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The Tao of Žižek
Paul Bowman
Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself; Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself. (Zenrin Poem)
The Tao of Ideology
The list of contemporary books whose titles begin with the phrase ‘The Tao Of…’ is extensive, and growing. These books range from scholarly works to business manuals, via all kinds of self-help and pop psychology to clearly new age publications. In fact, the list of topics that allegedly have a Tao of their own now encompasses virtually every mainstream and marginal academic discipline as well as multiple (and – apparently – multiplying) cultural practices. There are Taos on topics that extend from the predictable to the preposterous, from the esoteric to the exoteric, and from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Apparently everything can be made into a book propounding this or that Tao: from the nooks of philosophy to the crannies of science (Watts 1995; Siu 1957), and from individual subsets of science to the relationships between ‘modern physics and eastern mysticism’ (Capra 1985), and beyond. Prominent are books on the Taos of this or that kind of human selfhood: from the Tao of the psychological subject (Bolen 1982) to Taos of the genders (Metz and Tobin 1996); from the Taos of competitive subjects (Landsberg 1996) to those of getting motivated (Landsberg
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2000); from the health-focused subject (Blate 1978) to Taos of work: there are Taos of business (Autry and Mitchell 1998), management (Messing 1989), and sales (Behr and Lao 1997). There are Taos of icons like Bruce Lee (Miller 2000) as well as Taos by them (selections from Bruce Lee’s notebooks have been posthumously published under the titles The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Lee 1975) and The Tao of Gung Fu (Lee and Little 1997)). There is also a Tao of Muhammad Ali (Miller 1997), and even a Tao of Islam (Murata 1992). There is also, of course, a Tao of Pooh (Hoff 1982).
As J. J. Clarke points out, the original and central text of Taoism, the Tao te Ching (a title that is usually taken to mean The Way of Virtue) has recently become ‘one of the most frequently translated of all the world’s classic texts, with over two hundred versions in seventeen different languages’ (Clerke 2000: 56). As the Tao te Ching itself might say, from this original Tao ‘the ten thousand things have sprung’: myriad translations, offshoots, books, manuals, practices and worldviews each characterized by some relation to Taoism have emerged. What is more, this does not even scratch the surface of the vast and immeasurable sea of publications and practices that entail strong Taoist-sounding
orientations and pretensions yet without explicitly shouting ‘Tao’ in their titles. Once more, prominent among these is the veritable torrent of management self-help books all heavily reliant on pseudo-Taoist tropes, of which Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and In Your Life is but one exemplary example (Johnson 1998).1
Quite why there is such a contemporary proliferation both of the ‘original’ Tao and of new Taos is debatable.2 But Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation is unequivocal: the emergence of Taoist and Buddhist worldviews is, he
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contends, a ‘spontaneous ideology’ (Žižek 2001: 216), an ideological response to the ‘new conditions’, in two crucial realms: that of science and that of the economy. That is, Žižek regards ‘Western Buddhism’ chiefly as a non-scientific response to science (a ‘supplement’), and ‘Western Taoism’ chiefly as a straightforwardly ideological response to the chaos caused by contemporary economic processes. This is the root of Žižek’s very obvious disdain for all things ‘New Age’ (Žižek 2000a; 2001; 2001a; 2005).
In fact, it is crucial to note that Žižek’s disdain for all things ‘New Age’ is much more than a ‘mere’ distaste. It is not any old distaste. Rather, to Žižek, this taste – the taste for all things New Age – is exemplarily ideological, in the most pejorative sense. Indeed, Žižek actually argues that the contemporary Western interest in and turn to ‘New Age “Asiatic” thought … in its different guises, from “Western Buddhism” … to different “Taos”, is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism’ (2001a: 12). In other words, for Žižek, the contemporary ‘Western’ engagement with the ‘mystical Oriental Other’ is far from an innocuous or insignificant matter. Rather, it is the exemplary ideological – and therefore fundamentally intellectual and political – problem of our time and place. This is because, to Žižek’s mind, the contemporary ‘Western’ recourse to Buddhism and Taoism is simply the perfect way to avoid intellectual, political and economic problems, by taking recourse to a fetishistic supplement:
‘Western Buddhism’ is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the belief that you are not really in it, that you are well aware of how worthless the spectacle is – what really matters is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw … as in the case of a
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Western Buddhist unaware that the ‘truth’ of his existence is the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game. (2001a: 15)
The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism
Above, not a tile to cover the head; Below, not an inch of ground for the foot. (Zenrin Poem)
All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned… (Marx and Engels 1967: 83)
Žižek offers this image of a meditating yuppie in order to claim that there is a widespread cultural growth of a vaguely Taoist-sounding ‘acceptance of change’ as the dominant ‘ideological attitude’. To Žižek’s mind, this arises because the contemporary experience of global capitalism tends to be that of ‘being thrown around by market forces’ (2001a: 116). He takes this to be definitive of the form of life under contemporary capitalism, owing to the turbulent effects of deregulated markets and chaotic international flows of capital. Because of this, Žižek argues that there is now a growing ideological injunction not to ‘cling’ to old forms and values. In these conditions, he suggests, other than a retreat into defensive fundamentalisms, a Taoist ethic presents itself as an ideal ideological option. However, Žižek’s point is that this ‘Western Taoist’ attitude is no solution to the problems of capitalism. In fact, for Žižek, this ‘celebration’ or resigned acceptance of unfixity, flow, and nonclinging, is nothing but the problem itself in inverted form, masquerading
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as (if) the solution. It is an active misrecognition of a problem as (if) a solution, one that presumably, to Žižek’s mind (although this is never really spelt out), facilitates the intensification of everyone’s exploitation.
The very high incidence of business-management or performativecapitalist titles in the list of books entitled The Tao of… (management, sales, motivation, competition, performance: results!), as well as the immediately palpable sense in which Taoism is very often taken to mean individualist laissez faire passivity passed off as enlightened
empowerment, certainly bolsters the Žižekian position (see Johnson 1998; Bowman 2003). As such, Žižek’s argument recasts contemporary interest in all things ‘New Age’ and ‘Oriental’ in a provocative new light. But what is the source of that light? And what are the implications of this particular perspective?
The answer is simple. Žižek’s entire argument is specifically designed to refute every other contemporary approach to understanding culture, society, politics and ideology than his own. The argument about New Age Taoism as ideology is primarily a key part in Žižek’s ongoing critique of ‘postmodernist relativism’, ‘deconstructionism’, identity politics,
multiculturalism and cultural studies (among others, as we will see). For, in recasting something so apparently innocuous, gentle, naturalistic, sweet and innocent as Taoism as ideological, Žižek seeks reciprocally to implicate any approach that might regard it as an interesting or beneficial ‘multicultural’ development or ‘encounter’. For Žižek, both the practice and any intellectual interest in it or approval of it are strictly ideological (Žižek 2001). Against this, rather than running with the multiculturalists, post-modernists or post-Marxists who might view the contemporary articulation of East and West as truly new, Žižek sees himself as remaining courageously faithful to the truth of Marxism
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(2001a: 33; 2002a: 308). Thus, he begins his argument about Western Buddhism and Taoism by finding a precedent in the work of Max Weber.
For Weber, Žižek reminds us, Protestantism was a necessary ideology of industrial stage capitalism. By the same token, proposes Žižek, Taoism, Buddhism and New Age mysticism are to be regarded as the necessary ideology of contemporary ‘postmodern’ capitalism. This is because, for Žižek, it’s like this: according to Weber, during the ‘industrial stage’, the religiously-informed work ethic of Protestantism (suffer now for rewards in the hereafter) guaranteed the discipline and active participation of the workforce. So, Žižek argues, Taoism and mysticism function in a similar way today: ‘If Max Weber were alive today’, he declares, ‘he would definitely write a second, supplementary volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism’ (2001a: 13). What defines the new spirit of capitalism is no longer the former need to embrace frugality, moderation, hardship and a sedulous work-ethic as virtues (as was the case during the ‘industrial stage’). Rather, today sees the new ‘need’ to actively embrace ceaseless change and rootlessness, because ‘being thrown around by market forces’ (116) is definitive of the contemporary era. Thus, not clinging to stable forms becomes a ‘virtue’, because it is the current way of capitalism. The way of ideology is the emergence of value systems produced to enable us to cope with – by in some sense ‘avoiding’ the truth of – real conditions.
For Žižek, the embracing of Taoism is recourse to an ideological ‘supplement’. It becomes a kind of fetish. Thus, in his signature psychoanalytic idiom, Žižek classes ‘Western Buddhism’ as a perfect example of a ‘fetishist mode of ideology’, in which the fetishistic attachment functions as ‘the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth’. It remains a kind of avoidance of the truth
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even though ‘fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly “realists”, able to accept the way things effectively are – since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality’ (2001a: 13-14).
