This is Žižek’s contribution to An American Utopia.
A “seed of imagination” is the germ out of which a work of art grows. It is usually unrecognizable in the final product. A philosophical example is how Kant’s project grew out of an obsession with ghosts, or how Hegel’s late work was an engagement with English political economy. These seeds are often sublated and forgotten in the final result. The left needs seeds like this, to break out of our dire lack of imagination.
In 2015, army exercises in Texas were taken by conspiracy theorists to be the beginnings of martial law. Republican politicians responded ambiguously, ordering the National Guard to keep an eye on them.
Zizek asks how something so irrational could take place. Initially, this looks like a populist distortion of a legitimate distrust of state apparatuses. But at a second glance, it might confirm Jameson’s intuitions of the army’s emancipatory potential.
The fact that Jameson’s idea can only appear as an “ominous eccentricity” is a testament to our lack of imagination in dealing with alternatives.
There is another example of our inability to think of alternatives. Future biotechnology may allow us to trick the mind into thinking time was passing more slowly; we can imagine a pill that will make a ten minute prison sentence seem like 10 years. Rebecca Roache suggests it may be more ethical to give a prisoner this pill than to lock them up. But what about the opposite possibilities, like making sex seems like it lasts for 10 years? The fact that we only imagine using these pills for prison indicates a lack of imagination. Our images of the future are even worse — boring, repetitive dystopian stories.
The idea of the total triumph of capitalism is also due to a lack of imagination. It makes us miss signs of the new that already exist. For example, Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Zero Marginal Cost Society shows we are approaching the rise of a society based around a collaborative commons, an era of nearly free goods and services. Marginal cost is the cost of reproducing a product, minus fixed costs. Zizek says, “While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services priceless, nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market forces” (Jameson 2016, 271).
Information technology will push segments of the economy to near-zero marginal cost. For example, infrastructure is being attached to the internet through billions of sensors–the “internet of things.” A hybrid economy is being created: capitalism alongside a Collaborative Commons:
“people are making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D-printed products at near-zero marginal cost; they are sharing cars, homes, clothes, and other items via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, and cooperatives at low or near-zero marginal cost; students are enrolling in free open online courses that operate at near-zero marginal cost; entrepreneurs are bypassing the banking establishment and using “crowdfunding” to finance startup businesses as well as creating alternative currencies in the fledgling sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, sustainability supersedes consumerism, cooperation ousts competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “sharable value” on the Collaborative Commons. Capitalism will remain, but primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions—a powerful niche player in the coming world beyond markets, where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons (a term that effectively sounds like a clumsy translation of “communism”).” (Jameson 2016, 272)
However, every Utopian hope has its own form of alienation. For information technology, it is the tiny temporal gap between the disembodied synchronicity of the web, and the slight delays that are a trace of its materiality. High frequency traders are able to use lightning-fast computers to make trades in milliseconds, earning them billions. This basically proves that the stock market is not fair and open.
There is another reason information technology produces alienation. Franco Beradi says the Big Other, the symbolic substance of our lives, is now too fast for humans. Our mental lives are no longer in sync with our symbolic substance. We like to say that on the web, it doesn’t matter where or who you are, “The HFTs’ operation demonstrates that it does matter where I am; it is a kind of revenge of materialism against the spontaneous idealist illusion that pertains to the digital space” (Jameson 2016, 275).
HDTs are also a good image of how the act of perception is already inscribed into what we see. A trader perceives themselves as clicking YES to a deal and seeing immediate results, but the HFT network has already intervened. Something similar happens with physics. Brian Greene, in The Elegant Universe, asks us to imagine an airline in which you can fly and then pay after landing, before anyone notices. Greene suggests particles do the same–they “borrow” energy from the future and pay for it with their annihilation “before the system notices.” Zizek says,
“This is how, even in an empty region of space, a particle emerges out of nothing, “borrowing” its energy from the future and paying for it (with its annihilation) before the system notices this borrowing. The whole network can function like this, in a rhythm of borrowing and annihilation, one borrowing from the other, displacing the debt onto the other, postponing the payment of the debt—it is really like the subparticle domain is playing Wall Street games with the futures. What this presupposes is a minimal gap between things in their immediate brute reality and the registration of this reality in some medium (of the big Other): one can cheat insofar as the second is in a delay with regard to the first. So, like with HFTs, reality itself (the way we perceive it) is “rigged” because of things taking place in the imperceptible interstices of time.” (Jameson 2016, 277)
So all these new technological developments, including information technology, are ambiguous. Stanley Aronowitz, debating An American Utopia with Jameson, says utopias have declined because technology makes everything possible. But this “everything is possible” hides a whole series of impossibilities. As far as personal freedoms and technologies go, it does seem like everything is possible. But in the socioeconomic realm, we have apparently reached an “age of maturity” in which we know that big collective action necessarily leads to totalitarianism. We live in the post political era of the naturalization of the economy, in which things like austerity measures are presented as necessary.
