Zizek in ‘New Left Review’

In his latest article, published in the current edition of New Left Review (May and June 2009), Slavoj Zizek proposes that we recover the antagonism between the ‘included’ and ‘excluded’ which has been lost in contemporary forms of liberal politics. According to Zizek, the predominant liberal notion of democracy focuses on the inclusion of the excluded as minority voices and this leads to the situation where:

All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. (p.55)

Political struggle is fragmented into identity politics which serves ultimately to strengthen the liberal hegemony. What we need to do is resuscitate our common position as that of the excluded (instead of focusing on what makes us different from each other?).

In order to understand this position, we should ask the following question of capitalism: “does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?” Zizek identifies four possible antagonisms:

1. Ecological catastrophe

2. Inappropriateness of private property for ‘intellectual property’

3. The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments

4. New forms of social exclusion (e.g. third world slums)

The argument is that we are all in a position of exclusion in that the shared substance of our social being, what Hardt and Negri refer to as ‘commons’, is under threat. We can identify threats to each ‘commons’ relating directly to each realm of antagonism above. So, for example, the commons of external nature (e.g. the natural habitat) are threatened by pollution, exploitation and destruction; the commons of our intellectual production in the form of culture are threatened by the application of private property rules to ‘intellectual property’; also, our internal, biogenetic commons are under threat from cloning, genetic engineering etc.

What all of these antagonisms share is “an awareness of the destructive potential – up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself – in allowing the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons a free run”. (p. 54) Zizek’s claim is that the progressive enclosure of these ‘commons’ ultimately serves to exclude those who are “excluded from their own substance; a process that also points towards exploitation.” (p.54) It is important that we hold onto this reference to exclusion and inclusion as, without it, the antagonisms cited above lose their subversive dimension. So, for example, the area of biogenetics is reduced to an ethical issue (rather than a political one); the environmental question becomes one of how to achieve sustainable development; and the question of intellectual property becomes a problem for lawyers. The danger, therefore, is that these problems are reduced to issues played out in the private sphere and the trick is to expose them as universal problems related to the fundamental antagonism between those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’.

Zizek’s contention is that our “[…] ethico-political challenge is to recognise (the truth of our own position). In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance”. (p.55, italics mine)

In all of Zizek’s work there is a healthy suspicion concerning political arguments that state the obvious. For example, who in their right mind would argue against the position that “all positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected”, and so on? The lesson of Zizek’s work is that instead of accepting this wisdom at face value, we should ask why it is that this position has become the accepted discourse, even when this is plainly not what occurs in our liberal democracy. Zizek’s answer (as set out above) is that in promoting the inclusion of the excluded as minority voices, the system can absorb these challenges with the result that any threat is diluted.

Similarly, sweeping claims for the inclusive and transformative potential of ICT in education should be subjected to the same scrutiny.

Reference:

Zizek, S. (2009). How to Begin from the Beginning. New Left Review , 57:43-55.

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