Of course, there may be no ‘problem’ with such a crutch in itself. Surely, finding ways to cope with the contexts into which one is flung and within which one finds oneself is not only a necessary but also a good thing. But, implicitly at least, Žižek is concerned that in this ideological attitude the problem itself returns as (if) both virtue and solution. Also, it is expressed through the sentiments of it being a ‘good thing’ not to cling, and instead to move with the times, go with the flow, not expect stability, and just change with changes. Ultimately, ‘clinging’ itself is couched as a personal failing, a shortcoming, a psychological problem, and is rearticulated as if irrational (Johnson 1998; Bowman 2003). As Žižek formulates this: when ‘you can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage for which you have to pay’, the ideological injunction has become one in which you must ‘perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety’, he concludes, you are likely to be accused ‘of being unable to assume full freedom, […] of the immature sticking to old stable forms’ (2001a: 116). So, Žižek implies, ‘Taoist’ tropes help facilitate the re-presentation of what are in truth collective socio-economic and political problems as if they are individual and subjective matters.
In this regard, ‘Taoism’ could be said to facilitate the ethically and politically debilitating ideology of individualism. For, overall, Žižek’s argument is that the contemporary logic of capitalism demands that change become a virtue. (And Tao te Ching is mostly translated as Way of
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Virtue.) The necessary ideology is one that valorises change, makes it a virtue. But crucial here is that this is not active change. An ideology of the value of active change could lead to group action and fundamental socio-political change. Rather, passive change is what is demanded: passivity in the face of unquestioned change; rudderless change. (Again, Johnson 1998 is an exemplary case.) As Žižek concludes, when this is combined with ‘the ideology of the subject as the psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities and tendencies’, then everyone will tend to ‘automatically interpret all these changes as the result of my personality, not as the result of me being thrown around by market forces’ (2001a: 116). (Hence the utility of so many Taos about this or that essence of human selfhood. The ultimate Tao ‘to come’ would surely be best entitled The Tao of Sacking and Being Sacked.)
That is, Taoism becomes the order of the day not because it is true but simply because the virtually global advocation of free market capitalism means, as Marx and Engels prophesised, that:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, [that] all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify [and that] All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned. (Marx and Engels 1967: 83)
In contexts ‘outside’ of working life – and ironically particularly in contexts specifically intended to offer ways of escaping the stresses of working life – this New Age mysticism and spirituality arises as offering a very effective way of appearing to cope with working life. One may engage in t’ai chi-ch’üan, chi-gung, yoga or meditative practices as escape, release, or respite. But, says Žižek, ‘the “Western Buddhist” meditative
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stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity’ (2001a: 13). So, even though ‘“Western Buddhism” presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement’ (12). For Žižek, the way of capitalist ideology is the way of the fetishistic and mystificatory ideological supplement, which closes down the possibility for sustained thought and collective political action.
The Way of the Supplement
As Žižek sees it, this mystificatory supplement springs up everywhere – even where one would expect it least, and where it should be least welcome: namely, in putatively rational intellectual and academic contexts, contexts that explicitly champion science. In the scientific realm, he contends, such radical developments as quantum physics and astrophysics introduce a deeply disturbing ontological complexity and undecidability into traditional notions of reality. This is so much so that what he calls the ‘dominant’, ‘traditional’, ‘positivist’ and ‘cognitivist’ approaches cannot grasp contemporary science’s transformed notions of reality. Thus, he claims, vaguely Buddhist ‘spiritualist’ interpretations have sprung up to supplement conventional rationality’s lack of ability to interpret current scientific theory, practice, and findings.
Žižek claims that the problem is that ‘the moment one wants to provide an ontological account of quantum physics (what notion of reality fits its results), paradoxes emerge which undermine standard common-sense scientistic objectivism’ (2001: 217). As a consequence, ‘contemporary cognitivism often produce[s] formulations that sound uncannily familiar
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to those who are acquainted with different versions of ancient and modern philosophy, from the Buddhist notion of the Void, and the German Idealist notion of “being-in-the-world”, [to] the deconstructionist notion of différance’ (2001: 200), and ultimately to the situation wherein:
from David Bohm to Fritjof Capra, examples abound of different versions of ‘dancing Wu Li masters’, teaching us about the Tao of physics, the ‘end of the Cartesian paradigm’, the significance of the anthropic principle and the holistic approach, and so on. To avoid any misunderstanding: as an old fashioned dialectical materialist, I am opposed as ferociously as possible to these obscurantist
appropriations of quantum physics and astronomy; all I claim is that these obscurantist shoots are not simply imposed from outside, but function as what Louis Althusser would have called a ‘spontaneous ideology’ of scientists themselves, as a kind of spiritualist supplement to the predominant reductionist-proceduralist attitude of ‘only what can be precisely measured counts’. (216)
So, Žižek claims that the ‘standard common-sense scientistic objectivism’ of mainstream scholarship resists acknowledging the fact that its own central ontological premises and tenets about reality are ‘naïve’, and have been demonstrably undermined by science itself. Because such
developments as quantum mechanics cannot be translated into the ‘dominant’ ways of understanding what counts as reality, Žižek’s argument is that ‘obscurantist’ ‘spiritualist’ interpretations spring up to supplement them at their points of failure and inadequacy. These supplements are attempts to plug the holes in a dominant paradigm that really should be rejected tout court. But the ‘spiritualist supplement’ supports – maintains – the dominant view by fudging over or obscuring its limitations, its failures. Žižek’s claim, then, is that because the spiritual is of an entirely different order to the rational or scientific, and
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indeed to knowledge per se, then recourse to the ‘spiritualist supplement’ is utterly at odds with knowledge as such. Any recourse to ‘spiritualist’ accounts of ontology by avowedly ‘rational’ thinkers is, for Žižek, deeply self-contradictory. It has happened because commonsense rationality cannot comprehend the truth approached by science, so it hides its inability by making a pathetic recourse to a spiritualist mumbo-jumbo. This is why he regards ‘obscurantist New Age ideology is an immanent outgrowth of modern science itself’ (216).