In this framework, power no longer censors. Rather it allows unlimited expression. Zizek quotes Badiou: “Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves”
Kipling’s “If” says we should be able to dream without making dreams our master. Zizek thinks Jameson’s book is a step in this direction. He thinks it breaks three forms of taboo.
The first taboo he breaks is to not only dismiss the two standard forms of state socialism, the welfare state and party dictatorship, but also the standard by which leftists judge their failure–the idea of communism as a permanently self-organized (via direct democracy) multitude. Jameson dismisses this direct democracy. All there is is the militarily organized economy and the realm of pleasure. Zizek adds to this, “(The truth we have to embrace is that, if we want to move out of representation toward direct democracy, this direct democracy has always to be supplemented with a non-representational higher power, say, of an “authoritarian” leader—in Venezuela, Chavez’s leadership was the necessary obverse of his attempts to mobilize direct democracy in barrios.)” (Jameson 2016, 281).
Zizek thinks one of Negri’s dreams needs to be censored—his account of the goal of emancipatory movements, in which the self-organized multitude overtakes social reproduction and regulation. He says the failure of the Brazilian left wing is the truth of Negri’s politics; the left-wing Brazilian President could not “contain and integrate the protesting multitude.” He says, “Although life of the poor and the middle classes improved considerably, it was as if this improvement, and the very attempt of the government to involve excluded minorities in a dialogue and empower them as autonomous political agents, backfired and strengthened acts of resistance…” (Jameson 2016, 281-282).
He quotes Hugo Albuquerque’s account: “The central issue is less than people objectively ‘improved their lives,’ as the economists, sociologists, and statisticians … would have us believe, but rather that they feel authorized to desire and, therefore, now desire without authorization.”
Albuquerque goes on,
“This class has no name because it does not need one; it is the very expression of many minorities—the poor, blacks, women, etc.—that are sufficient in themselves, that go beyond labels and labeling and simply live. Without a name, this class is in some sense not order able, since only a subject that has a name, and is thus subject to a regime, is capable of receiving orders.”
Albuquerque says the future of this class “depends on positively embracing its own internal plenitude and differences. Carnival, with its masks and its lawlessness, not the normalization of bureaucratic seriousness … will allow a future for these lands … no repressive formula is capable of containing the intense investment of desire—at least not for long.”
What he says about how the protestors experienced their situation and the state’s despair over its inability to control them through improved living standards is basically true. It is true that desire was the factor responsible for the protesters refusing to cooperate with a progressive government, but we need to give it a Lacanian twist. Desire says, “I demand this from you, but if you give it to me, I will reject it because this is not really that (what I really want).” Desire is a void in every demand.
There is another paradox of the protesting multitude; the quotes talk about how the multitudes are “sufficient in themselves.” Zizek suggests that these “sufficient in themselves” groups just live in secluded groups, and the state apparatus is the destabilizing force.
Negri has changed his position in two ways: one, we have to leave behind horizontality, and two, it might be time to try to take power again.
The idea that political representation is a passivizing alienation reaches its limit here. The idea that we can organize society as a network of associations is impossible in three ways.
First, there are many cases in which speaking for others is necessary. For example, victims of mass violence cannot speak for themselves.
Second, whenever there is a mass mobilization, those people remain the minority—in Egypt, this silent majority defeated the Tahrir Square crowd and elected the Muslim Brotherhood.
Third, political engagement has a limited lifespan. The majority of the mobilized group always returns to normal life after a few weeks or months: “The battle has to be won here, in the domain of citizen’s passivity, when things return back to normal the morning after the ecstatic revolts.” (Jameson 2016, 285)
The true power of an Event is not the surge of enthusiasm that produces great acts, but by the way it affects the normal flow of life.
Jameson’s second innovation is the way he acknowledges and deals with resentment. Jean-Pierre Dupuy has used resentment to critique Rawls: in Rawls’s model of justice, everyone would know they are at the bottom of the social ladder because of their lack of merit; no one would be able to blame anything on society, and this would produce an explosion of resentment.
Nietzsche and Freud share the idea that justice as equality is founded on the envy of the Other, who has what we do not and enjoys it: “The demand for justice is thus ultimately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the Other should be curtailed so that everyone’s access to jouissance is equal. The necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism. Since it is not possible to impose equal jouissance, what is imposed instead to be equally shared is prohibition.” (Jameson 2016, 288)
Today, we are under a generalized superego injunction, the command to enjoy, which ends up hindering our enjoyment more than ever. It is like Nietzsche’s Last Man.
