Slavoj Žižek
Julian Assange and his
collaborators enacted a true and authentic political event. But what do we mean
by that, and how does it influence our actions?
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/02/slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek-what-authentic-political-event
[...]
Jacques Lacan proposed as the axiom of the ethics of
psychoanalysis: “Do not compromise your desire.” Is this axiom also not
an accurate designation of the whistleblowers’ acts? In spite of all the risks
their activity involves, they are not ready to compromise on it – on what? This
brings us to the notion of event: Assange and his collaborators enacted a true
and authentic political event – this is what one can easily understand the
violent reaction of the authorities. Assange and colleagues are often accused
of being traitors, but they are something much worse (in the eyes of the
authorities) – to quote Alenka Zupančič:
“Even if Snowden were to
sell his informations discreetly to another intelligence service, this act
would still count as part of the ‘patriotic games’, and if needed he would have
been liquidated as a ‘traitor’. However, in Snowden's case, we are dealing with
something entirely different. We are dealing with a gesture which questions the
very logic, the very status quo, which for quite some time serves as the only
foundation of all ‘Western’ (non)politics. With a gesture which as it were
risks everything, with no consideration of profit and without its own stakes:
it takes the risk because it is based on the conclusion that what is going on
is simply wrong. Snowden didn't propose any alternative. Snowden, or, rather,
the logic of his gesture, like, say, before him, the gesture of Bradley Manning
– is the
alternative.”
This breakthrough of Wikileaks is nicely encapsulated by Assange's
ironic self-designation as a “spy for the people”: “spying for the people” is
not a direct negation of spying (which would rather be acting as a double
agent, selling our secrets to the enemy) but its self-negation, ie, it
undermines the very universal principle of spying, the principle of secrecy,
since its goal is to make secrets public. It thus functions in a way similar to
how the Marxian “dictatorship of the proletariat” was supposed to function (but
rarely ever did, of course): as an imminent self-negation of the very principle
of dictatorship. To those who continue to paint the scarecrow of Communism, we
should answer: what Wikileaks is doing is the practice of Communism. Wikileaks
simply enacts the commons of informations.
In the struggle of ideas, the rise of
bourgeois modernity was exemplified by the French Encyclopedia, a gigantic
venture of presenting in a systematic way to broad public all available
knowledge – the addressee of this knowledge was not the state but the public as
such. It may seem that Wikipedia already is today’s encyclopedia, but something
is missing from it: the knowledge which is ignored by and repressed from the
public space, repressed because it concerns precisely the way state mechanisms
and agencies control and regulate us all. The goal of Wikileaks should be to
make this knowledge available to all of us with a simple click. Assange
effectively is today’s d’Alembert, the organiser of this new encyclopedia, the
true people’s encyclopedia for the twenty-first century. It is crucial that
this new encyclopedia acquires an independent international base, so that the
humiliating game of playing one big state against another (like Snowden having
to look for protection in Russia) will be constrained to a minimum. Our axiom
should be that Snowden and Pussy Riot are part of the same struggle – which
struggle?
Our informational commons recently emerged as
one of the key domains of the class struggle in two of its aspects, economical
in the narrow sense and socio-political. On the one hand, new digital media
confront us with the impasse of “intellectual property”. The World Wide Web
seems to be in its nature Communist, tending towards free flow of data – CDs
and DVDs are gradually disappearing, millions are simply downloading music and
videos, mostly for free. This is why the business establishment is engaged in a
desperate struggle to impose the form of private property on this flow. On the
other hand, digital media (especially with the almost universal access to the
web and cell phones) opened up new ways for the millions of ordinary people to
establish a network and coordinate their collective activities, while also
offering state agencies and private companies unheard-of possibilities of
tracking down our public and private acts. It is into this struggle that
Wikileaks intervened in such an explosive way.
[...]