So, Žižek regards any unscientific supplement to science to be evidence of a (dominant) form of rationality transgressing its own central (Enlightenment) premises. Recourse to a ‘spiritualist supplement’ means, for Žižek, that any ‘interpretations’ made on the strength of this supplement are actually anti-intellectual non-interpretations. The
spiritualist supplement not only answers nothing, it actually works to close down rigorous ontological inquiry. It is also, once again, the return of the problem as if a solution. Accordingly, as Žižek implies, any such supplement that operates like this, to close down thinking and analysis, is to be identified and rejected.3
For, to Žižek, the supplement is that which seems to stabilise something, seems to answer a question, seems to fix a problem, fill a hole, etc.; but which actually subverts the entire system that it initially seemed to support. In this, Žižek directly appropriates and form(ulaic)ally applies Derrida’s trailblazing analysis and account of the work of supplements (Derrida 1976). Here, Žižek identifies the ‘Western Buddhist’ ideological supplement in the realm of academia as a ‘red herring’ that actually operates to close down thinking and analysis, and the vaguely ‘Taoist’ stance as the general contemporary ideological supplement, which operates to close down thinking and anti-capitalist politics. Because of
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this, Žižek claims to be explicitly opposed to anything that functions as a ‘denkverbot’ or implicit or explicit ‘prohibition’ against thought (Žižek 2001: 3). Indeed, Žižek claims to be opposed to any and all ‘obscurantism’. So it must also be asked whether Žižek is exempt from doing anything as suspect as operating in a way that might close down thinking and analysis, or from any obscurantist supplements.
The Tao of Hegemony
One obvious way to broach this question is merely to ask: is Žižek’s argument correct? At times it seems persuasive, but on what model of causality is it premised, and is this model or paradigm sound? Does it think and analyse everything, or does it rely on any unthought or even obscurantist supplements?
The first thing that must be made clear is that Žižek’s account hinges on a very particular conception of ideology. It also bundles heterogeneous practices together, claims that they constitute a coherent entity or collection of equivalent entities, and claims that this object or field is the ‘hegemonic ideology of global capitalism’. Already there may be much to doubt here. One might merely ask, for instance, what grounds there are for accepting that there is ‘ideology’, or that ‘it’ is what Žižek says it is, or that ‘this’ is ‘it’. But we are not all at sea here. These are not ‘abstract’ questions to be subjected to supposedly context-free, value-free
interrogation. For Žižek speaks of ‘hegemonic ideology’, and makes reference and appeal to some ostensibly legitimating truth of Marxism. Now, it is unquestionably the case that any academic or intellectual usage of the term ‘hegemonic’ necessarily evokes Antonio Gramsci’s seminal theorisation of culture and society (Gramsci 1971). This is never
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more so than when the term ‘hegemonic’ arises in a Marxist text. Indeed, here, the passage through Gramsci is overdetermined. Thus, we ought to tarry a while, and unpack Žižek’s phrase ‘hegemonic ideology’.
