A Spectre is haunting Multimedia Slavoj Zizek's recent parody of the Communist Manifesto (in his playful introduction to The Ticklish Subject, 1999) lends currency to what seems like outmoded sentiments. He persuasively demands a 'recentring' of political consciousness. He begins thus: 'A spectre is haunting western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the New Age obscurantist... and the postmodern deconstructionist... the Habermasian theorist of communication... and the Heideggarian proponent of the thought of Being... the cognitive scientist... and the Deep Ecologist... the critical (post-) Marxist... and the feminist. Where is the academic orientation which has not been accused by its opponents of not yet properly disowning the Cartesian heritage? [...] The point, of course, is not to return to the cogito in the guise in which this notion has dominated modern thought (the self-transparent thinking subject), but to bring to light its forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent self.' (1999: 1-2) Zizek is concerned to address this 'absent centre' in the context of what he calls the 'post-political' stance, and is keen to address the apparent failure of 'identity politics' with its multiple forms of subjectivity that tends to obscure socio-economic forces. The problem for Zizek is: 'how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multi-culturalism.' (1999: 4). By 'post-politics' he is referring to what he sees as a shift from 'repression to 'foreclosure'. Whereas the repressed would always return (in the Freudian model), the foreclosed returns in the 'Real'. Universal agreement is reached without any kind of traditional conflictual positions being registered (his example in 1999 is the 'radical centre of Blair's 'New Labour'), old ideological distinctions are simply bypassed: 'the political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within the traditional framework of the existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work'. In other words, an ideological strategy that pretends otherwise. Rather than politics being the 'art of the possible', post-politics has become the 'art of the impossible' - it has changed the parameters of possibility altogether (Zizek, 1999: 199). Zizek suggests the new world order (the logic of the post-political) is a form of post-political 'concrete universality' (see later section on universality) that accounts for everyone at a spurious level of inclusion (replacing outmoded descriptions of exclusion, 1999: 202). This multiculturalist vision of 'unity in difference' requires the construction of a more absolute (more extreme) 'Other' despite the rhetoric towards equality. This is a threat to the subject that must be destroyed evident in the form of Islamophobia for instance. The failure of identity politics is evident in new fundamentalisms and multiculturalist identity politics alike - both serving the supply of hybrid, fluid identifications against the backdrop of globalisation. The splittings are caused by globalisation and new identities emerge correspondingly - the resultant diversity of groups is ultimately remain linked by Capital (think of the 'pink pound', and the proliferation of 'world music' categories). Fundamentalisms and postmodern identities are not opposed but express the necessary corollary of 'Other' (for instance, leftists who require right wing bigots to imagine politics at all). He says multiculturalism is a 'disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism which empties itself of all positive content' (1999: 216) wherein the respect affording the Other is born out an assumed superiority (the 'privileged empty point of universality' in Zizek's terms), ultimately reinforcing a Eurocentrist viewpoint despite arguments to the contrary. In this way, the multiculturalist universality of globalisation can be revealed to be Eurocentrist in spirit. In general, cultural studies or cultural criticism similarly would tend towards a position where globalisation or capitalism as world system is regarded as essentialist, turning and depoliticising political struggle into cultural struggle for multiple subject positions (although a simple opposition of the cultural and political is very general - for instance, the work of Judith Butler would exemplify this position in seeing queer politics as a potential threat to normative capitalist production and corresponding practices of sexual reproduction - see Judith Butler ?? - yet, the counterargument is that these are easily incorporated as lifestyle choices and commodified accordingly, making being 'queer' almost fashionable and certainly tolerated. Zizek would argue that 'perverse' sexual practices as a symptom of capitalist diversification). This brand of tolerance (of difference) is really a tolerance of the Western capitalist world order in which all alleged differences are not differentiated but ultimately homogenised. Zizek expresses this paradox as: 'The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the heart of each (particular living) ghost.' (1999: 218) Capitalism is the status quo. Everybody accepts this as unchangeable despite their embrace of change in almost every other field of practice. Zizek concludes that the predominance of cultural studies, multiple subject positions and deconstruction all share the disavowal of Cartesian subjectivity. Here, there is a reference to the wealth of material that explodes the idea of fixed identity and substitutes it for free-floating, rhizomic, nomadic, hybrid identities (such as the 'subversive desiring machine' in the work of Deleuze and Guattari). Zizek's view is that the Cartesian subject is decidedly not guilty as accused. This position is tricky to say the least, seemingly caught between reactionary conservatism, populism and nostalgia, where opposition to globalisation is conditioned by the forces of globalisation. Zizek asks: 'how are we to reinvent the political space in today's conditions of globalisation?' (1999: 222) Political struggle cannot simply mean struggles that leave the central process of capital intact; for Zizek this is the 'Real' that lurks in the background. on the proletariat: In Marxist terms, the proletariat stands for human universality partly because it is the lowest, most exploited class (Zizek calls this 'identifying universality with the point of exclusion' 1999: 224) but more importantly because it is a 'living contradiction', revealing the capitalist system as out of balance. This is important to Zizek as it emphasises the distinction between universality and globalisation: 'the universal dimension "shines through" the symptomatic displaced element which belongs to the Whole without being properly its part'. In this way he does not fall into the trap of the coherent fixed subject but sees the fractured subject or 'hybridity as the site of the Universal' (1999: 225). The working class as simply a social group become the proletariat, through class struggle, as they seek 'redemption through revolution' (Zizek, 1999: 227), Thus, Zizek sees universality and radical subjectivity as linked in this struggle (and departs from Althusser's ideas on the subject's misrecognition). Autonomous free subject/freedom of choice: The idea of the radical subject is clearly central to most criticism of Marxist theory that presupposes a centred subject that requires emancipation (long since disproved by cultural studies and the like) - the active free agent. He describes the illusion of free choice (or 'decision', perhaps appropriate to interactive systems) through the Althusserian notion of interpellation. Accordingly, Zizek calls the 'vulgar liberal notion' of freedom of choice as 'not a choice between a series of objects leaving my subject position intact, but the fundamental choice by means of which I "choose myself" [...] or, as Deleuze put it, we choose only when we are chosen: "Ne choisit bien, ne choisit effectivement que celui qui est choisi."' - and in the note to this 'Choice is always a meta-choice; it involves a choice to choose or not.' (1999: 18) 'Forced choice' on the other hand, is explained as the subject freely choosing the inevitable, such as the subject's recognition of revolutionary consciousness. The subject is interpellated and recognises itself as 'always-ready' for action, and supposes itself a free agent. In the case of revolution, the subject is called by history to act in the right way and make the right choice of action. In other words, this is not ideological manipulation but what is almost preordained - it exists outside the subject's knowledge of it but it is true all the same. Zizek quotes Bertrand Russell: 'I did not know I loved you till I heard myself telling you so...'; not that love existed without the subject's knowledge but that the subject was in love all along.(1999: 54) This 'retro-active' response often works with speech in this shift from a virtual language to actual language - it is speech-in-itself, or speech that pre-exists itself, 'speech before speech', 'speech avant la lettre'. Things are decided before they are enacted in actuality, like a secondary reflexive entry into revolutionary consciousness. Zizek links this state of being not-quite realised to Plato's 'matrix-receptacle of all determinable forms governed by its own contingent rules [chora]' (1999: 54). Is this useful for an analysis of the generative process? Does it operate at this level of speech-in-itself? Night of the world/fundamental background to the subject: Hegel's view of imagination is explained in his manuscripts on 'the night of the world' (in Janaer Realphilosophie; like a description of a David Lynch film to Zizek; and extending Kant's view that does not consider its negative expression) in its negative, disruptive mode: 'The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity - an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belong to him - or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here - pure self - in phantasmagorical representations, is night around it, in which here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks at human beings in the eye - into a night that becomes awful.' (Zizek, 1999: 29-30) This 'night of the world' is the power of imagination that 'disperses continuous reality into a confused multitude of spectral 'partial objects', that forms part of the larger unified organism (like the primordial figures in Hieronymus Bosch's painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights). Thus, Hegel does not praises speculative reason as might be expected but understanding 'as the infinite power of falsity, of tearing apart and treating as separate what naturally belongs together'. Zizek calls this the basic negative gesture of 'pre-synthetic imagination' that tears apart sensible elements and experience. (1999: 31) He quotes from the Phenomenology: 'It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is the power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject...' (1999: 30-1) This excessive 'pre-ontological dimension' (of pre-speech) is an indication of the Hegelian dialectical vortex at work: 'The innermost "motor" of the dialectical process is the interplay between epistemological obstacle and ontological deadlock. In the course of a dialectical reflexive turn, the subject is compelled to assume that the insufficiency of his knowledge with regard to reality signals the more radical insufficiency of his knowledge with regard to reality signals the more radical insufficiency of reality itself (see the standard Marxist notion of the 'critique of ideology', whose basic premiss is that the "inadequacy" of the ideologically distorted view of social reality is not a simple epistemological mistake, but simultaneously signals the much more troubling fact that something must be terribly wrong with social reality itself - only a society that is "wrong" in itself generates a "wrong" awareness of itself). Hegel's point here is very precise: not only do the inherent inconsistencies and contradictions of our knowledge not prevent it from functioning as "true" knowledge of reality, but there is "reality" (in the most usual sense of "hard external reality" as opposed to "mere notions") not only in so far as the domain of the Notion is alienated from itself, split, traversed by some radical deadlock, caught in some debilitating inconsistency.' (1999: 55-6). This goes some way to describe the gap between reality from the sense of reality (spectre) that precedes it (that Zizek would describe in Lacanian terms as 'fantasy' as an attempt to close the ontological gap in thinking that this spectral real is the real thing; 'the "murmur of the real" and from the fully constituted logos' 1999: 57). Similarly, this delay between an event in-self and for-itself can often lead to huge disappointment (the effect of the delay, as Zizek puts it: 'every birth of meaning is an abortion' 1999: 58). The paradox of dialectical materialism is evident in chaos theory in that: 'a cursory approach ignorant of details reveals (or even generates) the features which remain out of reach to a detailed, exceedingly close approach. As is well known, chaos theory was born out of the imperfection of the measuring apparatus: when the same data, repetitively processed by the same computer program, led to radically different results, scientists became aware that a difference in data too small to be noted can produce a gargantuan difference in the final outcome.' (1999: 58) The gap between the event itself and its 'symbolic registration' (as this would be described in dialectical materialism) thus indicates the dialectical relationship between essence and appearance; and that one is bound in the other: '"false" appearance is comprised within the "thing itself"' (1999: 59). In other words, appearance is simply the emerging essence, and this is the only way it can be perceived in reality through its rejection of its false appearance. Does this mean we are free agents only in the sense that we do not recognise the determining factors that control us? Are we simply 'lifeless automata', turned into computers or 'thinking machines', Zizek asks? 'Is the status of consciousness basically that of freedom in a system of radical determinism? (1999: 60). This is where Hegel's usefulness arises for Zizek, in emphasising that Cartesian subjectivity arises in the tension between the moment of excess and attempts to normalise this excess (1999: 62). The human subject is clearly not an autonomous agent that simply processes information through the senses like a computer. This is not to be confused with conscious and unconscious states - both these would be included in the rational frame for Lacan, the background is something altogether more excessive. For Zizek, the Cartesian rational subject requires the unconscious to provide the necessary productive cracks that give rise to radical contradiction. Negation of negation: With dialectics, the movement is not from one extreme to the opposite extreme (yes to no) and from there to 'higher unity' but rather a 'radicalisation' of the first position.