Vith International Marx Congress, September 2010, Plenum d’ouverture, Zizek Slavoj

WELCOME TO THE INTERESTING TIMES

In China, if you really hate someone, the curse you address at him is: “May you live in interesting times!” In our history, “interesting times” are effectively the times of unrest, war and power struggle with millions of innocent by-standers suffering the consequences. Today, we are clearly approaching a new epoch of interesting times.After the decades of the (promise of) Welfare State, when financial cuts were limited to short periods and sustained by a promise that things will soon return to normal, we are entering a new period in which the crisis – or, rather, a kind of economic state of emergency – with the need for all sorts of austerity measures (cutting the benefits, diminishing the free health and education services, making jobs more and more temporary, etc.) is permanent, turning into a constant, becoming simply a way of life.

These shifts cannot but shatter the comfortable subjective position of radical intellectuals in the West. One of their favored mental exercises throughout the XXth century was the »catastrophization« of our predicament: whatever the actual situation, it HAD to be denounced as »catastrophic.«Recall the figures of Adorno and Horkheimer in the West Germany of the 50s: while denouncing the »eclipse of reason« in the modern Western society of consumption, they AT THE SAME TIME defended this society as the lone island of freedom in the sea of totalitarianisms and corrupted dictatorships all around the globe. It was as if Winston Churchill's old ironic quip about democracy as the worst possible political regime, and all other regimes worse that it, was here repeated in a serious form: Western »administered society« is barbarism in the guise of civilization, the highest point of alienation, the disintegration of the autonomous individual, etc.etc. – however, all other socio-political regimes are worse, so that, comparatively, one nonetheless has to support it… One is tempted to propose a radical reading of this syndrome: what the unfortunate intellectuals cannot bear is the fact that they lead a life which is basically happy, safe and comfortable, so that, in order to justify their higher calling, they HAVE to construct a scenario of radical catastrophy?Back in 1937, in his The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell perfectly characterized this attitude when he pointed out “the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed”: radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that will achieve its opposite, prevent the change from really occurring. If a revolution is taking place, it should occur at a safe distance: Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela... so that, while my heart is warm when I think about the events far away, I can go on promoting my academic career.

The “interesting times” we are entering undermine such security. In a psychoanalytic treatment, one learns to clarify one’s desires: do I really want what I think I want? Take the proverbial case of a husband engaged in a passionate extra-marital affair, dreaming all the time about the moment when his wife will disappear (die, divorce him, or whatever), so that he will then be able to fully live with his mistress – when this finally happens, all his world breaks down, he discovers that he also doesn’t want his mistress. As the old proverb says: there is one thing worst than not getting what one wants – to really get it. Leftist academics are now approaching such a moment of truth: you wanted real change – now you can have it!

However, our new situation in no way demands that we abandon the patient intellectual work with no immediate “practical use.” On the contrary: today, more than ever, one should bear in mind that Communism begins with what Kant called the “public use of reason,” with thinking, with the egalitarian universality of thought. When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men and women, no Jews and Greeks,” he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identity, etc., are not a category of truth, or, to put it in precise Kantian terms, when we reflect upon out ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions, i.e., we act as “immature” individuals, not as free human beings who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. For Kant, the public space of the “world-civil-society” designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, by-passing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the Universal. In this view, “private” is not the stuff of our individuality as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of our particular identification.

Our struggle should thus focus on those aspects which pose a threat to the “public” space, like the ongoing Bologna reform of higher education which is one big concerted attack on what Kant called the “public use of reason.” The underlying idea of this reform, the urge to subordinate high education to the needs of society, to make it useful for the solution of concrete problems we are facing, aims at producing expert opinions meant to answer problems posed by social agents – what disappears here is the true task of thinking: not only to offer solutions to problems posed by “society” (state and capital), but to reflect on the very form of these “problems,” to re-formulate them, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive a problem. The reduction of high education to the task of producing socially-useful expert knowledge is the paradigmatic form of the “private use of reason” in today’s global capitalism.

It is crucial to link the ongoing push towards Gleichschaltung of the higher education – not only in the guise of direct privatization or links with business, but also in the more general sense of orienting the education towards its »social use,« the production of expert knowledge which will help to solve problems – to the process of enclosing the commons of intellectual products, of privatizing the general intellect. This process has set in motion a global transformation in the hegemonic mode of ideological interpellation. If, in the Middle Ages, the key Ideological State Apparatus was Church (religion as institution), the capitalist modernity imposed the twin hegemony of legal ideology and education (state school system): subjects were interpellated as patriotic free citizens, subjects of the legal order, while individuals were formed into legal subjects through the compulsory universal education. The gap was thus maintained between bourgeois and citizen, between the egotist-utilitarian individual concerned with his private interests and the citpoyen dedicated to the universal domain of the state – and, insofar as, in the spontaneous ideological perception, ideology is limited to the universal shere of citizenship, while the private sphere of egotist interests is considered »pre-ideological,« the very gap between ideology and non-ideology is thus transposed into ideology. What happenes in the latest stage of the post-68 »postmodern« capitalism is that economy itself (the logic of market and competition) is progressively imposing itself as the hegemonic ideology:

--- In education, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the classical bourgeois school ISA: the school system is less and less the compulsory network elevated above market and organized directly by state, bearer of enlightened values (liberte, egalite, fraternite); on behalf of the sacred formula of »lower costs, higher efficiency,« it is progressively penetrated by different forms of PPP (public-private partnership).

--- In the organization and legitimization of power, the electoral system is more and more conceived on the model of the market competition: elections are like a commercial exchange where the voters »buy« the option which offers to do in the most efficient way the job of maintaining social order, prosecuting crime, etc.etc. On behalf of the same formula of »lower costs, higher efficiency,« even some functions which should be the exclusive domain of the state power (like running prisons) can be privatized; the army is no longer based on universal conscription, but composed of hired mercenaries, etc.

--- Even the process of engaging in emotional relations is more and more organized along the lines of a market-relationship. Alain Badiou[1] deployed the parallel between today’s search for a sexual (or marital) partner through appropriate dating agencies and the ancient procedure of marriages prearranged by parents: in both cases, the proper risk of “falling in love” is suspended, there is no contingent “fall” proper, the risk of the real called “love encounter” is minimized by preceding arrangements which take into account all material and psychological interests of the concerned parties.

And, quite logically, insofar as economy is considered the sphere of non-ideology, this brave new world of global commodification considers itself post-ideological. The ISA are, of course, still here, more than ever; however, as we have already seen, insofar as, in its self-perception, ideology is located into subjects in contrast to pre-ideological individuals, this hegemony of the economic sphere cannot but appear as the absence of ideology. What this means is not that ideology simply directly reflects economy as its actual base: we fully remain within the sphere of ISA, economy functions here as an ideological model, so that we are fully justified to say that economy is here operative as an ISA – in contrast to the »real« economic life which definitely does not follow the idealized liberal market model.

What kind of shift in the functioning of ideology does this self-erasure of ideology imply? When Althusser claims that ideology interpellates individuals into subjects, “individuals” stand here for living beings on which a dispositif of ISAs works, imposing on them the network of micro-practices, while “subject” is NOT a category of living being, of substance, but the result of these living beings being caught into an ISA dispositif (or into a symbolic order). Today, however, we are witnessing a radical change in the working of this mechanism - Agamben defines our contemporary postpolitical/biopolitical as a society in which the multiple dispositifs desubjectivize individuals without producing a new subjectivity, without subjectivizing them. »Bio-politics” designates this constellation in which dispositifs no longer generate subjects (“interpellate individuals into subjects”), but merely administer and regulate individuals’ bare life – in bio-politics, we are all potentially homo sacer.