In the wake of Gramsci, whatever is called hegemonic (from the Greek hegemon, meaning prince, leader or guide) is to be regarded as being of both ethical and political significance and consequence. This is because, in Gramsci’s paradigm, the discourses and practices that permeate and constitute society, culture and politics, are involved in ‘discursive’ (i.e., open-ended, contingent, quasi-‘conversational’ institutional) processes, wherein parties and ideologies:
come into confrontation and conflict, until one of them or at least a combination of them tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself throughout society – bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, a ‘universal’ plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental group over a series of subordinate groups. (Gramsci 1971: 181-182)
This does not sit entirely comfortably with Žižek’s use of the term ‘hegemonic ideology’. For, a key point that the avowedly Gramscian theorists Laclau and Mouffe (1985) extracted from Gramsci’s perspective is the insight that therefore culture and society are thoroughly contingent and political achievements in and of themselves. They are not passive expressions of the ‘economic infrastructure’ or indeed the ‘economic base’ (which is what Žižek’s theory of Taoism-as-ideology implies). Indeed, in Gramsci and in Laclau and Mouffe (and beyond), ‘hegemony’ is clearly at odds with the paradigm that Žižek uses to make his claim about ‘ideology’. This is because Žižek uses a paradigm that is now often termed ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ Marxism. Its central claim is that the ‘economic base’ (capitalism) determines the ‘ideological superstructure’ (the beliefs
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and practices of culture and society). The problematic difference between Žižek’s and the Gramscian (and Laclauian) understandings of hegemony is that, for Žižek, hegemony is something that is simply ideological, in the sense that it all ‘grows out from’ and sits on top of the economic base, which is the driving force of everything.
In contrast to Žižek’s usage, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the economic cannot be divorced from the political. What this means becomes apparent when one translates Laclau and Mouffe’s terms back into those of the crude Marxism that they reject. In this retranslation, any transformation in the ‘ideological superstructure’ may well have effects on the ‘economic base’, because base and superstructure are no longer conceived of as separable, but rather as contingent political establishments and constellations in the larger discursive movements of history. In other words, the notion of hegemony subverts the ‘ideology’ (and) paradigm of crude Marxism, in which the superstructure is regarded as distinct from yet determined by the economic base. In the post-Marxist theory of hegemony, in fact, there is no fundamentally distinct base and superstructure, only contingent political establishments, which will take the form of different forms of socio-political arrangements. Human life is not a passive reflection of economic dictates. It can and does intervene decisively into ‘the economic system’.4
The Way of Changeless Change: Žižek’s Limit Problem
But Žižek does not accept the Laclauian argument about hegemony, nor does he accept the efficacy or even the reality of politics construed as changes in legislation, inter-institutional organisation, or anything ‘pragmatic’ like that. Indeed, he refers to every such kind of nonrevolutionary politics as proof of ‘the sad predicament of today’s Left’.
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This he says is characterised by ‘the acceptance of the Cultural Wars (feminist, gay, anti-racist, etc., multiculturalist struggles) as the dominant terrain of emancipatory politics; [and] the purely defensive stance of protecting the achievements of the Welfare State’ (Žižek 2002a: 308). To this impulse in Žižek’s work, Laclau replies: because Žižek ‘refuses to accept the aims of all contestatory movements in the name of pure anti-capitalist struggle, one is left wondering: who for him are the agents of a historical transformation? Martians, perhaps?’ (Laclau 2004: 327).
The point here is that the theory of hegemony construes society (including the economy) as consisting of contingent political constructs which can be intervened into and altered to effect significant alteration. Žižek, on the contrary, regards such change as ‘intra-systemic’, as obscuring and preserving ‘a certain limit’ (Žižek 2002: 170; Laclau 2000: 205). Thus, he argues, even efforts ‘like Médecins sans frontières, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns … are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach on economic territory (for example, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions, or use child labour) – they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit’ (2002: 170). What is this ‘limit’? Žižek explains:
This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, Politically Correct, etc., activity fits the formula of ‘Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!’ (170)
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This ‘formula’ is Žižek’s interpretation of politics under capitalism. Thus, what ‘invisibly’ remains the same is the way of capital per se. Žižek calls this the unseen ‘backdrop’, the unacknowledged ‘horizon’, the
unapproachable ‘limit’. He has even argued that there is a ‘silent prohibition’ against even talking about anticapitalism or undertaking class analysis in the contemporary university. (The fact that this is demonstrably false, especially for UK universities, does not stop him from regularly making this polemical claim. He makes it mainly to try to provoke American intellectuals to start to construe ‘capitalism’ as ‘the problem itself’.) In other words, quite against Laclau who exemplifies the tendency to regard the organisation of culture and society as the result of fundamentally consequential socio-political ‘battles’, Žižek regards all of this as the simple imposition of a particular ideology determined by an agenda set by the requirements of ‘global capitalism’, in an automatic process. This is what leads him to regard all politics (other than globally revolutionary anti-capitalist ‘class’ politics) as blind to their own ‘context’ – what he calls the ‘backdrop’ or ‘horizon’: The Capitalist System. For ‘backdrop’ and ‘horizon’ one cannot but read ‘economic base’ (Laclau 2005: 205). Thus, ultimately, Žižek’s vision of Taoism as/and ideology has been produced by a crude base/superstructure model of the world. In this, the hegemon that guides ideology is not a prince but a straightforward henchman; not a leader or guide in any sense, but a collaborator, in the service of the capitalist ‘economic infrastructure’ (Žižek 2001a: 12).
