Ghost in the Wire

What is wrong with this picture? Well, Zizek said, populism is inherently reformist, if not to say reactionary. Its fundamental fantasy is of an Intruder, or more usually a group of intruders, who have corrupted the system. Hence the problem is never the system, capitalism, but the oligarchy, this particular, lazy, exploitative bunch who happen to have control now. Once They are removed, everything will be alright... Hence populism always frame its project in terms of a series of demands addressed to the ruling elite. Antagonism is defused into a craving for recognition. (To push this analysis further: it's clear that the (entirely complementary) obverse of the demand for recognition is the demand that this or that politician resign, which is why endlessly 'renewed calls' for resignation are constant background noise on the post-political scene.)

Now I'm always reluctant to describe anything as post-whatever, but we'll let the post-political slide now, since I don't think K-Punk is awarding it all that much authority here, given how incidental its usage. But let's not be too charitable in assessing this redescription of Laclau's project, as there are at least three fairly fundamentally flawed manuevers here. First, if we agree with Zizek that the fantasy of populism is that of the Intruder (a claim that I find absolutely unfounded), then we must recognize that the Intruder is also the horizon against which the ruling elite define the necessity of their own rule. In other words, the fantasy operates at both ends of the exchange, since the ruling elite rule in order to stave off the Intruder, and the populist adopts the role of Intruder in order to challenge the ruling elite nor alternately sees the ruling elite as Intruders. Now Laclau never says any of this, of course, but if you're a Zizekian, and tend to think in dialectics, then this makes perfect sense to you. It makes little sense to delimit the fantasy to one half the dialectic and then pretend as if the same fantasy doesn't already differentially define the ruling elite occupying the dialectic's more authoritate half. Once we recognize that the Intruder plays a structuring role (in terms of the constitution of either social group, either the elite or the populist), then it matters not whether the populist actively adopts the fantasy or not, or sees the ruling elite along these lines, since the fantasy is imposed upon them and the scene of the demand.

Second, this of course provides a reason why we should pause and raise an eyeborw or three when we see Zizek impose the fantasy of the Intruder upon movements who may or may not claim it, since we must ask ourselves what critical position does Zizek occupy that he sees the Intruder fantasy for what it is, can assign it so authoritatively, and not be tainted by his own actions. The Intruder fantasy, it turns out, provides an interesting heuristic potential, but it doesn't tell us anything about the ontological structure of a populist movement, even if (as is obviously the case) certain populist movements operate under a signifier not unlike that of the Intruder, or more generically the outsider. Of course, Zizek wants to say Intruder, not outsider, even though in this case the latter is more appropriate to the subject matter and the critique, because without the rhetorical thrust of intrusion, Zizek would be compelled to defend the split between insider and out, a split that doesn't obtain within Laclau's discussion of populism (except for as an ontic, rhetorical gambit for particular populist movements), since there is no outside to the political system (as Laclau and Mouffe explained 20 years in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy), an argument that Zizek views favorably (assuming his writing can count towards any index of his views).

Third, note the elision here, by which a demand made against a system (the system fails to provide, it fails to meet the demand; for Zizek, it apparently does so because the system is corrupted - a generic claim about a universal condition of auctoritas, and one questionable in its own right) is transformed into a demand for action against particular elites who are now assumed responsible for the corruption. In other words, there is no possibility for Zizek that a populist movement can challenge the system at the level of the system because, by definition of the fantasy he imposes upon them, they will always succumb to silly demands for institutional change. And when I say no possibility for Zizek, I'm saying it because, thanks to his formulation, he won't allow for any possibility, not because I find his arguments convincing on the subject matter. Let us pursue them. On the one hand, this claim, this elision, is absurd, and ignores fundamentally, as Zizek always does, the particulars of the rhetorical strategies of any actual movements. To cite a quick example of a populist demand, one that I have written on, the electronic invasion of the ERGO (Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization) listserv by the Not Dead Yet (a group of civil rights based anti-euthanasia advocates), who spent their time assailing both particular leaders and system-wide, semantic strategies, and with some degree of success. To cite another, more famous example, the populist demand known as the Green Belt Movement, which has been far more successful in its mission and in inducing awareness and mindshifts at a larger level than Zizek's political framing would ever have theorized as possible. So certainly, a movement can do both, and it can also target the system (Burke's comic frame) for its engendering of corruption independently of claims about particular corrupt leaders. On the other hand, let us also say that Zizek is right, but if he is, he's more right than he can reasonably admit; ruling elites exist precisely because of their role in the authoritative structure, and so any emancipatory project, even Zizek's "class struggle" (see below) will have to work through them, deal with them, attack them, etc. And so, given this, any change, no matter how utopian and universal will always ground itself in the particulars of who is in charge, even if it does so merely as a means to its utopian, universalist, non-contingent ends. Back to the review:

