After Zizek conferences
Slavoj Žižek was in town last week, and lectured twice in Istanbul Bilgi University. One of my dear friends, Müge Serin provides a well done philosophical critique of these conferences and i provide a brief and more speculative critique just in the following paragraphs.
First of all, a technical detail. Zizek is a great public speaker. His constant use of anecdotes, most of them are not politically correct, make the audience keep listening. I admired his speech power although I would like to use less sexist language.
At the end of the first conference, my big conclusion was that Zizek does not accept any theoretical novelties after Lenin. In this sense, despite his humourous, sympathetic manner he is a Leninist fundamentalist. His some talk of a pursuit for a new "universality" then is a theoretically very regressive act.
His derision of political correctness, multiculturalism and post-structuralism ignores all the nuances and hard-won civil rights. His constant tease overlooks the historical struggles and contributions. His constant reactionism to "trendy" issues are not always helful but indeed regressive.
An older note on Zizek's perception of Web 2.0: Erkan cannot help but attack both Slavoj Zizek and Robert Fisk - I
A recent article in the Guardian on Turkey's possible intervention in Northern Iraq again misses Turkey's position although he provides some constructive criticism on war agains terrorism discourse...
And here comes a more substantive commentary by Müge Serin:
The Most Frequently Used Word by Zizek in Istanbul: "Paradox"
What strikes most to a devoted reader of Deleuze and D&G in the Slavoj
Zizek conferences delivered recently in Istanbul Bilgi University is
certainly Zizek's high-frequency word "paradox." I think we have a
right to draw extensively from Deleuze and D&G in formulating our
critique of Zizek since he not only mentioned the name of the book
Logic of Sense (this work meditates in particular on the difference
between paradox and contradiction so does Difference and Repetition)
between the lines to remark that he does not enjoy fancy book titles
but simple titles such as the one chosen by Deleuze for this extremely
difficult work but also because he surprisingly returned to the names
Deleuze, Negri and Hardt (deleting Guattari all together) to
depreciate them as the representatives of postmodern ideology at the
end of his first-day speech, repeating the gesture also the following
day. Having mentioned all this, let us now return to Zizek's extensive
discussion of habit and proceed.
In his condemnation of Multi-culturalist ideology, Slavoj Zizek argues
that the rise of cultural difference to the foreground culminates in
the retreat of political difference. Drawing from Naomi Klein's
notion of disaster capitalism, he posits that the use of politics of
fear that terrorize the public (which feed on ethnic, nationalist or
racist discourses and certainly war economy) works to manipulate the
public and to introduce radical liberal reforms. Moreover, Zizek
underlines the ideology of liberalism as the one that liquidates all
other utopias imposing its own utopia of free rational subjects
participating within the so-called best of all possible. Zizek points
out the fact that this parasitic ideology that sits on the market
presupposes another parasitic form which is socialization. So far so
good. Later on, Zizek invokes habit as the foundation of this
socialization which is indeed no socialization in the positive sense
of the term, but some egotistic exchange based on the logic of
revenge. For instance, according to Zizek, we feign that the gift of
each is free while we in deed presuppose what I, you, he, she, we,
they will get in return for the gift since we are following rules not
written but presupposed, rules that come from the domain of culture
dominated now by the market. Habit "the heart of darkness" as Zizek
calls it, is implicit but the most active in the functioning of power.
No wonder he mentions the name Judith Butler at this point to
underline the indisputable relationship between the body, the making
of the body and habit. (Let's also recall Foucault and certainly
Bergson who has also referred to habit as the sensory motor). Hence,
our pathetic socialization consists of our process of contracting
habits which finally transform us into extensions of these habits.
Here is the problem though; Zizek continuously refers to the only
apparent clash between meta-rules or so-called dictations of the
symbolic order and written laws to invoke in reality their
indisputable harmony in the functioning of power. He refers to this
harmonious yet apparently dissymmetrical functioning as the paradox of
habit. However, this is not a paradox in the philosophical sense of
the term, but rather an absolute contradiction in itself. Zizek
further emphasizes everyday-politics and strategies as resistant
against the domain of both written rules and meta-rules. Strangely,
however, he emphasizes the success of such every-day tactics as
another paradox of habit. Moreover, he perceives the word strategy
only in relation to transgression.
Strategies cannot be articulated as "paradoxes of habit" for habit has
always been conservative, as Nietzsche says habit is reactive; it
presupposes common sense which is to say recognition shared by many
and good sense which is to say one direction in which the action is to
be carried. When Zizek talks about implicit or explicit rules and
their strange harmony despite their difference, he is, as I understand
him, talking about a coding of the social which is strengthened by an
even more violent overcoding. Between the two orders of coding and
overcoding, realm of positive law and symbolic law is the movement of
intermezzo , the molecular, the affects, the strategies, the
contingent… They constitute the paradox because they constitute the
problem that cannot be dialectically resolved. Therefore, this
in-between cannot be named as another paradox of habit. On the
contrary, it is the space-time that deposes habit to invoke the
problem whether by means of humor or irony. Paradox in this sense is a
line of flight that goes in many directions at once, cannot be
categorized, cannot be resolved, it is the articulation of the problem
which may invites contingent solutions.
Yes, we agree with Zizek when he, drawing from Marx, calls capitalism
a vampire. It is a vampire that feeds on dead labor and our most
efficient strategy against it should be the counter-actualization of
living labor which Zizek, I believe, has emphasized by his referral to
intellectual labor. On the other hand, he harshly critiqued Negri who
has also carried out a similar discussion by his notion of immaterial
labor and cognitive work on the grounds of some vulgar humanism that
refutes the autonomy of strategic individuals. Therefore, we ask him
who is in a more efficient position to be capable of the abstraction
Marx proposes, the newly emerging cognitive working class or the
bourgeois dilettantes who identify with the never-ending humanist
discourse.
Finally, as it was narrated in Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is the
nightmare of all other social frames since it does not work by coding
or overcoding but rather by breaking up the codes. It does this by its
inner texture which is abstract labor and money as general equivalent.
Nevertheless, via States now in the service of the world-market and
multi-nationalist powers of capital, emerge reterritorializations all
the more violent. Archaic or modern, most States are now the phallic
points or markers that are recruited to the reorganization of flows.
Capitalism becomes the sole background, it survives by extending more
and more, displacing its limits, creating axioms for contingent events
transforming them into mere novelties. Capitalism works by inclusion,
it first categorizes, classifies, includes even in order to carry out
the most violent exclusions. Zizek is right when he says crisis feeds
capitalism or when he invokes capitalism's strange plasticity, yet
then he brings to the foreground the notion of the limit of
capitalism. Wouldn't it be better to state that capitalism has no
limit, but rather it has a threshold that is within? Capitalism is an
absolute contradiction in itself so is the absolute terror of peace
but paradoxes that implicate and explicate untimely movements are not
contradictions, they rather envelop the very problem. To finish up,
Negri and Hardt's notion of imperialism is not an abstraction as Zizek
argues but an emphasis of the most abstract as the most real. Capital
as the sole background, as the smooth space that attracts the
inscription of all desires magically functions in the final analysis
so that desire desires its own repression.