That being said, what nevertheless makes Žižek’s rejection of politics strangely consistent and apparently (paradoxically) ‘valid’ is the fact that he does not actually think that the majority of the world are subjugated and controlled by actual groups or classes. Or, that is: even if people are subjugated by other people, by particular groups, the buck does not stop
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there. On the contrary, for Žižek, the problem is strictly ‘systemic’. The problem with capitalism is not capitalists. The true problem is the system. His conviction is that what is leading and guiding and controlling all of us today is the invisible hand of the capitalist system itself. So, for Žižek, the universal/class enemy is not some actual or fixed class or group of people ‘in control’. Rather, what Žižek deems to be ‘in control’ is a machinic system (Žižek 2001: 1-2). This is why Žižek can claim simultaneously that ‘the fundamental antagonism’ is ‘the class antagonism’ and that there is no ‘authentic working class’ (2002: 308). That is, because the problem is systemic or structural, then every actual instance of its realisation is asymptotic to the real of the structure that it (never quite) exemplifies.
This ‘system’ or ‘structure’, construed through an ultra-formalist perspective is the problem, for Žižek (2002: 308). It is also the problem of Žižek, in the sense that his hyperbolically ‘consistent’ ultra-political stance must paradoxically reject all forms of politics other than something he conceives of as complete ‘systemic’ global anti-capitalist revolution (2002: 170). His polemical target is a perceived contemporary ‘consensus’ (that he regards as ‘resigned and cynical’) that capitalism is ‘the only game in town’ (2000: 95). From this perspective, all nonrevolutionary or non-anti-capitalist theory and practice cannot see the changeless ‘backdrop’ to its own activity: capitalism, the horizon within which all actually-existing politics drone on, but always avoiding ‘the problem itself’. This is why Žižek accuses contemporary cultural, intellectual and political life of having fallen all but entirely under the sway of capitalism. He portrays ‘capitalism’ and its liberal or neoliberal ideology as the total and universal backdrop against or within which things appear to change but fundamentally remain the same.
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But, just to be clear, the basic problem here remains that this very position arises only through the optic of what Laclau calls a very ‘crude version of the base/superstructure model’ (Laclau 2000: 205). Adopted in the name of furthering radical politics, it paradoxically rejects all politics, because none could possibly hope to measure up to the impossibly total demands generated by such a caricatural and hyperbolic paradigm. It ‘totalizes’ everything (‘the global capitalist system’), and so precludes the value of specific action. In insisting on inferred fundamental (‘ontological’ or ‘Real’) structures it refuses even to look at any significant aspect actually existing (‘ontic’) reality. In insisting on radical politics, it even prohibits working out what valid political action might be. (It merely evokes some enigmatic kind of universal spontaneous political
combustion). In fact, Žižek’s totalising leads to a prohibition of any analysis.
This is because Žižek’s polemical gestures levy a very heavy rhetorical and analytical toll. In order to make them, Žižek cannot analyse or question his own central categories (the notions he champions or denounces). This is so much the case that, rather than treating ‘neoliberalism’ (for example) as a complex, historically real, deliberately implemented geopolitical economic ‘experiment’ of ongoing, piecemeal, pragmatic, legislative violence (Kingsnorth 2000), Žižek merely picks up some familiar emotive terms – ‘capitalism’, ‘the system’ – and deploys them as if they are already fully understood and as if they simply must be taken to be millenarian signifiers of pure evil. In short, ‘capitalism’, ‘liberalism’, etc., function within Žižek’s discourse purely as emotive rhetorical devices, whilst being analytically empty (not to mention often categorically dubious). That is, on the one hand, these terms are irreducible, central to his discourse: they actually overdetermine, constitute, and orientate the shape and form of his intellectual
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production through and through. But, on the other hand (and unfortunately for anyone concerned with knowledge, analysis, or politics), they also signal the limit of his thought. ‘Capitalism’ is the central, fundamental point beyond which Žižek cannot or will not go; something that a Rortyan perspective might regard as Žižek’s ‘final vocabulary’: the tautological start and end-point of his discourse; as if the entire political dimension of the work of Žižek consists in the repetition of the following mantra or koan: ‘What is the problem? Capitalism. What is capitalism? The problem.’
