Slavoj Žižek
Another Carl, the one at Raincoat Optimism, wrote this week about the possible application to "Red Toryism" of Slavoj Žižek's ideas about violence:
Early in 2008, philosopher Slavoj Žižek published a book entitled Violence: Six Sideways Reflections in which he aims to describe the differences between the violence we might see on the news in the form of thuggery and the violence incurred by the workings of the rogue bankers tweaking the economy. The difference, for Žižek, is the difference between “subjective” and “objective” violence. That is to say, “subjective” violence is the perceptibly obvious violence seen on the streets in the form of “crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict” whereas “objective” violence is the unseen form of violence that takes the form of either the “symbolic” (bound in language and its forms), or the “systemic” (the catastrophic consequences of our economy when it is functioning as normal). The very notion that this objective violence is unseen sustains the level with which we perceive something as subjectively violent.
I'm not really convinced by the Raincoat Optimist's application of this opposition to Red Toryism: he implies that just as Žižek's visible, subjective violence masks a deeper, more real but less visible violence, so Red Toryism's surface compassion masks a deep right-wing savagery. But of course the point of the rhetoric of compassionate Conservatism is to persuade us that radical social policies really are compassionate rather than savage. Just because Carl isn't convinced doesn't mean there's anything sinister in Red Tories trying to claim compassion for themselves. What interests me more, though, is whether anything Slavoj Žižek says or writes can sensibly be applied in any serious political context, and how it is that he has come to fascinate and beguile people.
Let's take this idea about violence. First, it isn't Žižek's idea at all. The idea that the systematic exploitation of the poor by the rich is a form of violence is an ancient Marxist standard, and something I remember leftist friends of mine saying twenty years ago and more. It has been revived most recently in 2007 by Naomi Klein, and Žižek has kept it warm long enough to produce another book. I understand why people protest about the way the world works - how people in poor countries are exploited by the better off so as to produce cheap clothes and commodities, sometimes at the risk of their health and lives, and how poor people at home are paying the price in unemployment of the banks' recklessness and the asset boom that made the middle class feel rich. I admire writers like Naomi Klein for doing the legwork of researching and showing how the system operates so that we have to face the truth of our world. But to stress the importance of injustice by renaming it "violence" is merely a rhetorical trick. It has no real significance but has the attraction, in common with many of the rhetorical strategies of postmodernist philosophers and cultural "theorists", of seeming to say something radical.
Žižek has a relatively serious side. You see it here when among Marxists, he argues for revolutionary politics today, in a way. I think. By the way, it's very interesting to see him, towards the end, defend himself against (presumably) accusations of sexism for having used a joke about rape.
But I think his serious side is unattractive. Take his latest piece in the LRB in which he argues - well, what does he argue? That Mousavi in Iran isn't a western-style reformer, and that Berlusconi is an authoritarian capitalist leader pioneering a type of pseudo-democracy that is spreading from Asia through Russia to the west. Well, he's right to be wary of Berlusconi, but wrong I think if he thinks Britain, Germany and the US are about to be Putinised or Berlusconied. I don't think he's saying a great deal apart from that, to be honest. But much of what he does say shows not so much a fear for liberal, western-style democracy, but a pleasure in undermining and debunking it:
... in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.
He seems to me to be wishing for something else. Or take this 2007 piece in the LRB in which he seems to praise Hugo Chávez:
It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And... he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed...
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