Deja Vu All Over Again

I've got a review essay in the next issue of "Philosophy and Literature" (one of my favorite academic journals, so I am proud to contribute.) My piece is "On Zizek and Trilling" (PDF), and it targets Slavoj Zizek's On Belief. [What I just linked are uncorrected galleys posted to my personal site. Three typos, plus add haceks - those diacritical hats Slovenian names like to wear - to Zizek's name. If you want to quote, wait for the journal to come out.]

I'm blogging it now because I want to make a point about Bush, and it's better to do that before the election. But first let me note a truly curious feature of the book brought to my attention by Adam Kotsko.

A quote from On Belief, p. 26:

No wonder that Leibniz is one of the predominant philosophical references of the cyberspace theorists: what reverberates today is not only his dream of a universal computing machine, but the uncanny resemblance between his ontological vision of monadology and today's emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion into cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizean monad which, although "without windows" that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more monads with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe? The impasse which Leibniz tried to solve by way of introducing the notion of the "preestablished harmony" between the monads, guaranteed by God Himself, the supreme, all-encompassing monad, repeats itself today, in the guise of the problem of communication: how does each of us know that he or she is in touch with the "real other" behind the screen, not only with spectral simulacra?

Compare this little monad with another, in the same chapter, on p. 52:

No wonder that Leibniz is one of the predominant philosophical references of the cyberspace theorists: what reverberates today is not only his dream of a universal computing machine, but the uncanny resemblance between his ontological vision of monadology and today's emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion into cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizean monad which, although "without windows" that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more monads with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe? The impasse which Leibniz tried to solve by way of introducing the notion of the "preestablished harmony" between the monads, guaranteed by God Himself, the supreme, all-encompassing monad, repeats itself today, in the guise of the problem of communication: how does each of us know that they are in touch with the "real other" behind the screen, not only with spectral simulacra?

No, it's not a printing error. He just didn't notice that he pasted the same stock bit in twice. (Go ahead and poke around using the Amazon 'search inside' feature if you want to verify this to your own satisfaction.)

If I may quote a famous scene:

Neo: Whoa, deja vu.
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing, I just had a little deja vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it, was it the same cat?
Neo: Might have been, I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch, Apoc.
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

[Back on the Nebuchadnezzar]
Tank: Oh, my God.

[Back on the hotel]
Morpheus: Let's go.

[On the Nebuchadnezzar]
Tank: They cut the hard line, it's a trap. Get out.

I simply can't resist in light of what follows the Zizek's second passage:

Therein resides one of the key unanswered enigmas of the Wachowski brothers' film The Matrix: why does the Matrix construct a shared virtual reality in which all humans interact? It would have been much more economic to have each human being interacting ONLY with the Matrix, so that all humans he or she were to meet would have been only digital creatures? Why? The interaction of "real" individuals through the Matrix creates its own big Other, the space of implicit meanings, surmises, etc., which can no longer be controlled by the Matrix - the Matrix is thus reduced to a mere instrument/medium, to the network that only serves as a material support for the "big Other" beyond its control.

If you are wondering whether I am hinting Zizek's Theory, like the Matrix, was actually built to be a prison for my mind - well, that might be going too far. But I think it is fair to say that these duplicate passages do show something. When interacting with this book, you are interacting with a Matrix of rote gestures and automatized syntactic subroutines. Certain features of the environment are engineered to trick you into inferring the existence of a "real" philosopher behind the words. It's just a trick. Evidently Routledge - or, more likely, Zizek - decided it would be economic to dispense with all that old hat. (Head under the hat, rather.)

Which brings me back to my review essay and my main point about Zizek. I concentrate on the book's opening and closing chapters, which are more lucid than the cyberspace chapter but not better in terms of substance. Zizek styles himself a 'Kierkegaardian-Leninist'. What could that be? You know that old Bukovsky line about how the trouble with communism is that you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelet? But no one has ever seen the omelet? Zizek solves this problem for the Leninist like so: though it is culinarily inconceivable that an omelet should result from these broken eggs, yet we will have our omelet - on the strength of the absurd! You deal with the awkwardness of actually existing socialism by refusing to accept actually existing actuality, basically. Ergo: Kierkegaardian-Leninism.

I'm not going to try to summarize my critique beyond that. It's a bad book. But one diagnostic point I make right at the end of the essay seems to me to have some bearing on the intellectual and political world outside this bad book, so let me set it up on its own. [UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Adam Kotsko thinks On Belief is anomolously bad and that Zizek is truly a worthwhile thinker. So maybe Zizek isn't to be judged by one performance. Adam is a clever fellow. So I'll take his word on that.]

