Žižek Talk Cut Short by Bomb Threat

Slavoj Žižek’s book tour gets a serious interruption at Cooper Union.

By Jan Frel / AlterNet

October 15, 2009, 7:36 AM GMT

From philosopher and culture critic Slavoj Žižek's personal site:

Slavoj Žižek, dubbed the ‘most dangerous philosopher in the west’ by The New Republic, was rudely cut short by a bomb scare as he spoke to an audience of 800 at Cooper Union last night. Expounding on his new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek was forced by police to round up his talk and exit the Great Hall along with his hundreds of fans.

Amid the kerfuffle outside Cooper Union as police and security guards made efforts to get stragglers out of the building—several refused to be torn away from a bookstall inside selling copies of Žižek’s numerous books—the renowned Slovenian philosopher continued his talk for a time, signing copies of his newly launched book.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is a call for the Left to reinvent itself in the light of our desperate historical situation. And in the aftermath of last night’s bomb threat, one line in particular from the book’s jacket is worth noting:

The time for liberal, moralistic blackmail is over.

Unfazed by yesterday’s interruption, Slavoj Žižek can be heard on today’s Democracy Now, speaking to Amy Goodman.

http://www.alternet.org/story/143304/%27most_dangerous_philosopher_in_the_west%27_has_speech_cut_short_by_bomb_threat_in_nyc

Three Divisions of the Proletariat

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 147-148:

It is as if the three components of the production process--intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the provision of material resources--are increasingly autonomized, emerging as separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the "three main classes" in today's developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class: intellectual laborers, the old manual working class, and the outcasts (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space). The working class is thus split into three, each fraction with its own "way of life" and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class; the populist fundamentalism of the old working class; more extreme and singular forms of the outcast fraction. In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), the particular (manual workers), and the singular (outcasts). The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and "identity" politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss. Identity politics acquires a specific form within each fraction: multicultural identity politics among the intellectual class; regressive populist fundamentalism among the working class; semi-illegal groupings (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts. What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space.

The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part being played off against the others: intellectual workers full of cultural prejudices against "redneck" workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such. The old cry "Proletarians, unite!" is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of "postindustrial" capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory. This unity, however, will not be guaranteed by any figure of the "big Other" prescribing it as the "objective tendency" of the historical process itself--the situation is thoroughly open, divided between the two versions of Hegelianism.

Privatization of the "General Intellect"

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 145-147:

To grasp these new forms of privatization, we need to critically transform Marx's conceptual apparatus. Because he neglected the social dimension of the "general intellect," Marx failed to envisage the possibility of the privatization of the "general intellect" itself--and this is what lies at the core of the struggle over "intellectual property." Negri is right on this point: within this framework, exploitation in the classical Marxist sense is no longer possible, which is why it has to be enforced more and more by direct legal measures, that is, by non-economic means. This is why, today, exploitation increasingly takes the form of rent: as Carlos Vercellone puts it, postindustrial capitalism is characterized by the "becoming rent of profit." (See Capitalismo cognitivo, edited by Carlo Vercellone, Rome: Manifestolibri) And this is why direct authority is needed: in order to impose the (arbitrary) legal conditions for extracting rent, conditions which are no longer "spontaneously" generated by the market. Perhaps therein resides the fundamental "contradiction" of today's "postmodern" capitalism: while its logic is de-regulatory, "anti-statal," nomadic, deterritorializing, and so on, its key tendency to the "becoming-rent-of-profit" signals a strengthening of the role of the state whose regulatory function is ever more omnipresent. Dynamic deterritorialization co-exists with, and relies on, increasingly authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing, the state is today gathering strength.

To put it another way: when, due to the critical role of the "general intellect" (knowledge and social cooperation) in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are increasingly "out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production," the result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but rather the gradual relative transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labor-power into rent appropriated by the privatization of this very "general intellect." Take the case of Bill Gates: how did he become the richest man in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the cost of producing the commodities Microsoft sells (one can even argue that Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). It is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of higher levels of "exploitation" of his hired workers. If this were the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: masses of people would have chosen programs like Linux, which are both free and, according to the specialists, better than Microsoft's. Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft has succeeded in imposing itself as an almost universal standard, (virtually) monopolizing the field, in a kind of direct embodiment of the "general intellect." Gates became the richest man on Earth within a couple of decades by appropriating the rent received from allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in that particular form of the "general intellect" he successfully privatized and still controls. Is it true, then, that today's intellectual workers are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labor (they own their PC, etc.), which is Marx's description of capitalist "alienation"? Superficially, one might be tempted to answer "yes," but, more fundamentally, they remain cut off from the social field of their work, from the "general intellect," because the latter is mediated by private capital.