Communism might have to deal with this through lotteries, as opposed to elections.
Here, we have to talk about democracy. Badiou calls it our fetish, in the sense that it is the last thing we see before encountering the “lack” of the social field, class antagonism. So when we see brutal exploitation, we can at least say “Yes, but at least we have democracy.” This attitude appears in movies like All the King’s Men, in which the corruption goes all the way to the top, but rumpled gumshoe journalists can bring down the President.
Any political movement that combines the names “democratic” and “socialist” is stupid because it blurs such things. Anyone can be a socialist today, because it has become synonymous with humanitarian.
China is a good example of today’s “socialism.” The Party promotes its legitimacy with three claims. First, only the Part can guarantee successful capitalism, stop capitalist antagonism from exploding in riots. Second, only the atheist Party can guarantee religious freedom, because it prevents religious factions from destabilizing society. Third, only the Party can secure a future for Confucian values against the corrosive effects of hedonistic individualism.
The Party demands that all religion be “Sinicized,” though even this is not enough: Party members are allowed no religion at all. This exclusion of religion helps religious freedom because it produces a sort of neutral ground. Consider the French Revolution of 1848; the ruling party was a coalition of two competing royal houses. Since one cannot be a royalist “in general,” but only support a particular royal house, the two houses had to meet in the “anonymous kingdom of the Republic.” It is the same with religion; one cannot be religious in general, so so religious factions require the “anonymous religion of atheism.”
However, there is a deeper fear at work in this exclusion of religion. Zizek quotes Zorana Baković:
“It would have been the best for the Chinese Communist Party if its members were not to believe in anything, not even in Communism, since numerous party members joined some of the churches (most of them the Protestant one) precisely because of their disappointment at how even the smallest trace of their Communist ideals disappeared from today’s Chinese politics.”
Basically, the main opposition to the Party today comes from truly convinced Communists who are disappointed in capitalist corruption, and from the economic losers, the former farmers who must now work in Foxconn factories. Every year, hundreds of rebellions have to be quashed by the state. Hence, it is no surprise that state propaganda focuses so much on social unity. Zizek says,
“One should apply here the basic rule of Stalinist hermeneutics: since official media do not openly report on troubles, the most reliable way to detect them is to search for the positive excesses in the state propaganda—the more harmony is celebrated, the more chaos and antagonisms there are likely to be. China is full of antagonisms and barely controlled instabilities that threaten to explode.” (Jamson 2016, 293)
The religious politics of the Party arises from this fear of belief, belief in the emancipatory promises of communism. Zizek quotes Samuel Wade, writing in a Chinese state newspaper:
“Certain countries in the West advertise their own values as “universal values,” and claim that their interpretations of freedom, democracy, and human rights are the standard by which all others must be measured. They spare no expense when it comes to hawking their goods and peddling their wares to every corner of the planet, and stir up “color revolutions” both before and behind the curtain. Their goal is to infiltrate, break down, and overthrow other regimes. At home and abroad certain enemy forces make use of the term “universal values” to smear the Chinese Communist Party, socialism with Chinese characteristics, and China’s mainstream ideology. They scheme to use Western value systems to change China, with the goal of letting Chinese people renounce the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership and socialism with Chinese characteristics, and allow China to once again become a colony of some developed capitalist country.”
There are some truths in that passage, but they function to cover up a lie. While we certainly should mistrust Western universal values (as they do conceal particular ideological biases), they cannot really be opposed by a particular way of life, such as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” First, because we need a different universalism, one of universal emancipation. Second, socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism with a market economy; it fully integrates China into the world economy.
We cannot rely on particularisms to be “sites of resistance” against capitalism.
Jameson’s third achievement is to reject the old communist idea of work becoming pleasure. It is only in communism that the work/pleasure gap is fully asserted, in contrast with our culture today in which even the smallest personal pleasures are commodified as moments of capitalist self-reproduction.
What disappears in Jameson’s vision–and deliberately so–is politics, “the properly political process of making and enacting decisions that concern communal life” (297). It is the work/pleasure distinction which assures this, however
“the price Jameson pays for this disappearance is that he ignores basic questions like who will command the army and how, who will allocate jobs and how, how the psychoanalytic institutions regulating pleasures will be empowered, and so on. His dream is one of apolitical invention and regulation—no wonder he refers with great sympathy to apolitical neoliberal speculations about how to organize the economy efficiently, claiming that we should agree with everything there except the essential (capitalist private property).” (Jameson 2016, 297)
Jameson’s idea is not so much a utopia as it is a fantasy, of having one’s cake and eating it too. Production is militarized, and in culture freedom reigns supreme. Zizek thinks we have the obverse of this today; the market economy is liberal, while we have a near militarized duty to enjoy. Zizek is not sure this can be reversed, since it is possible the two sides always contaminate each other.
