and thus formulate a new inception. The task is difficult, it
compels us to take a great risk of stepping into the unknown - yet its only
alternative is slow decay, the gradual transformation of Europe into what
Greece was for the mature Roman Empire, a destination for nostalgic cultural
tourism with no effective relevance. [26]
And - a further point apropos
which we should risk the hypothesis that Heidegger was right, although not in
the sense he meant it - what if democracy is not the answer to this
predicament? In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great
conservative T.S.Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is
the one between sectarianism and non-belief, when the only way to keep a
religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is
our only chance today: only by means of a "sectarian split" from the
standard European legacy, by cutting ourselves off the decaying corpse of the
old Europe, can we keep the renewed European legacy alive. Such a split should
render problematic the very premises that we tend to accept as our destiny, as
non-negotiable data of our predicament - the phenomenon usually designated as
the global New World Order and the need, through "modernization," to
accommodate ourselves to it. To put it bluntly, if the emerging New World Order
is the non-negotiable frame for all of us, then Europe is lost, so the ONLY
solution for Europe is to take the risk and BREAK this spell of our destiny.
NOTHING should be accepted as inviolable in this new foundation, neither the
need for economic "modernization" nor the most sacred liberal and
democratic fetishes.
So although the French and
Dutch NO is not sustained by a coherent and detailed alternate vision, it at
least clears the space for it, opening up a void which demands to be filled in
with new projects - in contrast to the pro-Constitution stance which
effectively precludes thinking, presenting us with an administrative-political fait
accompli. The message of the French NO to all of us who care for Europe is: no,
anonymous experts whose merchandise is sold to us in a brightly-colored
liberal-multiculturalist package, will not prevent us from THINKING. It is time
for us, citizens of Europe, to become aware that we have to make a properly
POLITICAL decision of what we want. No enlightened administrator will do the
job for us.
[1] Many
pro-European commentators favorably opposed the readiness to bear financial
sacrifices of the new Eastern European members of the Union to the egotistic
intransingent behavior of UK, France, Germany and some other old members -
however, one should also bear in mind the hypocrisy of Slovenia and other new
Eastern members: they behaved as the latest members of an exclusive club,
wanting to be the last allowed to enter. While accusing France of racism, they
themselves opposed the entry of Turkey...
[2] See
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso 2005.
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