The Tao of Holding the Place
The reasons for Žižek’s refusal to analyse are certainly multiple. But they hinge on his avowed aim of ‘holding the place’ (Žižek 2000). He sees it as his intellectual responsibility to keep ‘radical’ theoretical and political themes on the table of public intellectual debate. As we have seen, in the cultural and political dimension, for Žižek this basically means maintaining a crude Marxian mantra. This is because, as he sees it, he is actually being courageous by resolutely not losing his nerve, ‘in a time of continuous rapid changes’ when ‘the retreat of old social forms’ means that ‘thought is more than ever exposed to the temptation of “losing its nerve”, of precociously abandoning the old conceptual coordinates’ (2001a). As he rather surprisingly alleges, even ‘The media constantly bombards us with the need to abandon the “old paradigms”’.5 But, he counters: ‘Against this temptation, one should rather follow the unsurpassed model of Pascal and ask the difficult question: how are we to remain faithful to the Old in the new conditions? Only in this way can we generate something effectively New’ (2001a: 32-33). This is Žižek’s wager, Žižek’s act: rejection of the way of capitalism; holding the place of
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the old against ‘today’s twin brothers of deconstructionist sophistry and New Age obscurantism’ (1998: 1,007), and against ‘capitulation itself’ (2002: 308), the position of ‘Third Way’ ideologues, like Giddens or Beck, and all who do not vociferously oppose capitalism.
What is particularly striking, however, is the way that the rhetorical ‘points de capiton’ that structure Žižek’s texts – signifiers like ‘capitalism’, ‘the system’, ‘anticapitalism’, ‘revolution’ – are entirely hypostatized place-holders. That is, they are never specified further. Indeed, one might say, within Žižek’s discourse, his key categories are supplements, in an almost exemplary sense.6 And they do exactly the same kind of work as the recourse to spiritualism that he criticises in his object of critique. His key categories are uninterrogated ‘pegs’; ‘pins’, whose removal would cause his text to unravel entirely. But,
furthermore, these place-holders are actually elevated to something very like the status of the figure of the ‘the eternal Tao’ in the Tao te Ching. In deconstructive terms, this means that the central categories of Žižek’s system are actually radically external to it, strangely excluded from it. They are there on full show, yet concealed from inspection. Placing them on full show is actually the way Žižek conceals them from inspection. To echo Žižek’s ‘formula’ of the nonpolitics of politics, his approach is thus: ‘Let’s go on talking about something all the time so as to avoid talking about it’ (See Žižek 2002: 170, quoted above). This rhetorical
(anti)analytical strategy puts Žižek’s entire approach on a par with the very style of mystificatory (non)engagement and intellectual failure that he critiques as being the move of the ‘hegemonic ideology of global capitalism’.
Does this mean that the way of Žižek is somehow a manifestation of the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism? This would be the deepest irony,
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given Žižek’s explicit declaration to try to ‘remain faithful to the Old in the new conditions’. The problem is that his (e)very effort to move involves tying his laces together. Every possible theoretical or political move meets one of his own unnecessary self-imposed puritanical ‘prohibitions’ (2001: 204-5, 220). The most striking is perhaps the refusal to question the supposedly ‘old’ paradigm itself, in the name of ‘remaining faithful’ to it. This amounts to the advocation of an antitheoretical and straightforwardly anti-intellectual, quasi-religious or spiritualist ‘denkverbot’ or ‘prohibition against thinking’ (2001: 3).
Of course, such a strangely paranoid defensive reaction might – possibly – but only tentatively, and forever only tenuously – sometimes – be strategically justifiable in the context of Žižek’s claim that he sees his role and intellectual contribution to be that of ‘holding the place’, of keeping traditional radical political questions and perspectives on the agenda, so to speak, lest we forget. But there are many other, more honest, intellectually open ways to do this than simply refusing to think, theorise, and analyse. But, even if as an intellectual, philosopher, theorist or academic one could possibly decide something like ‘it’s not how crude it is but what you do with it that counts’, the problem remains that Žižek refuses to do anything with his crude paradigm. He refuses to question, interrogate or analyse anything to do with the supposedly determinant ‘base’ at all. This refusal begs a question of the point of analysing anything, especially anything in or of the superstructure. In other words, Žižek does not do with the paradigm the very thing that the paradigm is supposedly set up to do, the very thing it seems to demand and that he implicitly most advocates. That is, as ‘the economy’ is placed in a determinant position, one might expect some analysis of it – perhaps of consequential moments, movements, acts, interventions or events that have taken place in the determinant realm. But this never appears. This
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is because any attempt at such analysis would reveal the economic system to be contingently and politically instituted and modifiable, thus revealing the inadequacy and untenability of his paradigm and his entire position (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 2004).7
Thus, Žižek’s own position is strictly fetishistic. According to his own argument, this makes Žižek entirely consistent with the logic of contemporary capitalism. As a ‘position’, Žižek’s work straightforwardly relies upon the logic of the supplement. It falls apart according to that same logic too. But Žižek does not care, because although he relies upon the deconstructive supplement, his work proceeds according to the psychoanalytic logic of the fetish. Thus, his mantras enable him to ‘fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the belief that [he is] not really in it, that [he is] well aware of how worthless the spectacle is … unaware that the “truth” of his existence is the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game’ (Žižek 2001a: 15).