This triumph of ideology as non-ideology marks the final moment of the failure of today’s Left - but what IS a failure? Alain Badiou described three distinct ways for a revolutionary (i.e., radical emancipatory) movement to fail. First, there is, of course, a direct defeat: one is simply crushed by the enemy forces. Then, there is a defeat in the victory itself: one wins over the enemy (temporarily, at least) by way of taking over the main power-agenda of the enemy (the goal is to take state power, either in the parliamentary-democratic way or in a direct identification of the Party with State. On the top of these two versions, there is perhaps the most authentic, but also the most terrifying, way: guided by the correct instinct telling it that every solidification of the revolution into a new state power equals its betrayal, but unable to invent and impose on social reality a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity by the “ultra-leftist” resort to all-destructive terror. Badiou aptly calls this last version the “sacrificial temptation of the void”:

“One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was ‘Dare to fight, dare to win.’ But we know that, if it is not easy to follow this slogan, if subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure (the attack didn’t succeed), while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restauration. That a revolution is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that the sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void.”[2]

What Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao’s “Dare to win!” – one should be afraid to win (to take power, to establish a new socio-political reality), because the lesson of the XXth century is that victory either ends in restoration (return to the State power logic) or gets caught in the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification. This is why Badiou proposes to replace purification with subtraction: instead of “winning” (taking over power) one maintains a distance towards state power, one creates spaces subtracted from State. But are not in this way de facto close to a kind of division of labor (or complementatity) between radical and pragmatic Left? Subtracting itself from statal politics, the radical Left limits itself to assuming principled positions and bombarding the State with impossible demands, while the pragmatic Left makes a pact with diable in the sense of Peter Mandelson's admissions that, in the matters of economy, we are all Thatcherites...

And is this properly perverse combination of Thatcherist economic politics and maintaining a distance from the State not what goes on in today's China? That is to say, how does China succeed in combining the political hegemony of the Party with the modern state apparatus needed to regulate an exploding market economy? What institutional reality sustains the official slogan that good stock-market performance (high returns on investments) is the way to fight for Socialism? What we have in China is not simply private capitalist economy and Communist political power: one should bear in mind that, through a series of transparent and non-transparent channels, state and Party own the majority of (especially large) companies – it is the Party itself which demand from them to perform well on the market. To resolve this apparent deadlock, Deng concocted a unique dual system: the state apparatus and legal system are redoubled by the Party institutions which are literally illegal, or, as He Weifangput it succinctly: »As an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party exists outside the legal system altogether.«[3] It is as if, in Benjamin's words, the state-founding violence remain present, embodied in an organization with an unclear legal status:

»It would seem difficult to hide an organization as large as the Chinese Communist Party, but it cultivates its backstage role with care. The big party departments controlling personnel and the media keep a purposely low public profile. The party committees (known as 'leading small groups') which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn have the job of executing them, work out of sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions.«

The front stage is thus occupied by »the government and other state organs, which ostensibly behave much like they do in many countries«: the Ministry of Finance proposes the budget, courts deliver verdicts, universities teach and deliver degrees, even priests lead rituals. So, on the one hand, we have the legal system, government, elected national assembly, judiciary, the rule of law, etc. But – as the officially used term »party and state leadership« indicates, with its precise hierarchy of who comes first and who is second – this state power structure is redoubled by the Party which all-present, while remaining in the background. There are, of course, many states, some even formally-democratic, in which a half-secret exclusive club or sect de facto controls the government; in the apartheid South Africa, it was the exclusive Boer Brotherhood, etc. However, what makes the Chinese case unique is that this redoubling of power into public and hidden is itself institutionalized, done openly.

So we should render more complex the formula of Party-State as the defining feature of the XXth century Communism: there is always a gap between the two, corresponding to the gap between Ego-Ideal (symbolic Law) and superego, i.e., the Party remains a half-hidden obscene shadow redoubling the State structure. There is no need to demand a new politics of distance towards the State: the Party IS this distance, its organization gives body to a kind of fundamental distrust of the State, its organs and mechanisms, as if they need to be controlled, kept in check, all the time. A true XXth century Communist never fully accepts the State: there always has to be a vigilant agency out of control of the (State) law with the power to intervene into the State.