I argue that the trouble with Zizek is that he is an unhealthy anti-liberal. I explain what this means by quoting Jacob Levy about what makes for a healthy liberal. (The lad is dearly missed, isn't he?) In “Liberalism’s Divide, after Socialism and Before” (PDF), Levy discusses dynamics that can induce liberalism to undermine itself, conceptually and practically. Pluralism and rationalism (maybe you can imagine what that means) are in tension. So healthy liberalism is a delicate balancing act. My essay coordinates this with Trilling on the liberal imagination. (I'm always hammering away with that Trilling stuff. You know me.) Anyway, here's Levy:

It is seeing that a thinker or a body of thought grapples with this set of tensions that helps us to identity him, her, or it as liberal. It is part of how we distinguish Burke from de Maistre and Paine from Robespierre . . . . This means that no liberal thinker or style of thought is going to be purely pluralistic or purely rationalistic; the dedication to freedom, if taken seriously, will require some thought about the kinds of threats to freedom that each view worries about.

I coordinate this with Zizek like so:

Because liberalism suffers from this paradoxical tendency to self betray, a healthy liberal is one who dialectically tacks and trims, in pursuit of liberty, between extremes of illiberal arch-rationalism and anti-rationalism. I have been tunneling to this exact point from the opposite direction: an unhealthy anti-liberal is one, like Zizek, who ticks and tocks in unreflective revulsion at liberalism, pantomiming that he is de Maistre (or Abraham) or Robespierre (or Lenin) by turns, lest he look like Mill.

It's clearer if you read the whole thing. But maybe you get the gist of the unbalancing act: a penchant for conjoining things that don't go together, just because they go against something you don't like. Namely, liberalism.

This diagnosis is interesting, even if you don't care about Zizek, because it applies to many conservatives. In my essay I make the point that Zizek has criticized the war in Iraq, but in a way which makes it quite unclear why he shouldn't - in principle - be praising Bush as a model, Zizekian Knight of Politically Revolutionary Faith. "Iraq shall be democratized - on the strength of the absurd." On the surface, a bold geopolitical, utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits. But scratch the surface and find Bush playing Abraham to the world's Isaac. The hallmark of faith (according to Kierkegaard) is inability to explain one's actions to others, especially actions that seem to make no sense whatsoever. Just recently I saw a reference to an old Bushism - probably you remember it - that google finds here:

In the book "Bush at War," by Bob Woodward, Bush talks about his job as "the strategic thinker" of his administration who makes provocative comments to prod his staff. Woodward then asked if Bush ever explained "what he was doing."

"Of course not," he said. "I'm the commander. See, I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

As a reductio ad absurdum on Zizek this works fine: if he were serious, Bush would be his political ideal. Bush is not his political ideal, so he is unserious.

Regarding Bush himself the case is a bit more involved. Above and beyond the amusement value of suggesting he is a closet Zizekian - I am only half-serious - there is a completely serious point to be made. Not just about the Iraq war, or even Bush in particular, but about a style of political thought and action. Matthew Yglesias is forever harping on Republican epistemological relativism - and rightly so. Josh Marshall has written about 'our postmodern President'. I see Timothy Burke has just written that, "It might surprise some conservatives and skeptics who probably could uncork a rant about “postmodernist academics” in a moment’s notice, but I think this particular rhetorical gambit has become even more profoundly characteristic of conservative thought and writing than any form of consciously “postmodern” writing." The gambit in question boils down to a preposterously broad license to ignore and/or proceed without evidence. One problem, however, with attributing postmodern epistemology to the President - right-wing pundits, movement conservatives - is that it is a little unclear where they would get such stuff. They obviously don't spend their days cribbing talking points from academic fashionable nonsense. I think the answer is that the intellectual troubles of conservatives stem from an unsound pincer maneuver carried out again and again against liberalism, perfectly analogous to the troubles that incapacitate Zizek. If the criterion by which you select your ideas is not their mutual compatibility but their shared incompatibility with viscerally loathed 'liberalism', you end up with no ideas, just a stock of "irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas" (to quote my stock Trilling tag). Because all these mutually contradictory impulses, plucked up from the hostile periphery of liberalism, don't add up. You can use them to prove everything, hence nothing. You can say that the trouble is that we should be standing athwart the train of history, shouting 'halt!' on behalf of some Burkean, culturally conservative communitarian wisdom. You can say we should run the train hotter and hotter on behalf of some ideal of economically rational creative destruction. But you can't halt the train while also making the train run faster and faster. (That's just one rather central example.)

So conservatism ends up being a sort of free-floating, objectless revolutionism. Hence the epistemological irresponsibility of many conservatives. You have no strategy, and your only real tactic is pretending to have a strategy. The looniness of the long-distance sprinter, you might say.

What I just gave isn't really an argument. The long version is to be found in my good old Dead Right post, in which I critique David Frum for trying to come up with a long-view positive conservative philosophy, to complement his policy wonkery, and failing. I've also touched on the theme in other old posts, like this one.

