Though Cowards Flinch

Slavoj Žižek appeared on the BBC’s Culture Show a few days ago. I’d been meaning to write it up and am only now getting around to it. His performance is dazzling, as per usual, and we socialists do like our in-jokes, but I thought that this time, rather than just show the video, I might pick up on a point or two of what he says, and how it relates to his wider oeuvre and his practice of what he preaches.

In the interview, Žižek maintains that the purest form of ideology is in cinema, that it is ‘more real than our everyday reality’. It is with this in mind that most of Žižek’s written works must be read – and to this is then applied the unique blend of Žižek’s systems of analysis: Marxist, Lacanian psychoanalysis and so on. I can see how certain ideologies can be evinced through certain movies. Žižek uses blockbuster ’2012′ as one of several examples he gives.

One message from the film suggests that ‘in order for one stupid American family to come together,’ most of the world’s population must be wiped out – that solidarity under current conditions is impossible, that even imagining is pointless, for the individual as much as for Hollywood.

There is a logic here; it is a motif repeated in almost every Hollywood disaster movie – the disaster wreaks a personal effect, which is almost universally good, presented as the exposure of the people underneath the day to day existence. Except that who we are day to day is who we are; the normal processes of the system are what the system is.

What Žižek is suggesting, and where I agree with him, is that in this repeated motif, we can see a function of ideology. It is the argument that we should disregard banality, disregard our day to day drudgery, because who we are, and who other people are, underneath sets us apart from all that. The moral of the story is a sedative.

Thus the constellations of message produced by Hollywood takes on the role of one more arm of the hegemonic ideology. Here is an opportune space to query Žižek’s epistemological assumptions. Žižek does not believe in an objective reality; what decides between competing interpretations is the “master-signifier”, a resistance to the infinite regression of over-intellectualized reason, “It is so because I say it is so!”

The concept of hegemony is based on the idea that one can know the real processes at work through the system of socio-economic organization we call capitalism. Having gained further knowledge of cinema and this particular movie, we can then suggest how its message might relate to this broader process that we’ve observed, i.e. the attempt to normalize as common sense everything that upholds values conducive to the smooth running of that system.

We can argue over the meaning of ’2012′, much like people argued over the meaning of Avatar. Yet we do so within the universe of the things actually contained within the film. Moreover we do so in the context of pre-existing ideology, the common sense factor, and mechanisms of dissemination controlled by the gate-keepers of the common sense factor (the press), all of which will have an effect on interpretation.

So the reality of the processes of capitalism have an effect in determining the interpretation. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s not limitless. It is not merely raw material to be warred over by competing factions wishing to hegemonize it and utilize its popular appeal for their own ends, much in the way that some Left groups tend to approach nationalism or ethnic identities.

It will contain the same contradictions as the ideology (or some part thereof) of the system which created it. We resolve those contradictions using the fundamental analytical categories provided by Marxism. It’s only when looked at in this way can we avoid what seem like wanton extrapolations from a film, however tightly packed it might be with ideology, however closely it may be linked to how capitalism thinks about itself, to the whole world or a whole ideology, or a whole socio-economic system of organizing.

In the interview, Žižek continues, “If you want to approach how beliefs function today, I claim, the best example I can imagine is that stupid cartoon which I’ve seen five, six times, because of my small son, Kung-Fu Panda.” Žižek goes on to link in the Marx brothers and how these explain the appeal of Silvio Berlusconi:

“This guy looks as an idiot, acts as an idiot, but this shouldn’t deceive you, this guy is an idiot”. Berlusconi is wealthy, his corruption is the subject of much debate, much like his links to the fascists and his many affairs with beautiful women and his changing of the law to suit his private interests. People, it seems, simply don’t believe that one can act like such a moron and yet be a moron.

This type of analogy seems different the previous one, more straightforward, assuming that what we can see in day to day life is real, and that we may look for reflections and distortions of the ‘real’ in cinema.

Whereas in the previous example, Žižek was taking a specific film and generalizing to the form in which capitalist hegemony attempts to oppress people, in this one it is mere metaphor for what we can see with our own eyes. An opportune film demonstrates a phenomenon we’ve all wondered about over George W. Bush and Berlusconi.

Simply put, how can people continually elect a moron? Žižek calls this the ‘double-cynical wager’, that if someone acts like what they are, then people will expect them not to be that. The explanation of this surface-phenomenon might be complex, but we’re still working within the confines of empirical data.

When attempting to explain such phenomenon, using cinema as a means to extrapolate meaning, whether by analogy or some other process, is as valid as reaching for any of the other items in our shared cultural universe. Cinema is as common a language as any, and there’s the added value that it’s entertaining – though even here, I think, we locate a flaw in our esteemed theorist.

He suggests that the current situation demands that we wake people up to the ideology that they live and breathe as part of their daily routine. Yet there are very few people who are going to read the tracts of any of the current shower of academics – Marxist, liberal, libertarian, whatever. Presumably it is through this entertainment, which include several visual endeavours and lecturing at a rubbish tip, that we might wake people up.

I think this loses sight of the need to approach people where they are, in languages with which they are familiar.

Žižek also suggests that if he were taken seriously, it would mean that he is ‘integrated’ into the cosseted, cultural buffer against revolutionism that universities so often form. While this is probably true, and Zizek’s antics make him stick out like a sore thumb, being taken seriously and being integrated need not mean the same thing. It really depends on who Žižek wants to take him seriously.

If it’s fellow academics, then being taken seriously and being integrated often are the same thing. One need only compare the lives of academic socialists such as Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. However, if Žižek wishes to be taken seriously by the people he wishes to carry out the revolution (however he wishes to define them, assuming they’re not an intellectual elite), then he needs to get his hands dirty at public meetings and on the doorsteps as well as writing such stylish prose.

That will prevent his integration to the Academy.

Concepts like post-marxism and identity politics, their proponents and their relationship to political struggles from the 1980s to the present day are mainstays of any explicitly socialist blog seeking to gain a greater understanding where we’re at and what is to be done.

At one extreme there are the membership-based socialist parties which largely propose the continuation of things we revolutionaries and socialists have been doing since time began. At the other extreme there are the high-falutin’ philosophers like Negri or Critchley.

Everyone who reads that sort of stuff will be familiar with the anecdote about Negri, walking past workers on strike and complaining that they were behind the times, that their sort of activity was outdated and actually held back the socialist agenda.

I say this by way of explaining that the philosophers often try very hard to convey that their work is new, is surpassing outdated formulae and practices – though mostly it passes unread by the vast majority of activists, and littles comes of it before the next totem-destroying book arrives fresh from the academy. In the case of Laclau and Mouffe, as has been discussed on this blog, ‘identity’ was the Big Idea.

With the working class looking rather unreliable as the means to overthrow capitalism, something else was needed. Interestingly, while most of us tend to look to the 1980s as the big decade for the ascendancy of this style of politics, it wasn’t the first time it had been tried. In fact it goes all the way back to the 1960s, as I was surprised to discover. The following was written in 1966 by Tom Haydn of the American SDS:

“[T]raditional Left expectation of irreconcilable and clashing class interests has been defied…It appears that the American elite has discovered a long term way to cushion the contradictions of our society. [We must] oppose American barbarism with new structures and opposing identities. These are created by people whose need to understand their society and govern their own existence has somehow not been cancelled by the psychological damage they have received.”

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the Mai 1968 student movement, has said something similar in his book, Obsolete Communism:

“The student, at least, in the modern system of higher education, still preserves a considerable degree of personal freedom, if he chooses to exercise it. He does not have to earn his own living, his studies do not occupy all his time and he has no foreman at his back. He rarely has a wife and children to feed. He can, if he so chooses, take extreme political positions without any personal danger…the ensuing struggle is especially threatening to the authorities as the student population keeps going up by leaps and bounds.”

With the failure of the student movement of the 1960s, other identities were floated, so that by the 1980s a veritable coalition of excluded groups could gather plenty of people. Whether single mothers, or women generally, ethnic minorities or homosexuals, the idea was that since these groups were most persecuted, they had most to gain by a change and thus the greatest revolutionary potential, though the term revolution was also changed, moving away from grabbing state power and executing the counter-revolutionaries to something more sociable.

Actually, reading over the pronouncements of such leaders with the benefit of hindsight, the corruption of the student struggle – once the palpable threat of general strike and a genuine political threat to capitalism had been suppressed, as it was in France – should have been easy to foretell. Cohn-Bendit again:

“Factory work, trade union ‘militancy’, verbose party programmes, and the sad, colourless life of their elders are subjects only for [the young workers'] sarcasm and contempt. The same sort of disdain is the reason why so many students have taken a radical stand…”

“In our case we exploited student insecurity and disgust with life in an alienated world where human relationships are so much merchandise to be used, bought and sold in the marketplace.”