Jameson could have imagined a standard centrally planned economy, but he specifically talks about the military because of the dimension of the state of emergency. In conversation with Stanley Aronowitz, Jameson says he imagines this world could arise after a crisis, perhaps ecological. Zizek describes his problem with this: “Does, however, this reply not rely on the sad prospect that only a great catastrophe can save the radical left? This surplus element is enigmatic and crucial: what if the militarized form is the very form in which the excluded politics and its obscene pleasures return in the pragmatic domain of production, of servicing the goods?” (Jameson 2016, 298)
The moment of truth in Jameson’s rejection of politics is his insistence on equality. Zizek quotes Allan Woods describing Marx on equality, for whom equality is
“an exclusively political notion, and, as a political value, that it is a distinctively bourgeois value (often associated with the French revolutionary slogan: liberté, égalité, fraternité). Far from being a value that can be used to thwart class oppression, Marx thinks the idea of equality is actually a vehicle for bourgeois class oppression, and something quite distinct from the communist goal of the abolition of classes.”
Or, in Engels’ words:
“The idea of socialist society as the realm of equality is a one-sided French idea resting upon the old “liberty, equality, fraternity”—an idea which was justified as stage of development in its own time and place but which, like all the one-sided ideas of the earlier socialist schools, should now be overcome, for it produces only confusion in people’s heads and more precise modes of presentation of the matter have been found.”
Zizek then quotes Marx:
“Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable by an equal standard only insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing else is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will receive more than another. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.”
Marx is not using the old conservative justification of hierarchy, because he is not talking about the inequality which results from class oppression, but the inequality which would exist in a post-class society. Hence, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.”
We need to qualify Badiou’s claim that “equality is the point of the impossible proper to capitalism.” This is true, but it is a point immanent to capitalism; capitalism advocates legal equality as one of its chief ideals, but in its actualization it becomes inequality. So Marx does not call for an actualization of equality, but says we need to move beyond that framework.
We should not take the “point of the impossible” as a “radical utopian Other.” Real points of impossibility are the things we can do in principle, but cannot in practice. In America, there is universal healthcare. In Europe, it is cancellation of the Greek debt.
Capitalism is not in crisis, but any of the people living under it are.
Capitalism initially legitimized itself as a force for freedom, against slavery–but it has generated slavery (in the American colonies) and continues to generate forms of it today (in Dubai). Zizek goes on to list many other examples of de facto slavery in fully capitalist countries. It is so baked in, that a struggle against this might trigger a global change.
There may be a strong counter argument against such a strategy:
“Many times, the left has engaged in the battle against a particular feature of capitalism with the presupposition that this feature is crucial for the reproduction of the entire capitalist system, and has been proven wrong. Marx’s support of the North in the American Civil War was based on the premise that cheap cotton produced by slaves in the South and then exported to England was crucial for the smooth functioning of the British capitalism, so that the abolition of slavery in the United States would bring crisis and class war into England. The premise of feminists and sexual-liberation partisans was that the patriarchal family is crucial for the reproduction and transmission of private property, so that the fall of patriarchal order would undermine the very roots of capitalist reproduction.” (Jameson 2016, 305)
Capitalism was certainly able to absorb all of these changes. However, this argument might not work today, since it appears that capitalism cannot afford worker’s rights and even old social democratic gains are being rolled back.
Returning to Jameson’s idea of militarization, it might be that attempts to change capitalism “from below” are all doomed to failure, so the only possible resistance might be some sort of militarization, because this is basically just a name for suspending the power of the self-regulating economy.
One might respond that this militarization should only be seen as an initial, lower stage, but this gets complicated quickly. Marxism has a tendency to multiply stages; it might be that belief in stages is itself a sign we are in a lower stage:
“In a properly Hegelian way, we effectively reach the higher stage not when we overcome the lower stage but when we realize that what we have to get rid of is the very idea that there is a higher stage to follow what we are doing now and that the prospect of this higher stage can legitimize what we are doing now, in our lower stage. In short, the “lower stage” is all we have and all we will ever get.” (Jameson 2016, 305-306)
Jameson leaves on taboo intact: he still calls for the dismantling of the state. His army might be an ersatz state, so maybe we ought to preserve the idea of the state and rethink it. China might give us a clue in this direction, with its Party that sits outside the law and outside the state. Many states have small, secret groups that control the state apparatus, but only the Chinese Communist Party does it openly. It is a kind of dual power. Stalinism had a similar issue, but there, the party was too weak to truly repurpose the state, so it had to supplement the state with “illegal” party power, unlike the Chinese.
Resolving this problem requires a new seed of imagination.
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