James Heartfield signs up to a manifesto of assertive subjectivity, or would do if it were one
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, Slavoj Zizek, Verso, £??.??
Solvenian born philosopher Slavoj Zizek opens this book with a take off of Marx's Communist Manifesto. A hundred and fifty years ago Marx took advantage of the capitalist world's fear of communism, to warn that a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. It was a bluff that worked: in 1848 communism as a political movement was negligible in its influence, little more than a vague idea. Marx took the guilty fears of the ruling capitalist classes and made them into a manifesto, a manifesto that founded the very movement itself.
Zizek replays the joke in the following terms: 'A spectre is haunting Western Academia ... the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre ...' Zizek goes on to name feminists, New Age obscurantists, postmodern deconstructionists and Deep Ecologists.
Zizek's point is that all of these differing intellectual trends coalesce in their hostility to what he calls the Cartesian subject. Described in philosophy by Rene Descartes, the rational subject is well known to us all. It's us: Us thinking, choosing acting subjects, who decide our own destinies. Zizek's argument is that it is these qualities that are today most radically challenged by the arguments that see the subject as exclusively male, an exploiter of nature, and so on. It is a good argument - I made it myself in this magazine in October 1996 ('Communal Self-Sacrifice'), and again most recently in the journal Prometheus ('Who is the Moral Subject', Spring 1999), though not as eloquently.
So I endorse Zizek's plea that 'It is high time that the partisans of Cartesian subjectivity should, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Cartesian subjectivity, with the philosophical manifesto of Cartesian subjectivity itself.' (2) But as everyone knows, two Cartesian subjects in the same room constitute a split, so I am duty- bound to air some criticisms of this Ticklish Subject.
The first is ultimately trivial, but immediately not so: Zizek's style, notwithstanding a great opening, is terrible. Recommending the Ticklish Subject to the people I know has raised questions about my sanity. True, too many of them are unlettered philistines who would do anything other than read a book, but Zizek's cryptically insular academic references would test all but an in-crowd of tenured post-modern leftists. To his credit, Zizek jokes and livens up his tales with anecdotes and film references - such as the tale of the Slovene translators who over- compensated for years of bowdlerised film sub-titles after the Wall came down. But unless you are familiar with the self-management socialism in Yugoslavia its relevance to neo-Heideggerianism does not shed much light. At times, Zizek writes as if he was in his anecdotage, such as a digression to tell the plot of Graham Greene's The Potting Shed with the comment 'intriguing as it is, such a story cannot effectively engage us today' (143). Indeed.
The opaque style is a shame, because there are jewels behind it. Zizek's assault on the dogma of multiculturalism is excellent, precisely because it is not a right-wing whinge about darkies. On the contrary, his attack is from the left. 'The ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism ... a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism', he writes (217). This is a courageous breach with the consensus, not seen since Kenan Malik's attack on multiculturalism in The Meaning of Race (Macmillan, 1996). Malik's point was that the understanding that the human race was necessarily divided between discrete cultures, in practice reproduced the old racial ideology, in less explicitly elitist form, though with similar consequences. Zizek, too sees through the flannel, noting that 'the multiculturalist's respect for the Other's specificity is the very form of asserting one's own superiority' and further that 'it tolerates the Other in so far as it is not the real Other, but the aseptic Other of premodern ecological wisdom, fascinating rites, and so on' (217, 219). Zizek is good too, on the lifelessly anti-ideological ideology of Tony Blair's Third Way, which he points out is emblematic of the absent political centre of contemporary life.
The limitation of Zizek's Ticklish Subject is that he does not hold fast to the opening insight of a degradation of subjectivity. Reading this off of its philosophical rejection, he fails to situate the attack on subjectivity in the historic defeat of the oppositional subject of the working class. Remaining at the level of ideas, he does not give the full measure of the real evacuation of subjective agency in the long defeat and disaggregation of the labour movement, and its culmination in an uncontested polity and culture. Consequently, when Zizek moves outwards from ideas, to a practical engagement, the central theme of the book remains tangential to material conditions, where it ought to have characterised these conditions themselves.
