Callinicos, Zizek et al, talking shit at Marxism '10

But wouldn't you agree that the common reproach to Zizek is that he is actually one of the more frequent practitioners in this leftist-identity more-radical-than-thou- politics game?

tbf, Zizek's critique of liberal authoritarianism does apply pretty well to consensus-based 'non-hierarchical' groups, which are pretty authoritarian and wrought with peer-pressure etc (or in other words, 'free' in the same sense as the Amish teenagers sent out into the city from one of his favoured parables). thing is, that has (a) virtually nothing to do with anarchism and (b) sod all to do with the vague allusion to Bakunin's 'brotherhood' he seems to be making via Marx. but i mean it does bely either massive ignorance or disingenuity for a 'communist intellectual' to think anarchists have no interest in global organisation, since even the most cursory knowledge of the historical workers' movement would dispell that. i mean afterall Bakunin's scheming was in the IWMA, anarchists refounded the IWA etc.

Perhaps you could give an example. I don't necessarily think you're wrong on this but like I've seen you post a couple times, he uses Lenin, Stalin for his own 'mixed up politics of the Act, etc.' which, to me, isn't an issue, because I think there is a discernible distance between the divisive posturing and Zizek himself.

Indeed, and could your belief in this "distance" come from the need to maintain your image of this star intellectual? Have you heard how Russian peasants had infinite hope that the Czar himself was good, kind and concerned about their problems despite the cruel acts of his large and small officials? Could that be analogous to the faith of a small intellectual who watches Zizek, the grand hipster, ironically play with various regrettable leftist poses and so somehow prove that he's beyond all the manipulations of this society and has the politics of the small intellectual?

(not to say that I'm more than a small intellectual myself but I at least want to escape all stars...)

My point is that you're in fact doing the complaining about some supposed monolithic anti-zizek crowd that you conjured up as a strawman; it's like you're hurt when people say they don't find Zizek's political statements 'intellectually stimulating' nor his philosophy 'useful for conceptual footing'. I, for one, don't say or imply anything about Zizek's hipster fandom and even the people who do, don't claim to be presenting this an argument for anything.

Every time some libertarian leftist attacks Zizek for being a Leninist, I repeat that Zizek's Lenin is highly distorted, and it should be clear, as you say, that Zizek is just posturing with it (he says the idea of Leninism as a working-class party is over,etc. etc.).

There isn't much difference in politics or intellectual rigeur between famous philosophers such as André Glucksmann, BHL, Sloterdijk and Zizek. Like the recent spiegel-article aptly says, Zizek's only reason for hating BHL seems to be the amount of showing off his chest-hair. Same for Badiou and his 'rival' Finkielkraut when they debated, it's pretty obvious, even the tv-host liked to claim that after all they are pretty much saying the same thing.

That there is no anti-zizek leftist-authenticity playing crowd mocking Zizek's claim to communism/marxism, is proved when on Newsnight on the BBC the liberal presenter asked why do you call yourself this label, and Zizek didn't have an answer. So it's kinda sad that the BBC understands Zizek isn't a marxist, but the London Marxism conference apparently doesn't.

I'm not interested in keeping some image of Zizek in my mind - this is what is assumed, that I or others (certainly some might) have a lot of feeling invested in Zizek, that he's our god or something. You're taking my words further than intended again in suggesting I'm talking about some monolithic anti-zizek crowd, as well. I was referring to the sentiments seen in this thread and others on libcom, most of which referred to hipsters, being eccentric, etc. I'm simply annoyed at the way in which the critique is done, the attitudes people take are rarely 'productive,' as in generate productive conversation (see most of this thread) about the subject. It's this absurd level of patronizing combined with a pretty weak critique that is just unimpressive. I found the 'Zizek show' article pretty on point, btw. So again, it's the assumption that for someone to find anything in Zizek necessarily means he's their new 'pop star,' totally idealized, etc.

Indeed. This is a good point and I believe largely it is Zizek's self-reflexive irony and whatnot that generates appeal. This is certainly a fault, and probably one of the biggest with Zizek; he's like an absolute contradiction, but that itself becomes part of the appeal, etc.

