Zizek's Leninism

henrymiller

Well-known member
With his edition of Lenin's 1917 writings and the long essay on Lukacs, not to mention his appeals to St Paul, Zizek has surely been trying to reintroduce the idea of activism into academic Marxism.

And yet here he is in 'Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle':

"Today's predicament is that, if we succumb to the urge of directly 'doing something' (engaging with the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor), we will certainly and undoubtedly contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to 'do nothing' * thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity."

He's been taken to task for this here.

Recently he wrote in the Guardian of:

"the 'prattling classes', academics and journalists with no solid professional education, usually working in humanities with some vague French postmodern leanings, specialists in everything, prone to verbal radicalism, in love with paradoxical formulations that flatly contradict the obvious. When faced with fundamental liberal-democratic tenets, they display a breathtaking talent to unearth hidden traps of domination. When faced with an attack on these tenets, they display a no less breathtaking ability to discover emancipatory potential in it."

A neat way of pre-empting such critiques, but not without a certain truth, as he admitted.

Is this vacilation or yet another of these 'paradixocal formulations'? Zizek is a Marxist, which allows for little in the way of ambiguity on the key question of agency -- as Zizek himself has argued in his essays on the Bolsheviks.

What's the deal, then?
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Yes, I think about this a great deal.

I take it that Zizek is interested in Lenin primarily because his was not only a theory of action, but a theory that produced, and was continually being informed by, action. Isn't that partly why he excoriates anti-capitalism? It is action, but action informed by non-existent or naive theory. Zizek is surely right that the anti-capitalist movement has been, in the main, fatuous and facile - it makes the fundamental, embarrassing error of treating Capital as if it were a human-faced foe that can be persuaded of its essential wrongdoing and reformed; as if unicycling, street theatre and a few 'insights' from Chomsky (newsflash: American Foreign Policy is corrupt and self-serving! No shit, professor...) will bring capital to its knees.

But there is a frustrating gap in Zizek's own theory - what does he want? What is he envisaging? Not a return to state socialism, for sure (even though he is right to point out the ways in which it was, in many ways, nowhere near as bad as it has been painted in capitalism's end of history propaganda).

What IS left for those who don't want to simply engage in reproduction of the system. There are certainly a number of dangers/ temptations:

1. The lure of the micropolitical. The conviction that all energies should be devoted to the ultralocal (perhaps on the grounds that 'everything is political' or that there is no point engaging with the State at any level).

2. Psychedelic fascism. The view that there is no point engaging with politics at any form and that we simply need to rebuild our perceptions of the world (perhaps by taking drugs in the woods).

3. Redemptive teleological revolutionism. The view that nothing is worh doing unless it contributes to a total revolution, which will change and redeem everything.

What , then, are the positive alternatives?

Perhaps this is one area in which Badiou is clearly superior to Zizek. In the interview with Peter Hallward in the Ethics book, he argues that is no longer enough to simply ignore the state; politics has to proceed by making certain demands of the state, even if this is clearly not nearly sufficient. Surely there are unprecedented opportunities for global collectivity: if capital is genuinely global it produces, for the first time, the possibility of a genuinely global proletariat. (The role of the internet cannot be underestimated here.) Badiou is surely right that we have to start from local situations, but it is crucial not to remain there. In fact, the only way to handle local struggles effectively is to link them up to a universal struggle.

Again, though, it is far easier to see what we are struggling AGAINST than what we are struggling for. But I guess this is gap, this space, is an opportunity....
 

bat020

Active member
Zizek was asked what sort of alternative to capitalism he'd like to see in an interview a couple of years ago with Haaretz. He replied: "There's the puzzle. I would say, a new version of what was once called socialism."

Personally I think it's expecting too much for a philosopher-critic, no matter how ingenious, to supply a political solution. Such a solution can only emerge from the political field itself (which is why I don't think one should stand aloof from the global justice movement, its weaknesses notwithstanding).

What I like about Zizek is that when he encounters an aporia in his own thinking, he doesn't just fret and utter pieties about complicated and difficult it all is, he jumps in with gusto and makes all sorts of plainly contradictory attempts to resolve the issue. As Lenin said: "We Bolsheviks made *all* the mistakes."
 

john eden

male pale and stale
bat020 said:
As Lenin said: "We Bolsheviks made *all* the mistakes."

At last, some Lenin that I agree with and that Leninists do faithfully carry out to this day! :p

I think Mark's list is very good. I have (mainly!) opted for number 1, but I would say that the state and national/international issues can and do occur on a micro local level... knowing your limitations is not a bod place to start, either...
 

bat020

Active member
john eden said:
knowing your limitations is not a bad place to start

It's a dreadful place to start. For starters it's a recipe for reaction and timidity. And more pertinently, you cannot know what your limits are unless you try to break them.

Nice to bump in to you again, btw, anyone else from the old UKD crew around apart from you and meme?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
over-reaching yourself is also dangerous tho?

In terms of limits, I think I've seen so many people trying to do massive things and failing, and then trying to do other massive things and failing (for what I see as the same reasons) that it's good to get back to square one and grow exponentionally from there - particularly if you are able to evaluate what you are doing and be self-critical, which is something anti-capitalists (and indeed much of "the left") is terrible at. I test my limits every time I do something new... that's how I know what they are!

and yes, isn't it?

Marc D is here as bassnation... Matt B is probably after your time on uk-d. Possibly others under a bewildering array of pseudonyms... ;)
 

bat020

Active member
john eden said:
over-reaching yourself is also dangerous tho?

Yes. Doing anything worthwhile involves a risk. And as you say, learning how to be self-critical is essential. I don't think the left's failures in this respect are down to some sort of psychological blindspot, I think it's down to the fact that achieving something worthwhile is perforce *difficult*.

I test my limits every time I do something new... that's how I know what they are!

Ah, but my point is that your knowledge comes *after* your action. So you don't learn what your limits *are*, you learn what they *were*. And this temporal mismatch - that you are never truly self-present - lies at the heart of subjective freedom, it's what allows you to "do something new".
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
john eden said:
knowing your limitations is not a bad place to start, either...

I agree with Bat; is there a worse place to start than this? For a start, aren't all the important transformative political questions begged: to wit, isn't politics about changing 'you' and therefore redefining what counts as a limitation?

Perhaps the greatest thing that Zizek, Badiou and Zupancic have done is to absolutely cane the depressive pomo cult of 'limits'. In some ways, this can be seen as a shift from the Deleuze of micropoltics to the Spinozist Deleuze who insists that no-one knows what a body can do.

Bat, I'm sympathetic to your idea that philosophers shouldn't have ALL the answers, but isn't the idea that the really important answerrs have to be experimentally resolved on the ground a bit of a cop-out? There must be a feedback between theory and practice surely?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
k-punk said:
Bat, I'm sympathetic to your idea that philosophers shouldn't have ALL the answers, but isn't the idea that the really important answerrs have to be experimentally resolved on the ground a bit of a cop-out? There must be a feedback between theory and practice surely?

What is philosophers' practice? I'm happy to absorb wacky ideas from all over the place, but I do think that, on their own, they are less useful than (wacky or not) ideas which have been informed by practice which resonates with my own. We should be as suspicious of philosphers with no practice as of activists with no critique...

As for limits, perhaps we mean different things. It seems self-evident to me that the left is in a right old state and there is a general lack of working class combativity (compared at least to the 70s, or even mid 80s, for example - or basically any time in my lifetime). Given that, surely it would ludicrous to behave as if we were in the period immediately before a revolutionary upsurge?