(Zizek, 1999: 71) Zizek quotes Wendy Brown's States of Inquiry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996: 36) to make this point more clearly of how dialectical arguments are posed. She describes how the oppressed imagine themselves in a future better world with the oppressor removed (women imagine a world without men, workers without capitalists, and so on). This logic fails to recognise how one identity position is infiltrated and mediated by the other (as a result of patriarchy, and the capitalist production process). In this way, the overall system is registered too. Zizek likens this to the misunderstandings at the root of the Hegelian idea of 'negation of negation'. He calls this the 'Hegelian triad': 'its matrix is not that of a loss and its recuperation, but simply that of a process of passage from state A to state B: the first immediate 'negation' of A negates the position of A while remaining within its symbolic confines, so it must be followed by another negation, which then negates the very symbolic space common to A and its immediate negation.... Here the gap that separates the negated system's 'real' death from its 'symbolic' death is crucial: the system has to die twice.' (1999: 72; Zizek explains this through Marx's use of the phrase - producers take over the means of production, but at this first stage it remains within the confines of private ownership, this has to be further negated to abolish the whole principle of private ownership of the means of production). As Zizek puts it, negation of negation presupposes no magical reversal (1999: 77). The previous examples clearly stop short of the third stage and fail to activate the 'negation of negation'. Only at this stage, does form and content coincide satisfactorily. Can this apply to the production of generative artwork, an artwork that is critical of its subject matter but also the system within which the subject matter is presented reflexively? Zizek puts this better than me: 'its [referring to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit] fascination with the 'mad dance' of reflexivity, of dialectic reversals, as the (still) introductory prelude to the System proper, with its satisfied speculative self-deployment.' (1999: 85) Perhaps this principle is best understood in terms of language (even if it too is man-made) - in that we can think only in words. To explain further, inner experience can only express pure thought by shedding external senses and then being expressed again by becoming externalised in a meaningless sign (Zizek, 1999: 87; 'it posits its presupposition, its conditions of existence and it expresses itself in its bodily exterior'). In all this, an element of contingent externality persists as it is impossible to fully internalise into subjectivity. Hegel and universality This Hegelian logic is crucial for Zizek - to describe what he calls 'the passage from [natural] in-itself to for-itself' (1999: 75). The difference between the terms 'abstract' and 'concrete' universality in Hegel relates to this wherein secondary identification is the process of individualisation (for instance, by rejecting the family group in favour of a wider networks of friends and associates). Secondary identification remains 'abstract' in that it is opposed to the primary identification. It becomes 'concrete' when it reintegrates (negation of negation) with the primary identification transforming them into the modes of appearance of the secondary identification (Zizek, 1999: 90). This logic underpins the Hegelian principle that it is only through 'abstract negativity' that 'concrete universality' can be attained, and correspondingly why 'understanding' is privileged over 'reason'. Universality in itself is not without its problems of course - as an 'empty site' wherein 'multiple particulars' operate and fight for hegemonic control (Zizek cites the work of Ernesto Laclau in this connection, 1999: 101); one could think of universal humanity as not neutral but decidedly male (man) and once recognised as such, then changeable. Laclau thinks the struggle for content is the political struggle, or rather the gap between the 'ordinary signifiers and the empty Master-signifier of Universality, 1999: 177). Hence, because it is struggled for, it is inherently unstable and changeable. The particular content in a scenario like this is an ideological distortion, an exaggeration or stereotype. Note: Marx attempts to reconcile the Universal and Particular, I think, in stressing the gap 'within' the particular content of the universal not the gap 'between' the two. In classical Marxism, and in terms of ideology, the universal is rendered false. Furthermore, an understanding of the symptom is that it arises necessarily as product from ideological universality and also undermines it: Zizek explains 'the symptom is an example which subverts the Universal whose example it is' (1999: 180). Exploitation is the exception, not to the rule, but because of the rule, in Marxist terms. One can easily see how the relationship between the