Thoughts on Realism and Solidarity (or, Celebrity Deathmatch: Zizek vs. Chomsky)

Several posts on this blog have discussed 21^st century attempts at realism (Griffin’s post on Zero Dark Thirty, Owen’s post on Syriana, my post on The Wire). That topic is, I think, closely tied to how peoples movements (the current protests in Turkey and Brazil, the Occupy movement etc) are documented and received. In this piece I want to offer my own take on Zero Dark Thirty’s attempt at realism, discuss historicism in Slavoj Zizek’s and Noam Chomsky’s appraisals of protest movements, and tie that in with problems I see with American solidarity with revolutionary movements abroad.

Noam Chomsky

            The first half of Noam Chomsky’s 2010 book “Hopes and Prospects” contains transcripts of talks he gave around Latin America in the four years preceding the book’s publication. One recurrent theme in Chomsky’s work is “historical amnesia”. Chomsky describes the historical trends surrounding American imperialism in Latin America; the US government’s main foreign policy concerns (with that region among others) throughout its history have centered around increasing military surveillance and corporate exploitation. The press, because of “historical amnesia”, ignores rather than documents events (the state-sponsored kidnapping of democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Arstide in 2004, one among countless examples) which would point to easily discernable historical trends in military and corporate interests. In this way, the American view of the world is de-historicized. This jibes with Griffin’s criticism of Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the manhunt for bin Laden; that the film presents “Central Asia as a place where bad things happen”,  “We never get an inkling of perspective on the causes or even many of the consequences of the American war machine”. Because of this lack of historical awareness, the film is a failure as a work of realism. But I think there is more to it than that. If “Zero Dark Thirty” dealt with terrorists and their motives, then history would matter- bin Laden’s rage was mostly directed towards forces of globalization and empire, his religious fervor more of an incidental cultural artifact than a motivating cause. However, the film deals with CIA strategists on the ground- they may be agents of History, but they don’t know they are. They work in an ahistorical world, one where military strategy and goals are designed to line up with the expansion of empire. Chomsky writes, “By the end of WWII… US industrial production more than tripled, while industrial rivals were severely damaged or destroyed. The US had literally half the wealth of the entire world, along with incomparable security and military power, including nuclear weapons. High level planners and foreign policy advisers determined that in the new global system the US should ‘hold unquestioned power’ while ensuring the ‘limitation of any exercise of sovereignty' by states that might interfere with its global designs… Since then, fundamental policies have changed more in tactics than in substance.” Zero Dark Thirty’s realism would have been more than just an affectation if it had confronted the disparity between the moneyed “strategic interests” that deemed the war a useful tool and the CIA operatives who risked life and limb to capture and kill Osama bin Laden- essentially participating in an ideologically constructed narrative rather than a mission of real pertinence. This disparity creates people like (now disgraced) General Stanley McChrystal, who essentially lived to be biographied and had no stake in the war effort, as well as characters like Maya (portrayed by Jessica Chastain), whose insatiable drive to capture and kill bin Laden comes off as increasingly Quixotic as the al Qaeda leader disappears from the headlines.

Slavoj Zizek

            Slovenian philosopher and “Original Gangster” Slavoj Zizek offers a different critique of realism, and his own historicism. He assesses The Wire’s representation of the present and the Occupy movement’s reaction to the present through a Marxist lens. In my post from couple months ago  that dealt with Zizek explicitly I quoted from his book “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”; he stated that The Wire had failed to perform the “formal task” of rendering “in a TV narrative, a universe in which abstraction reigns.” That is, a world where neoliberal economic policies all-too-often (and all-too-arbitrarily) determine the living conditions of entire communities. Zizek, however, doesn’t offer any advice on how to go about fulfilling this “formal task”. His assessment of the Occupy Movement is similarly oracular (and perhaps obtuse). He urges us to look for “signs from the future”, i.e. events in the present that contain kernels of a future beyond capitalism. This line of thought is, I think, dangerously dualistic. Although far from being an orthodox Marxist (socialism or barbarism!, etc) Zizek maintains that our world is determined by our economic-philosophical epoch (in our case, capitalism), and that we ought to look for signs of the coming communist epoch within the present. It is no wonder, given the utterly abstract status he affords capitalism and communism, that he ends his book with theological musings rather than concrete advice for protestors or artists. Zizek’s attempt to tie protest movements from around the world together because of their shared connection to an utopian future rather than their shared interpretation of intolerable aspects of the present is dangerous, if only because it leads to navel-gazing rather than discussion.  Chomsky uses the term “really-existing-capitalism” to refer to the web of strategic interests that determine and interfere with economic practices. Here lies an important distinction between these two thinkers. Chomsky studies unjust tendencies that are continually asserted throughout history and applauds movements that recognize these tendencies and rise up against them, however rudderless the movements themselves are. The tone of his work is detached, yet tentatively optimistic. Zizek, and other strict anti-capitalists, is probably too radical to be widely relatable, and too prone to waxing philosophic about a human condition which claustrophobically oscillates between blindness and fatalism (we're blind to the forces determining us, yet aware that those forces will do us in). Marx wrote that truth is without

 passion and passion is without truth. The stark truths documented by Noam Chomsky bring to light a sea of moral relativism and cynicism that send one on excursions of philosophic passion which contain no essential relation to the truths that launched them. Finding a balance between the soft-spoken pragmatism embodied by Noam Chomsky and the brazen polemics of Zizek is a task for artists who hope to create works of realism as well as revolutionaries striving for a working understanding of the modern situation. Chomsky is occasionally bitterly sarcastic, and Zizek often narrates his own wooly solipsism, but neither of them gives in to those transgressive tendencies as far as I can tell.

