26 October 2011

Responding to Slavoj Žižek:

Z: What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: “They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time.”

Half correct. Yes, the occupy movement should avoid a narcissistic turn and it hasn’t made such a turn yet (aside from representations made by David Graeber). However, the SF hippies who wore flowers in their hair were not simply having a good time. They conceived of a counter-culture, a new lifestyle, a new way of habitating, a new (well old) way of subsistence (back to the land). Some lived it, some sold it, others bought it: environmentalism, green tech, organic foods, etc. are remnants and monuments of the counter-culture. The occupations haven’t reached the point of articulating a new vision of culture aside from their political culture (participation, consensus, etc.).

Z: In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

Historical materialism once more? A dialectical movement of Economy-Culture-Economy (E-C-E) as opposed to Culture-Economy-Culture (C-E-C). Is Žižek’s model a use value or exchange value? But to the point: why privilege capitalism as the objective synthesis? Capitalism is as much a culture as it is a mode/means of production. Wall Street is a metaphor, a signifier, of a cultural practice, not simply an institution of commodity fetishism. It presents a form of knowledge about the production and distribution of wealth. Let’s dispense with the dialectic and look more closely at horizontal and vertical networks of power: status, money, knowledge. This is what the occupiers, as indigenous theoreticians, must untangle. Forget the romantic idea of a people’s capitalism.

Z: The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, those in power will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.

Ideological purity, really? The protesters should use the resources and legitimacy of whatever partners they find. Coalition should replace consensus as a political model. Insofar as it is a movement, the occupation should be a movement for the Many, not simply for the One (which is what the occupation “Assemblies” presuppose and aim for).

Z: Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

This is a premature judgment, just the sort of self-congratulatory statement he warned about earlier. Capitalism remains the hegemonic ideology insofar as no one has yet argued it should be replaced; at most the demand is to democratize the systems of the generation and distribution of wealth.

Finally: “What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy’s turf; time is needed to deploy the new content.” As cold weather approaches in occupied zones in the northern hemisphere, the time is for organizing and institutionalizing the movement; otherwise “the phrase” could exceed the occupation’s objective conditions of possibility.