.

There is some truth to that. Or at least, his argumentation style doesn't really offer itself to proper evaluation, causing people to resort to snide remarks or overly enthusiastic praise, I suppose. I think one has to investigate Zizek's presuppositions and whatnot, extrapolate from his silly examples, etc. to gain much from his output.

You easily get Zizek's presuppositions by reading Bosteels summary of 'structural causality':

"While urging a more coherent account of Miller's overall thought, I
will summarize this doctrine by referring to the work of a student of his,
Slavoj Zizek....

Three points can be made regarding the real, the subject, and ideology,
which sum up the basic elements of the new doctrine of structural
causality:

I. Just as the symbolic order is structured around the traumatic kernel
of the real, a social field is m1iculated around the real of antagonism,
which resists symbolization. Like the theory of relativity, the special
theory of foreclosure needs to be generalized. To become consistent, not
just a psychotic but any symbolic order needs to foreclose a key element
which paradoxically 'incompletes' the structure by being 'included out'.
The structure is not all: there is always a gap, a leftover, a remainder or, if
we slightly change the perspective, an excess, a surplus, something that
sticks out. A social formation is not only overdetermined but it is
constitutively incomplete, fissured, or baITed because of the very
impossibility of society which embodies itself in its symptomatic
exclusions. "There is no such thing as a sexual relationship," Lacan
declared in Encore in a formula which Laclau and Mouffe restate, or
translate, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategv: "There is no such thing as
a social relationship," or simply: "Society doesn't exist. The absence,
or lack, of an organic society is then the point of the real of politics, but
precisely by opening the field of the political, this impossible identity is
also the condition of possibility of any hegemonic identification. All this
lTlay very well seem to be a supplement to the common textbook idea of
structuralism but in fact the logic of structural causality never reduced the
effects of overdetermination to a closed economy of grid-like places and
their differential relations. The aim was rather always to detect and
encircle the uncanny element which, in the efficacy of its very absence,
determines the whole structure of assigned places as such. "The
fundamental problem of all structuralism is that of the term with the
double function, inasmuch as it determines the belonging of all other
terms to the structure, while itself being excluded from it by the specific
operation through which it figures in the stlUcture only under the guise of
its plllceholder (its lieu-tenCl/lt, to use a concept from Lacan)," Badiou
writes in his early review of Althusser, describing what even today
remains the principal task of the critique of ideology for someone like
Zizek: "Pinpoint the place occupied by the term indicating the specific
exclusion, the p,ertinent lack, i.e., the determi/lation or 'structurality' of
the structure. As an absent or decentered cause, the determining
instance may well have shifted in keeping with the increased attention for
Lacau's later works, so that the real is now to the symbolic what the
symbolic was to the imaginary before; in any case, we remain firmly
within the framework of the common doctrine of structural causality. As
Zizek himself concludes in The Sublime Object of Ideology: "The
paradox of the Lacanian Real, then, is that it is an entity which, although
it does not exist (in the sense of 'really existing,' taking place in reality),
has a series of properties - it exercises a certain structural causality, it
can produce a series of effects in the symbolic reality of subjects.