Clearly, whatever I do changes me anyway - so I am not arguing for a narrowing of perspectives but using tactics appropriate to the time we are living in. Of course there is always the danger that I am in denial about all this and in fact things are loads better than I think they are, and there are almost infinite possibilities for imminent communism. But on the other hand, it may be just as limiting (in terms of results, or burn-out) to proclaim that "there's no leemiiiiits!" and then run around like a blue-arsed fly shouting from the rooftops, but achieving nothing.

As ever, Bat has lost me about 3 posts in - this time with all the time-travel stuff! :) If I fully accepted that there were no limitations to what I could do I'm not sure I would get anything done, there has to be some sort of prioritisation or filtering, yes?
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
But the point is not that there are NO limits, but we simply don't KNOW what the limits in any given situation will be. The 'time trave'l idea is simply that we can only know what the limits WERE... that is, you only have knowledge after the fact. You will and can never know what you are, you can only know what you were. But action, if it is novel, if that is to say, it is really action in any meaningful sense, exceeds the knowable.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
k-punk said:
But the point is not that there are NO limits, but we simply don't KNOW what the limits in any given situation will be. The 'time trave'l idea is simply that we can only know what the limits WERE... that is, you only have knowledge after the fact. You will and can never know what you are, you can only know what you were. But action, if it is novel, if that is to say, it is really action in any meaningful sense, exceeds the knowable.

This sounds like it's getting into hippy dippy zen metaphysics to me.

For starters, what you are saying (in terms of not knowing...) seems to apply equally to people, regardless of their view on limits, or whether or not that view is accurate.

Secondly, I am really not all that keen on the idea of "novelty" at all - I prefer to judge things on their results. The reason not to repeat tactics ad infinitum is not that it stops being all shiny and new, but that it doesn't achieve anything progressive.

Everyone has done things which have ruptured reality, or produced incredibly unexpected results. I'm not sure what your point is with this - I don't think it's something you can plan for, and I'm guessing neither of you do either. So what's the big deal? :confused:
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
john eden said:
This sounds like it's getting into hippy dippy zen metaphysics to me.

On the contrary, it is a very rigorous metaphyiscal claim - not at all dippy and certainly not zen.

For starters, what you are saying (in terms of not knowing...) seems to apply equally to people, regardless of their view on limits, or whether or not that view is accurate.

You're right that is an a priori argument - i.e. it is not empirical/factual. And of course it all applies to all people - NO ONE can know what they are. But this is not an especially controversial claim: anyone from Freud to Marx to Foucault to Lacan, in fact anyone who is not a naive realist and proponent of commonsense, would readily accept this, surely?

The concrete political point is that basing things on the Possible is to do nothing to challenge the existing order; very much to the contrary, it is reproducing that order, whose principal power lies in determining what counts as Possible.

Power tends to move from Impossibilism to Inevitablism, from 'That could never happen', to 'of course that was going to happen, but...', a priori screening out the possibility of change.

Secondly, I am really not all that keen on the idea of "novelty" at all - I prefer to judge things on their results. The reason not to repeat tactics ad infinitum is not that it stops being all shiny and new, but that it doesn't achieve anything progressive.

I think we are talking at cross purposes here. The endless fetishization of the shiny and new is not what is at issue, although my use of the term 'novel' obviously invited that interpretation. An Event is only an event because it ruptures the Possible - i.e. an Event IS 'its' results.

Everyone has done things which have ruptured reality, or produced incredibly unexpected results. I'm not sure what your point is with this - I don't think it's something you can plan for, and I'm guessing neither of you do either. So what's the big deal? :confused:

Everyone?