Zizek's attack on multiculturalism could have gone on to argue that this ideology was itself the expression of a loss of agency amongst oppositional movements - that multiculturalism exemplified the disaggregation of a society that had lost its direction. Instead his complaint is that multiculturalism leaves the 'real problem' untouched. The real problem is the 'logic of capital', and that 'the global capitalist system was able to incorporate the gains of the postmodern politics of identities to the extent that they did not disturb the smooth circulation of Capital' (216-7). In itself, this is not wrong, but it leaves social order (the 'global capitalist system') and multiculturalism unrelated, except accidentally, or negatively, in that the one does not disturb the other.
Here Zizek is repeating Frederic Jameson's mistake of presuming that the analysis of the underlying social system is completed in Marxism, and demoting his own analysis to a discrete side-show of ideological forms. The problem is that the degradation of subjectivity as an historic reality could not leave the underlying 'smooth circulation of Capital' undisturbed. As Phil Mullan explained in last month's LM, capital itself is paralysed by a failure of subjectivity, its circulation actively disrupted by the unwillingness of investors to take risks.
Zizek's weakness is all too apparent in what could be the most interesting part of his book. Outside of these pages, he writes the only critical examination of the influential theory of the 'risk society' promoted by the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The theory is that risk is now endemic, because it is no longer just accidents of nature, but human action itself that throws up potentially disastrous, unintended consequences, like pollution or genetic diseases. Instinctively Zizek understands that the radical expansion of risk calls into question the very possibility of bridging the gap between 'knowledge and decision, between the chain of reasons and the act which resolves the dilemma' (337).
Here he ought to grasp that the breach between act and decision is one that is subjective, expressed in the theory of risk, rather than an objective condition of the growth of industry and technology. In the risk theory, Zizek confronts the most pernicious example of the attack on subjectivity, because it paralyses the very possibility of action with scare-mongering tales of unimagined consequences. But instead of faulting the risk theorists for their attack on Cartesian subjectivity, he does the opposite. He criticises them because 'the leave intact the subject's fundamental mode of subjectivity: their subject remains the modern subject, able to reason and reflect freely, to decide and select his or her norms, and so on' (342). He thinks that risk theory gives too much priority to the rational subject.
Failing to see that the risk theory evacuates the possibility of rational choice for the subject, Zizek's criticisms fall back into a traditional leftist complaint that they fail to treat risks as products of capitalism. Zizek is not really engaging with the new conditions that are expressed (however perversely) in risk theory - namely the very topic of his own book, the attack on subjectivity. Instead he is asking that their complaints against human intervention should be assimilated to his own anti-capitalism. He thinks that he is putting their risk theory on a surer footing, by giving it some Marxist credentials. But all he is doing is lending the rhetoric of Marxism to the same paralysing anxiety that is formalised in risk theory.
In fact, a dose of anti-capitalist rhetoric is entirely commensurable with the attack on subjectivity. Zizek thinks that it is strong to insist on 'some kind of radical limitation of Capital's freedom, the subordination of the process of production to social control' (p353). On the contrary, 'social control' in this climate could only mean a conservative constraint. And limitations upon 'capital's freedom' in the current climate could only lend themselves to constraints upon all our freedom, in the name of safety and ecological balance. The contemporary campaign against genetic science is the best example of this. This 'social control' is government reacting to the precocious activism of a tiny handful riding a much larger wave of anxiety. In the name of ignorance, scientists are being prevented from researching the growth of genetically modified organisms. The demotic fervour of this campaign reaches its highest pitch with the banal observation that the companies that fund the research are profit-driven.
If Zizek had held more firmly to his initial insight, instead of treating it as an add-on to a traditional Marxism, he could have seen through the real meaning of the risk theory. Instead, his old allegiances only lend themselves to the very thing that he set out to criticise, the attack on the Cartesian subject.
-- Jim heartfield