At the last, when the movement was defeated, what remained was simply a protest against the specific values then dominant through the liberal democratic form which western capitalism takes. The defeat of the movement is not simultaneous with the defeat of the Nanterre students, nor the failure of the French General Strike. As the situation across Western Europe suggests, the 1970s saw escalating battles between the ruling and ruled. It was a long defeat.

By the end of it, however, modern liberal democracy had been largely anaesthetized to the effects of the social revolution – elements of which, particularly individualism and an alienation-countering way to ‘fulfillment’, were incorporated enthusiastically into a resurgent capitalism. This is illustrated by Slavoj Zizek to great effect in his book Violence (pp18-19) when discussing the two faces of the highest modern businessmen:

“Liberal communists do not want to be just machines for generating profits. They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion, but for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation…Their preferred motto is social responsibility and gratitude…After all, what is the point of their success, if not to help people? It is only this caring that makes business worthwhile.”

That capitalism could assimilate this rebellion was a consequence of a wrong political strategy, but it also an acknowledgment that identity politics cannot be revolutionary on its own. Not to say that the entire movement of the 1960s is easily dismissed. It is not. E.P. Thompson in his Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski derided the “posters of Che Guevara, juxtaposed against mini-skirts, ‘Mao tunics’, and military leather jackets” that “decorated the most modish swinging boutiques in the King’s Road or Royal Leamington Spa” but he also defended the movement:

“And yet there are other, and more hopeful, ways of seeing that experience: the challenge to Gaullism, the great strikes in the French motor industry, the first large cracks in the massive, ritualized traditionalism both of French academic institutions and of the routinized politics and routinized ideology of the PCF. [...] What was remarkable in the German youth movement was not its impulsive form and its lack of bearings, but that these children of Hitler’s legionairies had taken to the streets, and in this affirmative way, at all.”

Rather what I am giving is just a warning against, for example, dealing with inequality in the identity-focussed, individualist manner that Harriet Harman recent did, without its class-based content.

In the1960s, the creation of a popular counter-culture only vaguely associated with the serious and revolutionary demands of a large section of the population, and even of the student movement, was simply the waves that denoted the earthquake. Yet the earthquake passed, eventually, and the waves were all that remained. On one of those waves came the seeds of identity particularism fruited by the trees of Haydn, Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke and the others – and they took root all over the place in the context of a working class in retreat.

So the identities of the excluded, rather than becoming better integrated into the wider socialist programme – the leadership of which had failed to take proper account of them – instead became a political regression, a means to replace class and explain the defeat. Which brought things full circle to Tom Haydn, who, as outlined above, imagined the particularism of students precisely in response to the long-term quiescence of the working class (and, I would add, his failure to see how that quiescence could be integrated with Marxist theory).

From there it is only a short-hop to some types of post-marxism, which I shall engage with in Part 2 as regards Goran Therborn and the conclusions of Slavoj Zizek’s books, In Defense of Lost Causes and First as Tragedy.

Phil at AVPS brought this short article by Douglas Carswell to my attention. In it, Carswell claims that we don’t need to import the American revolution, but  “we need to complete the English one.” This seems to follow a line of thinking on the part of some academically aspiring members of parliament (and their liberal intelligentsia luvvies) wherein the Tories are the natural successors to the Levellers and Thomas Paine, and, in the reckoning of Daniel Hannan and David Cameron, Anthony Wedgwood Benn the younger.

It’s easy for the more urbane Conservatives to make such pretences. For example, religious tolerance, a key demand of the Agreement of the People, is a well-trodden path these days. Of course lurking behind the urbane exterior of the Conservative Party are those who would violate everything the Levellers asked for and would force their moral judgments down the throat of the people of this country. That is true from such decaying relics as Norman Tebbit all the way to David Davis or the Cornerstone Group of Family, Faith and Flag.

It was the conclusion of the Leveller Agitators ‘that  matters of religion and the ways of God’s worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power’. So much for an established church! Will we be seeing proposals to abolish it from this incoming Tory government? Unlikely. Perhaps the abolition of the House of Lords? We managed it, on March 19th, 1649 – and the Levellers were in the vanguard of that decision. No? The execution of the monarch and dissolution of the monarchy? No I thought not – but again, the Levellers were to the front of such a demand.

So really the Conservatives can only lay claim to such radical heritage when it has been denuded of everything that made it radical to begin with. There is not a scholar alive who would claim that the Levellers, or even the Diggers, were radical through and through. Within the Leveller tradition, there were those who argued that English government should be based on the Bible, or natural law or ‘common right’ – and there were those argued against, but to predicate a Conservative-Leveller affinity on any of this is to ignore all the history in between.

In effect, it is to ignore the radical praxis of the Levellers during the English Revolution; a radical praxis, we should note, that was clearly recognized by the Army Grandees during the debates at Putney. “If you admit any man that hath a breath and being…why may not those men vote against all property? … Show me what you will stop at; wherein you will fence any man in a property by this rule.” Thus begetting the entire history of Tory opposition to the popular franchise, of Old (i.e. Tory) Corruption and so on down through the centuries.

At the time, Colonel Rainborough himself made an apposite remark. “Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty, but all property must be taken away…but I would fain known what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.” Sexby was angrier still. “It seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right…I wonder we were so much deceived.” Despite its couching in terms of natural law, here are two sides – one showing its true regard for property and lack of regard for democracy, one showing its true regard for democracy against all comers.

This, I think, is a good idiom for the modern Conservatives – except it is the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats who now take on the role of the Grandees. What’s different, is that three hundred and fifty years later, the parties of the propertied classes have learned a trick or two about couching their intent. Hence we have the liberal intelligentsia confusing Tom Paine – one of the greatest English Radicals – and David Cameron. We have Dan Hannan, capitalist superhero, citing Tony Benn on local democracy.

Missing from each of these paeans to English historical heroes, however, is any mention of the propertied, material basis out of which real power grows. What do we hear about democratic checks on the wealthy? Only complaint!

In their book, “The Plan”, Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan say, “The elites have altered in character and composition. The citizen is far less likely to be impacted by the decisions of dukes or bishops than by those of Nice or his local education authority.” And they are right – but it should be fairly obvious that they neglect to mention other instances of elites. More likely still than imposition by the elites of Nice or the LEA are impositions by local supermarkets and the concomitant corruption of our local planning laws – wilfully aided and abetted by both Labour and the Tories. And it bears mentioning that these new elites pull the old ones around them – dukes and bishops rub shoulders with the capitalist elites at benefits events, Oxbridge colleges and all sorts of venues.

Yet these new elites can have much greater effect than the old one. Mass unemployment, the devastation of whole regions, the decking out of towns and cities like garish prostitutes while the muscle and sinews of civil society that keep people (workers!) together are under attack from the most sophisticated industrial enterprise all the way back to the farms that ultimately sustain them. Neither Nice nor the LEA have much say here. Local government should be devolved – but the last time local government disagreed with the Tory consensus on letting the rich get richer while the poor remained poor, local government was eviscerated, centralised. And so everything done by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown with that power, the Tories have only themselves to blame.

If in truth the poorest he that is in England hath a live to live, as the greatest he, then in the modern era there flows from that all sorts of corollaries: the conditions of life, a productive job, a home, safety to live and bring up a family. And if that’s what the Tories are after, then I want to hear a little bit less about their comparison to the Levellers and a little bit more about how Thatcher, the icon of both Carswell and Hannan, fucked things up so bad – mass unemployment, rising homelessness, rising crime, rising inequality and so on ad infinitum. Talk about bad judgment – but then this is the same Dan Hannan who managed to miss the glaring racism at the Washington march against universal healthcare.

We won’t, of course. And in truth the opposition by the Right of the Tory Party to centralisation and bureaucracy is opportunistic. They oppose these things only insofar as these things hamper the growth of business – never mind the welfare of workers! Where huge government spending and excessive bureaucracy is conducive to business, the Right support it, either by letting it pass unremarked upon or by railing against it in word and going the other way in deed. Such as Thatcher and government spending.

Which, to bring us back to our starting point, is what this talk of the Levellers, Tom Paine amounts to (I’ve got to ask, what next?  The Jacobins? David Cameron on his love for Robespierre? Osborne on Lenin?) – a wily ploy, likely to fool those who want to be fooled, due to their total disillusion with New Labour, illusions which they should never have had to begin with. It’s unlikely to carry much weight with the average voter – but I suspect that such hollow claims will ring true in the hollow brains of the liberal commentariat. Pity.