The point is that politics must be based on the Impossible - but that the Impossible is the Real. :D
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
this is not an especially controversial claim

it's a highly controversial claim!

unless the only views that count are captured in the sequence Freud to Marx to Foucault to Lacan (and even then, doubt that it holds true for the historical determinist Marx)

and the claim is controversial in at least two ways:

first, as it pertains to limits imposed by the historical situation to which the actor belongs -- "facticity" in Heidegger -- limits which cannot be "known" theoretically, limits which elude the total grasp, but limits which are nonetheless "there" to be grasped, if not in an everyday manner, but in a modified, authentic manner (and not after the fact, but during the fact)

second, as it pertains to limits imposed by nature, especially as such limits relate to: (a) the reluctance of most people to take active political risks (vanguard vs. people power issue); and (b) the kinds of ends or desires for which they ought properly to take risks

in short, the claim is non-controversial only if you don't take nature or history seriously

(and having a kind of knowledge of one's limits is not the same as fully knowing what or who or how one is -- i.e., john eden was talking about "limits," not identity)


k-punk said:
The concrete political point is that basing things on the Possible is to do nothing to challenge the existing order; very much to the contrary, it is reproducing that order, whose principal power lies in determining what counts as Possible.

Power tends to move from Impossibilism to Inevitablism, from 'That could never happen', to 'of course that was going to happen, but...', a priori screening out the possibility of change.

The standing order may have its version of what is possible -- but this does not dispense with the need to understand what is truly possible in a situation -- o/w action is reckless & most likely feckless

(but perhaps i'm overly eager to argue today)
 
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henrymiller

Well-known member
i don't think marx was a determinist -- lenin definitely wasn't. at the same time marx sometimes thought that action was pointless. in the 1850s he withdrew from political activity. in the 1860s, he returned to active politics, but did not believe revolution was on the agenda. instead he believed that you have to build the party -- in his case, this meant arguing within the first International against the anarchists, and helping to form the german social democratic party (SPD). he was neither a pessimistic determinist in the way i think many of us are nor an optimistic determinist, the way marxists of the Second International (effectively the SPD) were -- and it was they whom lenin (and lukacs) were arguing against. i think zizek is too dismissive towards the anti-globalists -- surely what's called for is, at the least, an exchange of ideas between them and [people like] him?
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Be realistic, demand the impossible

dominic said:
it's a highly controversial claim!

Alright, name one serious philosopher who holds to this navie psychological realism. This DOES NOT include your beloved Herr Heidegger, obv, whose whole philosophy is based on denying that complete self-knowledge is possible.

There are too many too quick moves here:

1. Being a determinist does not mean that you are committed to any view about 'knowledge of limits'. Remember that Spinoza is a philosopher of total metaphysical determination AND a philosopher of Freedom AND the philosopher who says 'no one knows what a body can do'. Rationalists like Leibniz and Spinoza are determinist i.e. Leibniz says that crossing the Rubicon is part of Ceasar's essence but this does not mean that they think that Ceasar or any other human beings could know that in advance of it happening. It just means that there is a sequence of cause and effect that is strictly logically entailed. Leibniz would argue that only God can know what this sequence is, though; we post-Cantorians know that even God cannot know.

2. The claim that there are limits is not equivalent to the claim that such limits could be known. Insofar as there is knowledge, it is always retrospective.

3. But what, in fact, are these limits? Yes, down with History, down with Nature (except in the Spinozist sense): politics AND cybernetics are predicated on the destruction of these theistic residues. Cyberpunk as the dismantling of everything Possible, all limts, all so-called facticity. All codes (social, genetic, semiotic) are up for grabs.
 

bat020

Active member
k-punk said:
Bat, I'm sympathetic to your idea that philosophers shouldn't have ALL the answers, but isn't the idea that the really important answers have to be experimentally resolved on the ground a bit of a cop-out? There must be a feedback between theory and practice surely?

I think the problem lies with the theory/practice disjunction. Once you pose it, political activity gets folded into practice-as-opposed-to-theory, so necessarily becomes some kind of empirical intervention that only happens "on the ground", something *unthinking* or blind, which is of course a "cop out", leading to the need for a supplement, aka "feedback", a dialectic between theory and practice, which of course never quite works... deconstructive stalemate inevitably beckons, which rapidly degenerates into tragic romanticism.