2. The subject 'is' nothing but this gap in the structure, the fissure
between the real and its impossible symbolization. The new doctrine thus
avoids at the same time the metaphysical understanding of both substance
and consciousness. In fact, insofar as metaphysics, in one of its famous
Heideggerian delimitations, culminates in the epoch of the image of the
world as the representation and manipulation of the object by the subject,
the new doctrine can also be said to entail a wholesale deconstruction of
metaphysics. This means that the pseudo-polemic between structuralism
and humanism can be avoided, since the doctrine of structural causality
already implies a new notion of the subject. Subject and substance are
then articulated through the lack at the very center of structure. In other
words, if there is always a leftover in the process of symbolization, a
smbborn remainder that signals the failure of the substance fully to
constitute itself, then the subject coincides with this very impossibility,
which causes the inner decenterment of the structure as substance. "The
leftover which resists 'subjectivation' embodies the impossibility which
'is' the subject; in other words, the subject is strictly correlative to its own
impossibility; its limit is its positive condition," Zizek writes in The
Sublime Object of Ideology in a typical deconstructive move; while
Laclau explains in his preface to the same book: "The traditional debate
as to the relationship between agent and structure thus appears
fundamentally displaced: the issue is no longer a problem of autonomy, of
determinism versus free will, in which two entities fully constituted as
'objectivities' mutually limit each other. On the contrary, the subject
emerges as a result of the failure of substance in the process of its self
constitution.,,-Io Before adopting any particular position, identity, or
mandate, in a logical primacy' that will guarantee the radical status of the
new doctrine, the subject is thus the subject of lack. If to be radical means
to go to the root of things, as the young Marx was fond of recalling, what
can be more radical indeed than to show the constitutive uprootedness of
the very notion of the subject, prior to any essence of the human being of
the kind invoked by Marx?

3. Ideology is a fantasy-construct aimed at concealing the essential
inconsistency of the sociopolitical field. The fundamental ideological
fantasy, therefore, is always some version of the idea that society
constitutes an organic, cohesive and uudivided whole. By defining
society as impossible, strangely enough, the new doctrine thus gives itself
an unfailing measuring stick to redefine ideology in terms of a structural
misrecognition - this time not of some concrete reality hidden behind
the veil of false consciousness but rather of the fact that ideology
conceals nothing at all, the 'nothing' of the structure which 'is' the
subject. As Laclau writes in his New Reflectiolls Oil the Revolutioll of Our
Time: "The ideological would not consist of the misrecognition of a
positive essence, but exactly the opposite: it would consist of the non­
recognition of the precarious character of any positivity, of the
impossibility of any ultimate suture. Totalitarian ideologies, for
instance, fail to acknowledge the empty place of power, which in
democracy constitutes the paradoxical object-cause of all political
struggles. The critique of ideology, therefore, can no longer consist only
in unmasking the particular vested interests hidden behind the false
appearances of universality. Instead, two rather different tasks impose
themselves, which can be compared to the ends of the psychoanalytical
cure as discussed by Zizek. The aim is, first, a traversing of the fantasy,
so as to acknowledge how an ideology merely fills out a traumatic void in
the midst of the social field. Second, in order to avoid that the symbolic
order disintegrate altogether, it entails an the identification with the
symptom, with the piece of surplus enjoyment which continues to resist
even after the dismantling of the fundamental fantasy, and which thus
somehow gives body to the radical inconsistency of society itself. This
obscene enjoyment, which attaches itself to the symptom and which is
ultimately nothing else but pure death drive pulsating around the central
emptiness in the midst of the symbolic order, cannot be overcome by
means of an old-style symptomal reading of ideology, nor even by a
revolutionary social change. As Zizek writes about the drive to enjoyment
which, as our human condition, is the ultimate pre-ideological support of
all ideology: "The thing to do is not to 'overcome,' to 'abolish' it, but to
come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension
and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articubte
a modus vivendi with it. What Zizek thus adds to Laclau's cleaner,
deconstructive version of structural causality is the obscene passionate
enjoyment that is the dark underside of the lack in the symbolic order.
Finally, in a last ironic twist, the doctrine of structural causality is
turned against Althusser - himself one of the first to use these terms to
bring together Marx, Freud and Lacan! "

I leave out many of the interesting footnotes. The text, available at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/pdfs/Vol_12/12_12_Bosteels.pdf , goes on with how Zizek misrepresents Althusser and offers some criticisms of Zizek.

Yes, I am familiar with all this.

The stuff Noa pasted above is way too dense to argue with altogether.

But this phrase struck me.

As far as I can tell, most folks, who use the term "ideology" negatively would indeed use it to describe a distortion of a wider unitary "sociopolitical field". This seems to be a thread going through the whole "Hegalian Marxist" school - Luckas, Gabel, Debord, etc, (with Zizack being there as far as I know from my limited skimming of his stuff).

And I'd argue that if one is going to seriously talk about communism supplanting capitalism, one needs to consider such an undivided whole. Of course, we're not talking about mystically "organic, cohesive and undivided whole" but a whole that is close enough to undivided to serve our purposes.

Specifically, capitalism relentlessly develops every possible division and control specialization. Communism thus cannot be merely a better tweaking of these control systems but rather needs to involve an "over coming" of this entire process. Specifically, the proletariat needs to be able to function "as a whole", as a unified human community, given that capital is already exploring all of the ways that we can be made to function as parts, pieces, "human resources" and so-forth.

Of course, this is not the same as saying that capitalism is simply control or that communism is simply lack of control.

And? If you're just going to repeat how unimpressive the criticism is or complain about 'haters', while not showing any investigating of Zizek's presuppositions yourself or even mentioning what the content of the 'output' you've gained is, you're discussing in bad faith. I've never seen the people (which specifically means you, revol68 and communistingoodfaith) who say that structural causality is relevant, try to make a 'proper evaluation' of it themselves. Maybe you're afraid of the conclusions if you did?

I didn't intend to come in here to justify his theories, simply to voice that many of the criticisms were weak. Neither was it intended towards you particularly, in fact, moreso towards mateofthebloke and a few others, who were basically spouting nonsensical forum banter. I'm interested in his theories, as theories, as concepts, as things to think about in relation to other concepts and theories. If you don't think theory is relevant, than so be it. I should say I find his philosophical and cultural criticism more interesting than his politics. Again, the assumption is that I subscribe to his theories, etc. I'm simply interested in all of it.

Tbf to mateoftheblock, when he said that Zizek is actually an absolute piece of shit, he was doing Zizekian theology:

Martin Luther directly proposed an excremental identity of man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus. ... Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in his act of Incarnation, freely identified Himself with His own shit, with the excremental real that is man – and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called "man."

You posted up an evaluation of Zizek's theories on the subject as the excess or gap between the real and the symbolic order, I didn't see any criticism in it, just as before in the other thread where you failed to grasp the point.

What if the period of workers' councils is past? Rather, what if the workers' council itself was a product of a particular moment of the labor process and valorization process?

What happens if:
1. The council form was predicated on the possibility of the workers' in the labor process comprehending the entire process for a given product.
2. The council form was predicated on workers comprehending the technical aspects of the labor process, that is, the consciousness of the workers and their level of knowledge dominated the kind of technology utilized in the labor process.
3. The council form was predicated on direct labor as the substance of value and direct labor was overwhelmingly what production was about.
4. That in this moment, the consciousness of the class as a class can exist in a more overt fashion because the identification of the workers with the labor process in a sense against the valorization process, that they can recognize themselves in the work which is done because it does not exceed the comprehension of the workers' consciousness.

So what happens if none of these any longer obtain? I think in fact we can show quite clearly that this is the case, that none of these conditions any longer obtain.

Of course, what I have not said is that this moment was probably already passing in the period from 1945-1968 in the wealthy countries, if it was not already gone. There is a reason, IMO, that councils did not come into being after 1937 anywhere in Western Europe, Japan or the U.S., and we have not seen them in the more developed second-tier countries since the late 1970's in Iran, as prior to that we have not seen them since at the latest Czechoslovakia in 1968 or maybe Poland in the early 1970's.

Instead of being muppets ourselves and repeating "councils, direct democracy, workers' control of production", maybe we need to be looking at the way the current movements are shaping up or not. Argentina in 2002-3, Greece 2005-10, France in 2005-6, so far these only represent rebellions that, as much as I support them, do not necessarily indicate a taking up of the vast material capacity for creating useful wealth.

IMO, it is this contradiction between our capacity for producing material wealth without much direct labor, but still being bound to a society predicated on the value-form, a social form of domination whose substance is and remains direct labor, which is more clearly at issue than ever before. This has reached a point where the reduction of labor time to a minimum and the production of a high quality of life, which requires taking over and then transforming the labor process, or rather, the conquest of the labor process as the breaking of the valorization (and exchange) process, of its immediate overcoming.