universal and the particular is an entirely political struggle, and as such the basis of representational democracy. Zizek expands on this idea of post-politics describing how the traditional relation between the particular and the universal that underpins politics (how a single issue becomes representative of a wider struggle) is foreclosed and kept in the realm of the particular. (1999: 204) Universality stands as something not given or natural at all, but subject to hegemonic and ideological struggle and expresses politics in all spheres of human activity. This is often not acknowledged and Zizek describes this in symptomatic terms in how 'this very exclusion of something from the political is a political gesture par excellence' (1999: 182). He says much the same about the denial of ideology elsewhere. Zizek is arguing for a reapprasial of Hegel in terms of politics enabled by his recourse to Lacan et al. He uses these examples to argue (against Althusser's anti-Hegelianism) that Hegel's conception of 'concrete universality', we never actually encounter the embodiment of universality as such. No figure could adequately match its notion of universality - as Hegel puts it 'the Universal genus is always one of its own species'; among the species of a genus, it is the universal one that is forever missing (Zizek, 1999: 103). Thus, Hegelian Universality can be seen to thoroughly paradoxical - it 'reflexively "includes out" the very excess and/or gap that forever spoils such a totality' (Zizek, 1999: 113). This contains huge importance for any understanding of politics in that 'any normative order, taken in itself, remains stuck in abstract formalism; it cannot bridge the gap that separates it from actual life' (1999: 114). There is no way of escaping this sense of order even in something that appears utterly disorderly. -- Zizek cites the famous passage from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire to emphasise the point (1999: 88): in that men make their own history, not out of nothing or in the conditions they have chosen themselves - but that they create history in the conditions which were found and imposed on them (ref. Derrida and the idea of the Spectre). Any unity resulting from the dialectical movement is not simply a return to the lost sense of unity but a far more radical entity. In the 'newly reinstated 'mediated' totality, we are dealing with a substantially different Unity, a Unity grounded on the disruptive power of negativity, a Unity in which this negativity itself assumes positive existence.' (Zizek, 1999: 96) -- The difference between the terms 'abstract' and 'concrete' universality in Hegel relates to this wherein secondary identification is the process of individualisation (for instance, by rejecting the family group in favour of a wider networks of friends and associates). Secondary identification remains 'abstract' in that it is opposed to the primary identification. It becomes 'concrete' when it reintegrates (negation of negation) with the primary identification transforming them into the modes of appearance of the secondary identification (Zizek, 1999: 90). Political subjectivisation and its vissisitudes On theory/practice: 'Any theoretical approach that endeavours to grasp and mirror adequately 'what is' (what Marx called the 'world-view') is denounced as something which, unbeknown to itself, relies on a contingent practical act - that is to say, the ultimate solution to philosophical problems is practice.' (Zizek, 1999: 174) -- Add to history section: Zizek explains how Heidegger extends this to the notion of authentic choice through repetition, somewhat in parallel to Benjamin's notion of revolution as repetition that realises the hidden possibility of past (repressed) revolutions (in his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'; Zizek, 1999: 20). History is thus not closed down as a set of facts but opened up to emancipatory possibility - activated by the revolutionary subject. -and- The history of philosophy itself is a repetitive tracing of the relationship between materialism and idealism; '(in materialism, content generates and determines form, while idealism posits a formal a priori irreducible to the content it embraces.') (1999: 64) -- oder/disorder The Hegelian conclusion is that the very notion of politics stems from the conflict between the political and the apolitical - between order and disorder - politics, itself and its negation. Zizek sees this in Hegelese 'how positive Order is nothing but the positivisation of the radical negativity' (Zizek, 1999: 224). -- 'Finally, we say: The authors disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions (whether hard or soft). Let the Multi-nationals and Multi-culturalists alike tremble. Multi-media users have nothing to lose but their chains (or the wires that bind them). They have real/virtual worlds to win. Users of all paradigms, ignite!' [This is the ending of a paper I jointly wrote with Tim Brennan that reflects upon a project 'Manifest' (produced with Adrian Ward),