But if you see political theory and practice as one and the same, ie understand political theorising as willful conscious action (the Aristotelian definition of "praxis"), politics gains a certain autonomy, it no longer needs a transcendent supplement.

And from this a far more important disjunction arises, not the false opposition between theory and practice but the very real opposition between philosophy and politics. I'd say the relationship between these two is the crucial question. Politics poses challenges to philosophy that the latter must rise to (it "conditions" philosophy in Badiou's terminology).

Conversely, philosophic discourse has political effects, and therefore politics must respond to philosophy insofar as philosophy shapes the ideological field. But the relationship is one of non-communication, antagonistic, rather than being some kind of "higher" synthesis of the two.

///

On this note, I'd take mild issue with Henry's characterisation of Marx/Engels shift of tack in the 1850s as a withdrawal from political activity. True the class struggle was at a low point and they spent less time organising meetings etc and more time developing and honing their ideas. But my point is that the latter is *still* political activity.
 

Wrong

Well-known member
bat020 said:
I think the problem lies with the theory/practice disjunction. Once you pose it, political activity gets folded into practice-as-opposed-to-theory, so necessarily becomes some kind of empirical intervention that only happens "on the ground", something *unthinking* or blind, which is of course a "cop out", leading to the need for a supplement, aka "feedback", a dialectic between theory and practice, which of course never quite works... deconstructive stalemate inevitably beckons, which rapidly degenerates into tragic romanticism.

Absolutely, and it's true on the other side, too. I've been concerned for some time about the lack of interest in theory in the British left (particularly the more-or-less self-defined 'activist' left). However, recent experience of stimulating 'theoretical' debate has persuaded me that that alone isn't the answer either. Setting aside time from practice to discuss theory degenerates into an impotent utopianism. Part of the problem is that being self-consciously theoretical easily leads to a concentration on 'theoretical' questions which are set by previous political problems - individualism vs. communalism, anarchism vs. communism, reform vs. revolution - which are not necessarily the questions we need to be asking. However, if we construe these utopian questions as being abstract discussions of practice (not 'what do we want' but 'what is to be done' - and how is it to be done), they start to seem alive and relevant.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
bat020 said:
But if you see political theory and practice as one and the same

you're in danger of ending up with what we've had in British universities forever: PoMo faux radicalist textualist posturing posing as political intervention. Hey, why do anything but metaphorensic text-quibbling, coz EVERYTHING is acting, right? Surely the point following on from your earlier posts, Bat, is to go in the other direction: almost NOTHING is an action, actually. But I accept the point that it's silly to say that concept engineering isn't acting.

ie understand political theorising as willful conscious action (the Aristotelian definition of "praxis"), politics gains a certain autonomy, it no longer needs a transcendent supplement.

It's a mistake to equate feedback with dilalectics. Feedback, i.e. cybernetic processes, means the destruction of any possibility of transcendence.

And from this a far more important disjunction arises, not the false opposition between theory and practice but the very real opposition between philosophy and politics. I'd say the relationship between these two is the crucial question. Politics poses challenges to philosophy that the latter must rise to (it "conditions" philosophy in Badiou's terminology).

Conversely, philosophic discourse has political effects, and therefore politics must respond to philosophy insofar as philosophy shapes the ideological field. But the relationship is one of non-communication, antagonistic, rather than being some kind of "higher" synthesis of the two.

I always like the sound of this in Badiou, but - to play devil's advocate for a moment - what is 'politcs' as opposed to philosophy if not some form of action as opposed to theory?

(Hmmmm, I know that 'as opposed to' is a misleading way to characterise this antagonism.)

What's at stake in the refusal of communication btw?
 

henrymiller

Well-known member
k-punk otm -- i can go 50% of the way towards accepting that "theory is a kind of practice", but it is still useful to have *some kind of* distinction. after all, few post-modernist academics would accept that a striking trade unionist is engaged in "theoretical work".
 
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