For Žižek, the name of the game is ‘holding the place’. This relies on ‘place holders’: repeated evocations of the names of problematics as if naming them is everything. Naming is both to gesture to and yet thereby bracket off, silence, close down analysis, in the same gesture. This is a structure of foreclosure and denial in which what apparently holds the structure in place actually lacks any possible content. Were the supplements – the place holders – engaged, fleshed out, the structure would collapse. Žižek joyously ignores this untenable incoherence because he obeys his fetish: ‘I know very well [that what I am saying is untenable and empty], but nevertheless [I will continue to say it – because I enjoy it/it enables me to ‘face’ things]…’. So what? Who cares? The issue here, as Žižek so completely demonstrates, is that this gesture
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is anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual, anti-philosophical, anti-analytical and anti-political – indeed, arguably exemplifying the very ideological, intellectual and political problem of our time and place.
Notes
1
For an engagement with Who Moved My Cheese? and the discourse it
typifies, see Bowman 2003.
2
According to Clarke, ‘There are various possible reasons for its wide
appeal. One is the protean quality of the text, namely its readiness, as one writer puts it somewhat cynically, to “furnish whatever the reader needs”, a factor which gives it “an immense advantage over books written so clearly that they have only one meaning”’ (Clarke 2000: 56). Of course, no text will ever ‘have only one meaning’. The endless proliferation of translations of the Tao te Ching may merely testify to the fact that the Tao that can and will be translated is never going to be the final translation, because ‘translation’ is one version of the question of ‘interpretation’, and every interpretation of any text is never going to be the final interpretation. Texts are read in contexts, and contexts cannot be exactly the same twice. Pragmatic problems of translation can themselves be referred back to the fundamental problem of interpretation (Zhang 1992; Derrida 1992; Mowitt 2992).
3
His ultimate argument, of course, is that ‘standard common-sense
scientistic objectivism’ needs to be replaced, because it is intellectually naïve and ideologically unsound – because it cannot handle ‘the real’. To his mind, his own Lacanian paradigm is the answer, the solution, the best candidate for the job of understanding all realms and registers of reality (from the ‘impossible Real’ which cannot be directly apprehended,
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to the failed attempts to approach it in the ‘symbolic order’; to, in fact, all other aspects of the human condition).
4
As Laclau puts it, in response to Žižek’s criticisms of post-structuralism
and post-Marxism: ‘Nobody seriously denies [the centrality of economic processes in capitalist societies]. The difficulties come when [Žižek] transforms “the economy” into a self-defined homogeneous instance operating as the ground of society – when, that is, he reduces it to a Hegelian explanatory model. The truth of the economy is, like anything else in society, the locus of an overdetermination of social logics, and its centrality is the result of the obvious fact that the material reproduction of society has more repercussions for social processes than do other instances. This does not mean that capitalist reproduction can be reduced to a single, self-defining mechanism’ (Laclau 2005: 237).
5
Quite which media it is that ‘constantly bombards’ Žižek with such
intellectually stimulating provocations is – regrettably – left unsaid. If he had named them, I for one would be tuning in.
6
Indeed, more than Žižek’s use of the deconstructive notion of the
supplement, his fundamental reliance on it should be noted. For, he both relies on the supplement in many of his arguments, and yet disavows deconstruction. This means that, here, deconstruction is literally Žižek’s own supplement. In Derrida’s analyses, this is precisely what a supplement is: that which is simultaneously central and excluded; something apparently only ‘added on’ but actually fundamental, constitutive; something disavowed yet relied upon. What becomes apparent in reading Žižek is that deconstruction is subordinated or even excluded by his own avowed position, yet nevertheless central to it. Furthermore, the very fact that he always deploys the notion of the
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supplement so formalistically and formulaically (and without any actual ‘reading’) actually means that Žižek himself seems to be the best example of a ‘deconstructionist’ – or the sort of proponent of formulaic deconstruction that he regularly denounces – to be found.
7
Žižek’s argument in his analysis of Lenin is a case in point (Žižek 2002).
Here Žižek effectively argues for the primacy of the political intervention over the ‘economic system’.
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