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.

Singular Universality as "Post-postcolonialism"

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 116-118:

One should not dismiss the talk of the "unconscious tool of history" as the expression of a naive teleology, of trust in the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress--the point is simply that the British colonialization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonialization itself. At a reception for Margaret Thatcher in 1985, the Chinese president applied to China Marx's statement about the role of British colonialization in India: "The British occupation has awakened China from its age-old sleep." (Quoted from Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la penitence, p. 153)

Far from signalling continuous self-abasement in front of the ex-colonial powers, statements like these express true "post-postcolonial," namely, a mature independence: to admit the positive effect of colonization, one has to be really free and be able to leave behind its stigma. (And symmetrically, rejecting self-blame, while fully and--why not--proudly claiming one's emancipatory heritage, is a sine qua non for the renewal of the Left.)

Someone who cannot be accused of softness towards the colonizers is Frantz Fanon: his thoughts on the emancipatory power of violence are an embarrassment for many politically correct postcolonial theorists. However, as a perspicuous thinker trained in psychoanalysis, he also, back in 1952, provided the most poignant expression of the refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers:

"I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past.... My black skin is not a repository for specific values....Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century? ... I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden.... I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world.... Am I going to ask today's white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? ... I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.... it would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the third century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.... I find myself in a world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other."

(Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press 2008, pp. 201-6)

Singular Universality (contra Rorty et al.)

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 104-106:

This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations. When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, "there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks," he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as "immature" individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality or reason. The opposition between Kant and Rorty with regard to this distinction of public and private is rarely noted, but is nonetheless crucial. Both sharply distinguish between the two domains, but in opposite ways. For Rorty, the great contemporary liberal par excellence, the private is the space of our idiosyncrasies where creativity and wild imagination rule and moral considerations are (almost) suspended; the public, on the contrary, is the space of social interaction where we are obliged to obey the rules in order not to hurt others. In Rorty's own terms, the private is the space of irony, while the public is the space of solidarity. For Kant, however, the public space of the "world-civil-society" exemplifies the paradox of universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypassing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the Universal. This then is what Kant, in a famous passage from his essay "What is Enlightenment?" means by "public" as opposed to "private": "private" designates not one's individual as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one's particular identification; while "public" refers to the transnational universality of the exercise of one's Reason:

"The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one's reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him." (quotation from Immanuel Kant's "What is Enlightenment")

The paradox of Kant's formula "Think freely, but obey!" (which, of course, poses a series of problems of its own, since it also relies on the distinction between the "performative" level of social authority and the level of free thinking where performativity is suspended) is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the "public" sphere precisely as a singular individual extracted from, or even opposed to, one's substantial communal identification--one is truly universal only when radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities. It is Kant who should be read here as the critic of Rorty. In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one's social identity, of one's position within the order of (social) being--precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.

This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the "Holy Spirit"--the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular life-worlds ("neither Greeks nor Jews"). Consequently, is Kant's "Think freely, but obey!" not a new version of Christ's "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's"? "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's": in other words, respect and obey the "private" particular life-world of your community; "and unto God the things that are God's": in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian "world-civil-society," and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way "private": private in the precise Kantian sense of the "private use of Reason" in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 102:

Liberals who acknowledge the problems of those excluded from the socio-political process formulate their goal as being the inclusion of those whose voices are not heard: all positions should be listened to, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practises respected, and so on. The obsession of this democratic discourse is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, e tutti quanti. The formula of democracy is patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost here is the proletarian position, the position of universality embodied in the Excluded. This is why, upon a closer look, it becomes clear that what Hugo Chavez has begun doing in Venezuela differs markedly from the standard liberal form of inclusion: Chavez is not including the excluded in a pre-existing liberal-democratic framework; he is, on the contrary, taking the "excluded" dwellers of favelas as his base and then reorganizing political space and political forms of organization so that the latter will "fit" the excluded. Pedantic and abstract as it may appear, this difference--between "bourgeois democracy" and "dictatorship of the proletariat"--is crucial.