And the same goes for natural resources: their exploitation is one of the great sources of rent today, marked by a permanent struggle over who is to receive this rent, the peoples of the Third World or Western corporations. The supreme irony is that, in order to explain the difference between labor-power (which, when put to work, produces surplus-value over and above its own value) and other commodities (the value of which is consumed in their use and which thus involve no exploitation) Marx mentions as an example of an "ordinary" commodity oil, the very commodity which is today a source of extraordinary "profits." Here also, it is meaningless to link the rise and fall of oil prices to rising or falling production costs or the price of exploited labor--the production costs are negligible; the price we pay for oil is a rent we pay to the owners and controllers of this natural resource because of its scarcity and limited supply.

The Reign of Abstraction

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 143-144:

So what about the standard critique of "formal freedom", namely that it is in a way even worse than direct servitude, since the former is a mask that deludes one into thinking that one is free? The reply to this critical point is provided by Herbert Marcuse's old motto that "freedom is the condition of liberation": in order to demand "actual freedom," I have to have already experienced myself as basically and essentially free--only as such can I experience my actual servitude as a corruption of my human condition. In order to experience this antagonism between my freedom and the actuality of my servitude, however, I have to be recognized as formally free: the demand for my actual freedom can only arise out of my "formal" freedom. In other words, in exactly the same way as, in the development of capitalism, the formal subsumption of the production process under Capital precedes its material subsumption, formal freedom precedes actual freedom, creating the latter's conditions. The very force of abstraction which dissolves organic life-worlds is simultaneously the resource of emancipatory politics. The philosophical consequences of this real status of abstraction are crucial: they compel us to reject the historicist relativization and contextualization of different modes of subjectivity, and to assert the "abstract" Cartesian subject (cogito) as something which today corrodes from within all different forms of cultural self-experience--no matter how far we perceive ourselves as being embedded in a particular culture, the moment we participate in global capitalism, this culture is always already de-naturalized, effectively functioning as one specific and contingent "way of life" of abstract Cartesian subjectivity.

How did we reach this new phase of the reign of abstraction? The 1968 protests focused their struggles against (what was perceived as) the three pillars of capitalism: the factory, the school, the family. As a result, each domain was subsequently submitted to postindustrial transformation: factory work is increasingly outsourced or, in the developed world at least, reorganized on a post-Fordist non-hierarchical interactive team-work basis; permanent and flexible privatized education is increasingly replacing universal public education; multiple forms of variegated sexual arrangements are replacing the traditional family. The Left lost in the very moment of victory: the immediate enemy was defeated, but was replaced by a new form of even more direct capitalist domination. In "postmodern" capitalism, the market has invaded new spheres which were hitherto considered the privileged domain of the state, from education to prisons to law and order. When "immaterial work" (education, therapy, etc.) is celebrated as the kind of work which directly produces social relations, one should not forget what this means within a commodity economy: namely, that new domains, hitherto excluded from the market, are now commodified. When in trouble, we no longer talk to a friend but pay a psychiatrist or counselor to take care of the problem; children are increasingly cared for not by parents but by paid nurseries or child-minders, and so on. We are thus in the midst of a new process of the privatization of the social, of establishing new enclosures.

Marxist Dialectic of Fetishization (contra Negri)

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 141-142:

What we find here is the standard post-Hegelian matrix of the productive flux which is always in excess with regard to the structural totality which tries to subdue and control it ... But what if, in a parallax shift, we perceive the capitalist network itself as the true excess over the flow of the productive multitude? What if, while the contemporary production of the multitude directly produces life, it continues to produce an excess (which is even functionally superfluous), the excess of capital? Why do immediately produced relations still need the mediating role of capitalist relations? What if the true enigma is why continuous nomadic "molecular" movement needs a parasitic "molar" structure which (deceptively) appears as an obstacle to its unleashed productivity? Why, the moment we abolish this obstacle/excess, do we lose the productive flux constrained by the parasitic excess? And this also means that we should invert the topic of fetishism, or "relations between people appearing as relations between things": what if the direct "production of life" celebrated by Hardt and Negri is falsely transparent? What if, in it, the invisible "relations between [immaterial] things [of Capital] appears as direct relations between people"?