         The current protests in Brazil and Turkey were widely reported in a blizzard of articles that were abundantly shared on Facebook. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has essentially turned on his people, mobilizing military forces to violently terrorize peaceful protestors. In Brazil, the government has been more positively (if superficially) engaged. But in both cases, the us vs. them mentality is the product of immediate material conditions, rather than a learned anti-capitalist viewpoint. The struggle in South America is between US-backed elites and peoples movements. For Zizek, capitalism is a transgressive abstract force; for Chomsky, it is a collection of historical tendencies. In Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere, people are standing up and saying “no” to these historical tendencies, which are for them a daily fact of life. 

               In his “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel equates abstraction with indifference; it makes sense then that living in an age where increasing overpopulation and increasing wealth inequality coexist (an increasingly few people who benefit from an economic paradigm are indifferent towards an increasingly huge number of people who are being fucked over by it) creates the impression that we live in a “universe where abstraction reigns”, as Zizek writes. Indifference reigns. Indifference towards historical tendencies. If American liberals are going to attain solidarity with protest movements abroad, it won’t be by occasional memetic appropriations in social media. Either we wait until the material conditions of our lives are determined as starkly as they are for people living in Latin America and Central Asia, or we confront the blithe indifference that exists beneath the surface of mainstream liberal narratives of progress. Otherwise, our solidarity will be worthless at best, toxic at worst.

Not Even Safe in Our Dreams: Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek

I just finished Slavoj Zizek’s slim 2012 book “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”. Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, is reviled by many other “professional philosophers” because of the obscurity of his writing and beloved by many undergraduates because of his funny accent. I guess I’m becoming the sort of person who thinks that Mr. Zizek is actually a very profound and (circuitously) lucid thinker, and I look forward to reading his larger works. I was first introduced to him by way of his appearance in Astra Taylor’s documentary “Examined Life”. When I first watched it I thought he was a babbling fool compared to the other thinkers interviewed; I thought this because he was the basically the only person in the documentary who didn’t just repeat liberal platitudes. He was saying something really new, so I reflexively dismissed him. Luckily, I’ve since managed to begin removing my mainstream-liberal-goggles, so now I can read Zizek and blog about it! Here we go, kids.

Zizek suavely evading flaming wreckage

In “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”, Zizek attempts to analyze some of the most politically aware events of the 21^st century, including HBO’s “The Wire” and the Occupy Wall St. movement. Both of these are reactions to (as my fellow blogger Boros put it) the brutality of the modern situation: the Occupy movement being a group of activists who recognize the inadequacy of democratic institutions, and The Wire being a harrowing portrayal of the perverse relationship between law enforcement and poor black people.  Since both The Wire and Occupy Wall St. are vital cultural phenomena, Zizek’s discussion of them manages to frame his critique of ideology in such a way that it becomes accessible to a layperson like me.

Zizek quotes David Simon, the creator of “The Wire”, as saying that “we pretend to engage in a war on narcotics, but in truth, we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as labor supply”. Given this harsh formulation, what are we to make of Simon’s humane and even positive portrayal of police officers (McNulty, Bunk, Lester Freamon etc.)? Somewhat paradoxically, since Simon has few illusions about the function of law enforcement in post-industrial urban areas, he is better able to render the goodness of the cops who are attempting to effect change within a pernicious institution. Zizek calls the acts of the “good cops” on The Wire utopian, but in an unconventional sense. Typically, a utopian action would seek to reform an institution or perfect a system; i.e. a utopic action is performed with the assumption that the “system” one is working within is perfectible. Plato’s Republic would be a classic example of this: it was an idealized version of the framework Plato was working under as an Athenian, and Plato advocated that people act with this ideal in mind. The world Simon presents in The Wire is one drowning in the arbitrary effects of corporate capitalism and neoliberal economic policies; he makes it clear that capitalism as a system, rather than people’s moral decrepitude, is at fault. The Wire has been frequently compared to Greek tragedy, but Zizek thinks that they differ in one important respect: Greek tragedy presents fatally flawed characters, The Wire presents characters living and working within a fatally flawed system. Of course, a term like “the system” is so vague that it barely means anything on its own; how does The Wire portray this flawed “system”? Zizek writes,

Here we encounter the formal limitation of The Wire: it has not solved the formal task of howto render, in a TV narrative, a universe in which abstraction reigns. The Wire’s limit is the limit of psychological realism…          