However, if the council form, like the commune form, like syndicalism, like the soviet, are passed, what then? If the conditions out of which a direct positive consciousness of class belonging has ceased to be, out of what does a proletariat (an anti-working class, an against-labor class) come to be? IMO, the capital-labor relation still obtains, and in fact more fully than ever before, and thus its contradiction is more brutal than ever, but I don't think that the workerism of the past will come back because it was the product of an immature capitalist society.

Which way forward, then?

Its not through John Holloway's stuff, I think. I know John through years of e-mail exchanges and such, I think this was actually the first time I have ever seen or heard him. I had no idea. I won't say here what I have not said to him yet personally, beyond that I found it a bit appalling.

I also don't think that Zizek or Badiou or any of those people have a clue. I think Zizek knows how badly Badiou has no clue, but he is stained by the taint of a shared background (philosophically and psychoanalytically, largely). I think that Zizek is a capable cultural and philosophical critic who needs to be handled with a sifter, unlike Badiou who is just a poop taking the place of the now-dead poops who floated in the bowl before him: Levi-Strauss, then Althusser, then Derrida and Lyotard and Foucault, then Deleuze, then Negri (who is alive but rather obviously discredited after the last decade made Empire appear a bad joke.) However, on this question of councils and 'direct democracy', he is right. IMO, took him too long to figure it out.

Moreover, I don't think that Theorie Communiste or the communizers have it right either. Or least, it seems not much more than a variation on the councilist-direct democracy theme, updated with some awareness that revolution entails the abolition of the entire class relation, both poles, labor and capital, not the victory of one over the other.

Chris

I see where you're coming from, but iirc this wasn't Zizek's argument, at all. So when you write that:

you seem to be attributing your own reasoning to his position.

And although Holloway creeps me out too, tbf to Holloway at least he doesn't reject Marx's LTV for the immaterial labour/oil rent/commons stuff and unlike Zizek, he sees that Morales' Bolivia, taking statepower, etc. just will perpetuate the system.

The "Poop" argument. How (cough) brilliant.

So, we know what your strategy ISN'T. Do tell, what IS it?

By Zizek, we are referring to the man who essentially accused Emmanuel Levinas of not having experienced the holocaust because of Levinas' ethical perspective, correct?

But I'm being rude. I did enjoy Zizek's book on Christianity, I just wish I didn't have to read three different variations of it for him to get to his point, which, although interesting, I could have lived without comprehending.

The fact of the matter is, not only does his work lack coherence, his basic theoretical framework makes his Marxism ultimately authoritarian. Zizek's Lacanian lens, through which he views everything (although to say that he views anything is to affirm that he is not in fact totally blind), makes it such that everything is framed in terms of excess or lack intrinsic to the subject. How it is that Zizek actually manages to make his psychoanalytic weltanschauung come into some sort of productive engagement with any sort of Marxist politics escapes me (in part due to the fact that, as far as I am aware, he never makes an explicit argument for how this can be done--but I am certainly not a Zizek scholar, nor would I want to be one: too much cocaine involved in the induction ceremonies). By framing everything in terms of a constitutive lack or excess, Zizek gets away with his pseudo-Marxist politics of "social responsibility," for he simply has to align this framework with a simplistic reading of Capital and, voila--lack and excess in the modern world! The authoritarianism comes into play insofar as the psychoanalytic framework not only conceives of human subjectivity as fundamentally static, but also as fundamentally...neurotic, psychotic, perverse...take your pick. And this subject requires therapy, although this therapy can not actually heal him. Only treatment is possible. Thus, the therapist's existence is necessitated until death. Zizek seems, in some respects, to treat of Marxist politics in the same way. I won't get into the specifics because, frankly, I don't think it merits breaking out The Fragile Absolute to demonstrate this claim. Moreover, even proving this is nigh impossible because half the damn book is filled up with ruminations on random pieces of pop-culture that he consumed while he was high (not that I'm knocking his pastimes, but I wouldn't expect more than a close circle of friends to read anything I wrote while trashed).

