Joanna
Eubulides wrote:
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1417982,00.html
>The empty wheelbarrow
>
>Intellectuals have to be most critical when rulers insist the choice is
>clear
>Slavoj Zizek
>Saturday February 19, 2005
>Guardian
>
>>From my communist youth, I still remember the formula, endlessly repeated in
>official proclamations to mark the "unity of all progressive forces":
>"workers, peasants and honest intellectuals" - as if intellectuals are, by
>their very nature, suspicious, all too free-floating, lacking a solid social
>and professional identity, so that they can only be accepted at the price of
>a special qualification.
>
>This distrust is alive and well today, in our post-ideological societies.
>The lines are clearly drawn. On the "honest" side, there are the no-nonsense
>experts, sociologists, economists, psychologists, trying to cope with the
>real-life problems engendered by our "risk society", aware that old
>ideological solutions are useless. Beyond, there are 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.
>
>This cliche is not without truth - recall the numerous fiascos of the
>20th-century radical intellectuals, perhaps best encapsulated by the French
>poet Paul Eluard's refusal to demonstrate support for the victims of
>Stalinist show trials: "I spend enough time defending the innocent who
>proclaim their innocence, to have any time left to defend the guilty who
>proclaim their guilt." But hysterical over-reaction against"free-floating"
>intellectual renders such a critique suspicious: distrust of intellectuals
>is ultimately distrust of philosophy itself.
>
>In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur
>philosophising: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we
>know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we
>know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we
>don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth
>term: the "unknown knowns", things we don't know that we know - which is
>precisely the Freudian unconscious. If Rumsfeld thought that the main
>dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns", the
>threats from Saddam we did not even suspect, the Abu Ghraib scandal shows
>where the main dangers actually are in the "unknown knowns", the disavowed
>beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about,
>even though they form the background of our public values. To unearth these
>"unknown knowns" is the task of an intellectual.
>
>On September 11 2001, the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on
>November 9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9 announced the "happy 90s",
>the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal
>democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent
>of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the
>obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely contingent - local
>pockets of resistance where leaders did not yet grasp that their time was
>over. By contrast, 9/11 is the symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy
>90s, of an era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, in the West Bank,
>around the European Union, on the US-Mexico border. The prospect of a new
>global crisis is looming: economic breakdowns, military and other
>catastrophes, states of emergency .
>
>In their recent The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F Kaplan
>wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there... We stand
>at the cusp of a new historical era... This is a decisive moment... It is so
>clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the
>Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the US
>intends to play in the 21st century." One cannot but agree: it is
>effectively the future of the international community that is at stake now -
>the new rules that will regulate it, what the new world order will be.
>
>The ruling ideology appropriated the September 11 tragedy and used it to
>impose its basic message: it is time to stop playing around, you have to
>take sides - for or against. This, precisely, is the temptation to be
>resisted: in such moments of apparent clarity of choice, mystification is
>total. Today, more than ever, intellectuals need to step back. Are we aware
>that we are in the midst of a "soft revolution", in the course of which the
>unwritten rules determining the most elementary international logic are
>changing?
>
>The danger the west is courting in its "war on terror" was clearly perceived
>by GK Chesterton who - in the very last pages of his Orthodoxy, the ultimate
>Catholic propaganda piece - exposed the deadlock of the pseudo-revolutionary
>critics of religion: they start by denouncing religion as the force of
>oppression that threatens human freedom; but in fighting religion, they are
>compelled to forsake freedom itself, thus sacrificing precisely what they
>wanted to defend: the atheist radical universe, deprived of religious
>reference, is the grey universe of egalitarian terror. Today the same holds
>for advocates of religion themselves: how many fanatical defenders of
>religion started by ferociously attacking secular culture and ended up
>forsaking religion itself, losing any meaningful religious experience?
>
>And is it not that, in a strictly homologous way, the liberal warriors
>against terror are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that
>they will end by flinging away freedom and democracy? They have such a
>passion for proving that non-Christian fundamentalism is the main threat to
>freedom that they are ready to limit our own freedom here and now, in our
>allegedly Christian societies. If the "terrorists" are ready to wreck this
>world for love of the other, our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their
>own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other. Thus the American
>commentators Jonathan Alter and Alan Derschowitz love human dignity so much
>that they are ready to legalise torture - the ultimate degradation of human
>dignity - to defend it.
>
>
>Does the same not hold for the postmodern disdain for great ideological
>causes and the notion that, in our post-ideological era, instead of trying
>to change the world, we should reinvent ourselves by engaging in new forms
>of (sexual, spiritual, aesthetic) subjective practices? Confronted with
>arguments like this, one cannot but recall the old lesson of critical
>theory: when we try to preserve the authentic intimate sphere of privacy
>against the onslaught of "alienated" public exchange, it is privacy itself
>that gets lost. Withdrawal into privacy means today adopting formulas of
>private authenticity propagated by the contemporary cultural industry - from
>taking lessons in spiritual enlightenment a to engaging in body building.
>The ultimate truth of withdrawal into privacy is public confessions of
>intimate secrets on TV shows. Against this kind of privacy, the only way to
>break out of the constraints of "alienated" public life is to invent a new
>collectivity.
>
>Recall the old story about a worker suspected of stealing. Every evening,
>when he was leaving the factory, the wheelbarrow he was rolling in front of
>him was carefully inspected, but it was always empty - till, finally, the
>guards got the point: what the worker was stealing were the wheel-barrows
>themselves. This is the trick that those who claim today "But the world is
>none the less better off without Saddam!" try to pull on us: they forget to
>include in the account the effects of the very military intervention against
>Saddam. Yes, the world is better without Saddam - but it is not better with
>the military occupation of Iraq, with the rise of Islamist fundamentalism
>provoked by this very occupation. The guy who first got this point about the
>wheelbarrow was an arch-intellectual.
>
>. Slavoj Zizek, is senior researcher in philosophy at the University of
>Ljubljana, and co-director of the Centre for Humanities, Birkbeck College,
>London; his most recent book is Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
>
>szizek at yahoo.com
>
>
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