This, then, is the reason why class struggle should remain the privileged model. To insist on class struggle occupying a position of centrality is precisely not to invoke the 'working class' as the only agent of emancipation. In a sense, that is already to treat class insurgency as if it were yet another 'multi-cultural' demand for recognition. It's perfectly possible to imagine a capitalism in which, for instance, the demand for recognition of alternative sexualities has been entirely satisfied. But class struggle in the Marxist sense could not be satisfied by anything short of the 'obliteration of bourgeoisie as a symbolic social space' (which is by no means the same thing as the extermination of the members of the bourgeoisie). In a very real sense, the proletariat is that very obliteration. This point is perhaps best made by a joke recently recounted by Lenin on the Tomb. An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, 'I'm afraid I can't let you in'. 'Who wants to get in?' the IRA man retorts. 'You've got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.'

Yes, I would agree the point is best made by that joke, which is to say, it's not particularly well made elsewhere, so the joke is likely our best option. The main problem with this particular claim is one of time: Zizek is perfectly right that one might "imagine" a capitalism in which all demands for equality or recognition have been met beyond that of class struggle, but no capitalist structure currently exists like that, and so one wonders why it is that Zizek is willing to dismiss the value and worth of those demands because of his belief that hypothetically, they also wouldn't get rid of capitalism. Isn't Laclau's argument precisely that there is no single revolutionary moment, but constant articulations that are themselves contingent revolutions? If all demands save one were met (a ridiculous hypothetical), wouldnt the next populist movement necessarily be one of class struggle? And is there a reason why discrimination should continue in the meantime? Zizek isn't here making a claim that it slows the revolution, because then he'd have to predict something like the temporal horizon of a revolution, which he doesn't want to do, since that particular form of historical materialism has been discounted by, well, material history. All that being said, there is no actual claim here as to why it is that class struggle shouldn't be just anoter multi-culti demand, one demand among many. I'm not saying it should or shouldn't be, simply that this is an incomplete claim, and it's not a claim that, given its incompletion, we should take for granted. Class is a rhetorical concept, highly variable, highly contingent, and highly manipulable - this is the fundamental importance of Gramsci's theory of hegemony, even if that theory had some problems. "Hegemony" recognizes that class is not an objective reality but rather a discursive phenomenon, and one that can often be diverted, siphoned, repositioned by the same ruling elite that Zizek finds so threatening. One wonders, following Zizek sympathetically here, how the symbolic social space of the bourgeoisie is to be obliterated, and more fundamentally and necessarily, how that symbolic social space was and is constituted as symbolic in the first place. See, Zizek can't explain that, not because he's incapable, but because if he did, it would turn out that disruptions in that constitution - what are often called "antagonisms" - would provide reasonably good reforms, and Zizek doesn't want that. He only wants the Thor's Hammer of revolution, and nothing else is going to be as dramatic, and so damn everything else along with Valhalla. The fact that no one can find, much less lift, Thor's Hammer, is apparently immaterial.

We can also see why Zizekians (I include Zizek in that term, given his self-caricaturing practices these days) are tempted to use the word "core" previously, because it helps to make easy (read: facile) the distinction between a revolutionary antagonism founded on the one, the only, core of class struggle as opposed to being incorporated into an antagonism that synecdochally may limit or exceed the basic Marxist/Leninist problematic. If Zizek didn't strategically misidentify Laclau's antagonism with the idea of a "core" at the heart of the ontology of populism (a notion that makes no sense to someone who follows Saussure or Derrida), then we would be able to permute the two views, we would be able to negotiate contingency, and Zizek doesn't want that. He wants only a radical rearticulation, one so radical that he finds it nearly impossible to describe the actual conditions under which a rearticulation takes place. Take as an example the absurd defense of Kaiser Soze, in the usual suspects, who kills his family rather than give in to the demand of rival gang leaders, a killing that Zizek describes as the ultimate ethical act of extreme sacrifice. Predictive failures of fiction aside, one cannot help but note that this is a rearticulation of nothing, but rather a reaffirmation of those coordinates by which the patriarch defines the family. Rather than give in to the demands, thus destroying his authority as patriarch, and thus disrupting the notion of family wherein family is defined by his status as its patriarch, he simply preserves his authority by executing his family. The very fact that such a simple scene can have such radically divergent interpretations returns us to the problem of the floating signifier identified by Laclau, and should summarily dismiss any notion that an essential core can be found within any act, since any act is always already circumscribed by a field of discourse that structures its reception, extreme sacrifice or no. Continuing:

For Zizek, Laclau makes the mistake of treating the critique of political economy as a 'positive ontic science' (just as his dismissal of class struggle makes the mistake of treating the proletariat as if it were a positive ontic entity, 'the working class', rather than a 'substance-less subject'). What this ignores is what Zizek, after Derrida, called the 'spectral' dimension of Marx. In Marx's 'hauntology' - where undead labour is the correlate of vitalized commodities - it is understood that fiction structures reality. To call capital a 'self-engendering monster' is not at all to speak metaphorically.

And this claim is just incorrect, perhaps deliberately so, as Laclau argues precisely the opposite. Following Saussure, he never treats any political entity or economy as a positive ontic science, and in fact describes all groups as being structured by empty signifiers, signifiers that - precisely because they fail to provide a positive ontic content - can suture disparate individuals into a group, and create a chain of equivalences through which that suture can be parlayed into a group demand. There's nothing at stake here, other than Zizek trying hard to differentiate himself and add to his own importance, as Laclau says exactly the opposite of what Zizek has him say, and concludes in a remarkably similar fashion regarding the relationship between fiction (or in Laclau's words, discourse) and reality. What I can't figure out is why it is that class struggle seems to escape this essential relationship elsewhere in Zizek's presentation.

I'm using K-Punk's summary a bit unfairly here, having it stand in for a strand of anti-populist thought that pretends to disagree with populism precisely because it isn't populist enough! Phrase it how you like, but the telltale sign is usually some sort of rhetorical chicanery or antithesis, wherein, after maligning foundations that weren't actually in the argument, one then faults it for not having the right foundations, some of which were actually there all along. I find these critiques somewhat pained, in that they work so hard to speak in a way that's so revolutionary, so hip, so cool, but they end up turning into MTV, with the revolution dead and replaced by ultra-hip, tongue-in-cheek reality programming. As I've noted before, I think Laclau's analysis has some fundamental limits, but the sort of rejoinder we see/hear from Zizek does nothing to expose those weaknesses, and instead does more to expose the weaknesses of what I think has becomea career spoiled by its own meteoric success. There was a time, a time up until the Plague of Fantasies, where I really liked what Zizek was doing. That time has clearly passed, and I can add his critique of populism to his other recent debacles (on French riots, Iranian nukes, and so on) as being sad reminders of a good writer whose thinking didn't keep pace with his pen.

The next discussion of populism I want to talk about, one that I think agrees with the thrust of what I'm saying above, comes via Le Colonel Chabert, who, agree with her or not, can write with the best of them. I'll talk a bit more about her post, and Jon's "post-hegemonic" discussion of the issue in a later entry.