The Wire’s panoramic final scene shows a series of long shots of various locations around Baltimore. This reposeful cinematic gesture allows the viewer to process the fact that new generations of drug dealers, cops and corrupt politicians will come to replace the ones we loved or loved to hate. I will elaborate more on this in the next section, but in Zizek’s mind, one of the functions of ideology is to set up chains of equivalences- such as “people are poor because they use drugs”- when in reality, the urban  poor of Baltimore are poor because the economy has rendered them useless and they are offered little to no opportunities to transcend their situation. Their neighborhoods are flooded with drugs and terrorized both by the gangs who sell the drugs and by the police. The “System” can be apprehended through an understanding of the absurdity of the situations it creates, not as an immutable or transcendental entity in and of itself. With that in mind, I’ll now discuss the Occupy movement and Zizek’s view of the status of activism in general in the 2010’s.

           
I remember when the Occupy Wall Street movement first began. The summer after my freshman year of college I began getting the email blasts from Adbusters Magazine spreading the word about a planned occupation of Zuccotti Park, and once it was underway I avidly read every article I could find about it and watched videos of various people speaking at it (including Slavoj Zizek). I tried to soak up as much as the internet would allow. What made the Occupy Wall St. movement special? And why were most of the appraisals of it by the mainstream press so vacuous? Zizek uses his psychoanalytic training, and his readings of Lacan and Hegel, to attempt to answer those questions.

           
Zizek uses a quote from the journalist Anne Applebaum, who writes for the Washington Post, to exemplify the mainstream (ideologically-sanctioned) reaction to Occupy. She first claims that Occupy protestors (who, by the time she wrote this article, were all over the globe) are correct in their view that democratic institutions are not capable of dealing with the problems created by globalization; several paragraphs after that she chastises protestors for not using those institutions to reach their ends, and even goes on to state that Occupy and related protests will have the negative side effect of hastening the decline of existing democratic institutions. This argument is obviously fallacious, and as such nothing intelligible can be derived from it. Its unintelligibility sheds light on how ideology functions; Applebaum manages to appear reasonable by both expressing tentative praise and haughty ambivalence towards protest movements. She politely acknowledges the unsustainability of the “system” while simultaneously declaring recognition of the “system’s” unsustainability unrealistic.

           
If you’ve taken a course in logic, you know that once a contradiction has been established, anything can be asserted. Well, the liberal apologist view that I (via Zizek) debunked above results in a smug contradiction which opens a space for new ways of thinking about and understanding our situation. I offer the following formulation as a Zizekian philosophical maxim: “The more obvious a teleological explanation of an event is, the more crucial the speculative surrender of the self to the absolute becomes”.  What the fuck does this mean? Zizek here deploys French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s term “zero-point”; i.e. the economic and environmental collapse that capitalism is tending towards. In the face of coming ecological and economic crises, a politically pessimistic outlook seems justified. Pessimism of this kind is ultimately teleological because it equates the collapse of the” system” with nothingness, with the apocalypse. Zizek has many times criticized liberals for being better able to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; but isn’t this indeed how ideology functions? Pessimism about the future of capitalism is certainly called for, and the brutal truth that our lifetime is going to be spent during the slow, violent death of capitalism is a truly shitty fact to contend with. The brutality of this fact and the pessimistic outlook it inspires aren’t grounds for a fatalistic anti-capitalistic viewpoint, though. Each crisis ostensibly brought about by “capitalism” simultaneously erodes capitalism as a functioning system. This is where the “speculative surrender of the self to the absolute” comes in. Zizek writes, “The only way to sustain the Real when it gets too close-that is, the only way to avoid psychosis- is to fictionalize it”. Attempts to reform a failing, inherently dehumanizing system are literally absurd; the only way to engage with the Real of systemic collapse is by speculating about how limited and small you are; about how unintelligible the forces working on you are. This is what Occupy attempted to do: engage with reality in a world that demands disengagement and abject ignorance at any cost.

My first post dealt with novelist Don DeLillo. His book Cosmopolis centers around billionaire hedge-fund manager Eric Packer’s aimless limousine ride around New York City. At one point, Packer gets caught in the middle of a riot thrown by anarchists and communists. He dismisses the whole event as a “market factor”, and indeed, once the riot subsides, business-as-usual resumes. During the riot, however, a man sets himself on fire Tibetan monk style. Packer can’t account for the jarringness of this event. It functions as sign, or perhaps a symbol, of both the untenability of the present and the necessity of the future. It makes sense that the final chapter of Zizek’s book is called “Signs from the Future”. In this chapter, Zizek quotes Blaise Pascal: “There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition”.  Strangely, if one hopes to cultivate a rational disposition with regards to political thinking, a theological perspective is useful. John Locke says that if the government won’t heed your pleas, your best bet is to appeal to heaven. As democratic institutions become more and more useless, it would benefit us, Zizek thinks, not to adopt a dark fatalism, but rather to look to the heavens and recognize our own contingency.