Here, more than ever, it is crucial to remember the lesson of the Marxist dialectic of fetishization: the "reification" of relations between people (the fact that they assume the form of phantasmagorical "relations between things") is always redoubled by the apparently opposite process, by the false "personalization" ("psychologization") of what are effectively objective social processes. Already in the 1930's, the first generation of Frankfurt School theoreticians drew attention to how--at the very moment when global market relations began to exert their full domination, making the individual producer's success or failure dependent on market cycles totally beyond his control--the notion of a charismatic "business genius" reasserted itself in the "spontaneous capitalist ideology," attributing the success or failure of a businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quoi he possessed. And does not the same hold true even more so today, as the abstraction of the market relations that govern our lives is pushed to an extreme point? The bookshops are overflowing with psychological manuals advising us on how to succeed, how to outdo our partner or competitor--in short, treating success as being dependent on the proper "attitude." So, in a way, one is tempted to turn Marx's formula on its head: under contemporary capitalism, the objective market "relations between things" tend to assume the phantasmagorical form of pseudo-personalized "relations between people." And Hardt and Negri seem to fall into this trap: what they celebrate as the direct "production of life" is a structural illusion of this type.

However, before we succumb to bemoaning the "alienating" effect of the fact that "relations between persons" are replaced by "relations between things" we should nonetheless keep in mind the opposite, liberating, effect: the displacement of the fetishism onto "relations between things" de-fetishizes "relations between persons," allowing them to acquire "formal" freedom and autonomy.

The Logic of Global Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 126:

There is something unique in today's constellation: many perspicuous analysts have noted that contemporary capitalism poses a problem to this logic of a resistance which persists. Brian Massumi, for example, has formulated clearly how contemporary capitalism overcame the logic of totalizing normality and adopted the logic of erratic excess. (See my In Defense of Lost Causes, London: Verso, p. 197) And one can supplement this analysis in many directions--the very process of subtracting oneself and creating "liberated territories" outside the domain of the state has been reappropriated by capital. Exemplary of the logic of global capitalism are the so-called "Special Economic Zones": geographical regions within a (usually Third World) state with economic laws which are more liberal than the state's standard economic laws (allowing for, e.g., lower import and export taxes, the free flow of capital, the limitation or direct prohibition of trade unions, no minimum working day, and so on) in order to increase foreign investments. The name itself covers a whole range of more specific zone types: Free Trade Zones, Export Processing Zones, Free Zones, etc. With their unique combination of "openness" (as a free space partially exempt from state sovereignty) and closure (enforcement of working conditions unencumbered by legally guaranteed freedoms), which renders possible heightened levels of exploitation, these zones are the structural counterparts to our celebrated communities of "intellectual labor"--they constitute a fourth term to be added to the tetrad of high-tech "intellectual labor," gated communities, and slums.

Singular Universality as "Slavery in Equality"

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 124-125:

What was it, then, about the Haitian Revolution that went beyond Kantian enthusiasm, and that Hegel clearly saw? What needs to be added here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the "private" order of the social hierarchy--in other words, as a "part of no part" of the social body--directly stand for universality. Properly communist revolutionary enthusiasm is unconditionally rooted in full solidarity with this "part of no part" and its position of singular universality. The Haitian Revolution "failed" when it betrayed this solidarity and developed into a new hierarchical-nationalist community in which the new local black elite continued the exploitation process. The reason for its failure was not the "backwardness" of Haiti. It failed because it was ahead of its time--its slave plantations (mostly sugarcane) were not a remainder of premodern societies, but models of efficient capitalist production; the discipline to which slaves were submitted served as an example for the discipline to which wage-laborers were later submitted in capitalist metropolises. After the abolition of slavery, the new black Haiti government imposed "agrarian militarism"--in order not to disturb the production of sugarcane for export, ex-slaves were obliged to continue working at their plantations under the same owners, only now as technically "free" wage-laborers. The tension that characterizes a bourgeois society--democratic enthusiasm and personal freedoms co-existing with slave-like work discipline--this slavery in equality appeared in Haiti in its most radical form. What makes capital exceptional is its unique combination of the values of freedom and equality and the facts of exploitation and domination: the gist of Marx's analysis is that the legal-ideological matrix of freedom-equality is not a mere "mask" concealing exploitation-domination, but the very form in which the latter is exercised.