Ultimately, I find the Zizek fandom as groundless and loathsome as I do Tiqqun-mania. By and large, both produce theoretical works which are lacking in both form and content, insofar as they attempt to unite a supposedly "radical" political agenda with flagrantly conservative theoretical approaches, absent any reason-giving as to why those sources can be integrated into a radical approach, and resulting in an incoherent stream of quotes from "high philosophy" and suggestions to "fight the man." To both crowds: stop defending people who don't exist for you, and who don't care about you. Take yourself as your starting point. Do you really find what these theorists have to say worthwhile, to you, in your existence?

Despite its Deleuzian program, which luckily features rather marginally in the text, I think this article points out some of the major flaws of the Lacanian-inspired political theorists;

http://libcom.org/library/political-theory-constitutive-lack-critique

See as well Geoff Boucher's critique of specifically Zizek's politics (in In defence of lost causes and The parallaw view), which, again this time despite its Trotskyist concluding words, accurately points to the weaknesses in Zizek's stance;

http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/262/340

I take it you think the Deleuzian stuff is bunk too?

Of course, though I would not let that stand in the way of appreciating Robinson's critique of Lacanian theory...

I find his work to be coherent, at least as much as I find Nietzsche coherent, which seems understandable to me. I'd agree that Zizek isn't an economist, sure. And as for the accusation regarding Levinas, I would say that that's hardly true. If anything there's simply an ethical loophole left open in Levinas' philosophy.

I'm not sure lacking a systematic marxist framework immediately turns Zizek into an authoritarian. It seems like many steps were skipped in that accusation. And I've read Zizek particularly lambaste something as simple as "social responsibility", so that would seem completely unfounded.

To say psychoanalysis views the subject is static is just utter ridiculousness. The only thing psychoanalysis says about the subject is it isn't based on any concrete content. And Zizek isn't a clinical psychoanalyst, so he doesn't mention, to my knowledge, any "therapy" or treatment of the subject. There is a difference between a clinical session of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic discourse, which of course I'm sure you think amounts to shit, but that's neither here nor there.

Again, it would be nice to see some actual critique of Zizek rather than merely distinguishing that it isn't to your TASTE, which seems to be what this thread amounts to. And to compare him to Tiqqun is retarded. Tiqqun is a group of morons who spend WAY too much time trying to sound nice and in turn end up completely vague, whereas Zizek is actually interesting provided you know how to read him. I find what Zizek says is worthwhile. So is that the end of the argument then?

Is there a risk, both for Badiou and Zizek to sometimes err on the side of "Robespierrism"? Sure. But that shouldn't affect the person reading it.

In regards to constitutive lack, if you, the royal "you", thinks that this is untrue and unfounded, then I would ask you to argue that the human subject is constitutively complete, rather than simply telling me why you don't particularly care for Zizek.

Just to tout my own horn here; Robinson's point with his Blackadder reference is (one of) the problem(s) I've been pointing out on the transcendental materialism thread, namely that in Lacanian theory there is no feature distinguishing a constitutively complete subject from a constitutively lacking (non-all) subject. The concept of 'constitutive fullness' suffers the same mythical character (it would be interesting if you could find if there actually exist any philosopher who claims the subject is constitutively 'all', if only to disprove that Zizek isn't just shadow-boxing).

the whole point of Zizek's point is that a subject is defined by such a lack, in a similar way to Marx's species being, that is it's a 'nature' that is never at one with itself.

the notion of a complete subject has no meaning in Zizek's approach.

A complete subject according to Lacanian theory would enter into psychosis/madness, but you're right when you unwittingly repeat Robinson's critique, i.e., that Lacan cannot theorize psychosis.

But I'm not asking Lacan, I'm not asking Zizek. I'm asking YOU. Prove the complete subject. And if you're saying the subject is never complete, then I would respond that that's precisely what I've been saying.

You need to articulate the difference between a complete and a never-complete subject. Now you're just assuming everybody agrees that there is a difference and that everybody understands what that difference amounts to. Without a delineation of what the difference is, you're asking me to make a blindfolded ini-mini-miny-moe choice.