Slavoj Zizek, said this in a recent talk:
>An act is thus the intervention which goes against the predominant
>opinion; to put it in the old Platonic terms, it asserts Truth
>against the mere doxa. Here, however, the gap that separates us from
>Plato, i.e. the absence of the dimension of subjectivity in Plato,
>becomes palpable: to put it in (inappropriate) modern terms, in
>Plato, opinions are "merely subjective," while Truth is "objective,"
>it renders the actual state of things. In the space of modern
>subjectivity, however, the relationship is inverted: doxa is
>"objective," it registers how things "really are," opinion polls
>tell us what people think, while the act intervenes into this actual
>state of things with a subjective wager. Let us imagine a situation
>in which one has to take a radical measure which may appear
>"unpopular" according to the opinion polls. The mistake of the
>opinion polls is that they forget to comprehend the impact on the
>opinion of the "unpopular" gesture itself: AFTER this gesture is
>accomplished, the opinion is not the same as BEFORE. The clear
>negative examples is the candidacy of Edward Kennedy for American
>Presidency: before he formally announced it, he was a sure winner in
>the polls, but the moment he formally proclaimed his candidacy, i.e.
>the moment voters had effectively to take into account the ACTUAL
>FACT of his candidacy, his support quickly vanished. Another
>imagined case would have been that of a popular charismatic leader
>who blackmails his party: if you do not follow my politics, I'll
>drop you, and the opinion polls show that, if I drop you, you will
>loss half the votes... Here, the act would have been to do PRECISELY
>THIS, to take the leader at his word and provoke him to quit: such a
>gesture MAY change the whole public perception of the party from a
>bunch of compromisers kept in check by the leader to a political
>body with a consistent principled stance, and thus turn around the
>opinion itself.
>>
I have been out of the country for a bit, presenting to Russian teachers on civic education, so I am a bit behind in responding to Doug's citation of Zizek here. But I would still like to say that Zizek's analysis seems to me to be an example of the overextension of psychoanalytic approaches to politics. There are, no doubt, areas in which such an approach provides insight, but just as surely, there are areas in which it highlights what is peripheral to the subject above what is central. And that is what I think is Zizek does too often, and to a depoliticizing effect. (This has always been the effect of an overreliance of psychoanalysis, as the example of various figures in the Frankfurt school -- Fromm, Marcuse, Adorno -- shows.)
Polls are better seen, I would suggest, as one symptom of what is a general movement toward the 'market' model of politics. The voter is conceived no longer as the active citizen, the political subject, but now as the passive consumer in the marketplace of political choices. Polling is a key expression -- and a means of penetration -- of that model.
There is, BTW, a various interesting text by the Cornell political scientist on the subject, _The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power._
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --