Zizek on Havel

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   Havel's essay on 'The Power of the Powerless', written in 1978, was
perceptive in explaining how Late Socialism operated at the domestic,
day-to-day level. What was important was not that the people deep down
believed in the ruling ideology, but that they followed the external
rituals and practices by means of which this ideology acquired material
existence. Havel's example is the greengrocer, a modest man profoundly
indifferent to official ideology. He just mechanically follows the rules:
on state holidays, he decorates the window of his shop with official
slogans such as 'Long Live Socialism!' When there are mass gatherings he
takes part affectlessly. Although he privately complains about the
corruption and incompetence of 'those in power', he takes comfort in pieces
of folk wisdom ('power corrupts' etc), which enable him to legitimise his
stance in his own eyes and to retain a false appearance of dignity. When
someone tries to engage him in dissident activity, he protests: 'Who are
you to get me mixed up in things which are bound to be used against my
children? Is it really up to me to set the world to rights?'

Havel saw that if there was a 'psychological' mechanism at work in
Communist ideology, it was not to do with belief, but rather with shared
guilt: in the 'normalisation' that followed the Soviet intervention of
1968, the Czech regime made sure that, in one way or another, the majority
of people were somehow morally discredited, compelled to violate their own
moral standards. When an individual was blackmailed into signing a petition
against a dissident (Havel, for example), he knew that he was lying and
taking part in a campaign against an honest man, and it was precisely this
ethical betrayal that rendered him the ideal Communist subject. The regime
relied on and actively condoned the moral bankruptcy of its subjects.
Havel's concept of 'living in truth' involved no metaphysics: it simply
designated the act of suspending one's participation, of breaking out of
the vicious cycle of 'objective guilt'. He blocked off all the false
escape-routes, including seeking refuge in the 'small pleasures of everyday
life'. Such acts of indifference - making fun in private of official
rituals, for instance - were, he said, the very means by which the official
ideology was reproduced.  <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n21/zize2121.htm>
*****

Here Zizek's recycling an interpretation of the work of ideology (which
thrives in an ironic distance from ideology's truth claims) that he did
best in _The Sublime Object of Ideology_.  It seems to me that his recent
Kantian turn -- with an emphasis upon the prohibition of the subjective
assumption of Historical Necessity -- is at cross-purposes with his earlier
neo-Althusserian mode.  The early Zizek basically says that it really
doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you are behaving as expected,
the point is to quit doing what you are doing, whereas the late Zizek seeks
to salvage the concept of ethics from the ruins of the subject.  Doesn't
Zizek's Kantian turn have something to do with his work for the
post-socialist ruling party, with his professed goal of guarding liberal
pluralism?  One can turn Zizek's critique of Havel against Zizek himself --
now it does matter to Zizek what morality people subscribe to (ideally, for
Zizek, a Lacanian-Kantian ethics of personal responsibility in the face of
utter neo-liberal uncertainty), for he has to guard the status quo
('against nationalist excesses' would be his excuse, ironically because he
criticizes the West for projecting "an idea of the Balkans as the
phantasmatic space of nationalist madness") whereas earlier his reading of
ideology paid closer attention to exactly what maintains the status quo,
with a view to changing it (though he never explained how we might go about
doing so, given his dismissal of traditional concepts of agency, be they
bourgeois or Marxist).

Yoshie