Let me try to say something brief that won't just repeat that old stuff (which I do still think is good stuff.) The Bush administration has no defenders on the domestic front, i.e. no one seriously proposes that the Bush administration and Republican Congress did a good job with domestic policy. For Bush supporters, and for Republicans generally, it's foreign policy, foreign policy, foreign policy. But it is very notable (correct me if I'm wrong) that no one is presently and prominently in the business of even half-heartedly apologizing for domestic failures on the grounds that the Republicans have some general plan or philosophy of governance that was frustrated by Democrats, imperfectly implemented due to accident or the crush of external events. The fact is that domestically there is just plain nothing that Republicans are for. They are not seriously interested in seeking to shrink government, let alone drown it in the tub. (The rhetoric of Republicans as the party of small government is fading fast, am I right? Since it has been so long since Newt Gingrich blasted onto the scene. And telling the voters what Grover Norquist actually wants would be ballot box poison. And the the War means big government anyway.) Republicans are not seriously interested in forcibly imposing culturally conservative values on godless secular humanists, let alone turning the country into an authoritarian theocracy. (Hence the friendly faces of the pro-choice Republicans - Schwarzenegger and Giuliani - at the conventions. Give the people what they want if you want to get elected.) Nor do the Republicans have a plan for squaring the circle and turning the country into an authoritarian-libertarian theocratic minarchy.

Hence the terrible truth spoken by Dennis Hastert's spokesman: “It’s extremely difficult to govern when you control all three branches of government.” What he should have added is a final clause: 'when you are by nature an opposition party.' You are inherently an opposition party when you fundamentally oppose the existing political order of things as intolerable but do not have either the power to stage a coup, or sufficient popularity to stage a popular revolution; when, indeed, you do not even have a plan for a revolution, let alone a workable plan. Philosophically, the Republican party could only be happy if it were reduced not to impotence but to the level of influence that befits a gadfly on the body politic of the post-New Deal liberal democratic state. Any power above and beyond an occasional sting is unbecoming in a party that proposes no alternative, while disdaining the existing machinery as unsuitable. (David Brooks actually made this point a couple months ago. Plausibly, one of the reasons Republicans have indulged in such unseemly orgies of spending, paving their districts with pork, is that it is hard to refrain from employing the instruments of power in bad ways if you cannot conceive of how they could be used in good ways.) Democrats, by contrast, can honestly say that they see themselves as (ahem) conservative stewards of the New Deal. The people want big government but not inefficient government or invasive or paternalistic government. They don't want a welfare state. But they do want an entitlement state. The government is properly in the business of sending lots of people monthly checks. This desire set, which I submit might as well be set in stone for the foreseeable future, generates endless problems and tensions that are properly countered not by drowning government in the tub or posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings but by endless tacking from one threat into an opposite sort of threat. Running an entitlement state is about optimization and efficiency. Trying to figure out what services the people really want, and want to pay for, and providing them. Democrats are happy to say so. Republicans are not happy to say so.

Republicans have shown themselves ready to spend domestically in great spasms and geysers because, in a way, the grotesque spectacle must seem a confirmation of wise, Republican distrust of government. Republicans are happy to fund foreign wars. What they are unprepared to do is spend intelligently, according to some long-term plan for wise domestic governance and general welfare. To do so would be to admit that, after all, the thing to be is a Democrat.

Which brings us to foreign policy. I won't say Republicans are happy the War on Terror came along. But I am certain Republicans were, on some level, relieved to have something they could do in what felt like good conscience, having reached pretty much the ends of their tethers on other fronts. Some of that old Cold War Republicans-strong-on-defense glory sweetly recrudescing. Henry had an interesting post about this some time back. A quote from Irving Kristol:

Prescriptions for elderly people? Who gives a damn? I think it’s disgusting that . . . presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people. Future historians will find this very hard to believe. It’s not Athens. It’s not Rome. It’s not anything.

Thus, National Greatness Conservatism as a welcome change of subject. As Henry wrote:

There’s an important strain within US conservatism that is interested not only in revolution, but in permanent revolution. The struggle itself is what is important, not a successful resolution, which is dull, and somehow slightly distasteful. The everyday politics of policy and markets just aren’t very interesting. Some conservatives never seem more comfortable and happier than when they are engaged in an epic struggle between good and evil.

Hence, for example, David Frum's shift from Dead Right to An End To Evil.

The hell of it is that, having been handed a way to lift the curse of Zizekianism, the Bushies went and fought a Zizekian war anyway. If you see what I mean.

Well, I'll just conclude on an autobiographical note. It's rather odd for me to reread my article now. I drafted versions of it as early as mid 2002. (Such, such are the glacial joys of academic publishing.) I well remember reading Michael Walzer's essay, "Can There Be A Decent Left?" and quite agreeing with the spirit of it. Largely because I was also reading books by the likes of Zizek at the time (but not just by Zizek.) Stuff so philosophically toxic I felt I couldn't bear to be in the same political wing a moment longer. Then one day I woke up and I realized it was totally marginal, and I was letting my annoyance get the better of me.

I still strongly stand by everything I say against Zizek. But it feels odd to me now because the thoughts in it are associated with other thoughts I had then and really no longer do. I can't really sort out how much of that is me moving back to the left after having lurched right, and how much it has to do with changed priorities in light of the movements of events. Let me just take the occasion to take you down memory lane to the length of the first two paragraphs of Walzer's essay.

Leftist opposition to the war in Afghanistan faded in November and December of last year, not only because of the success of the war but also because of the enthusiasm with which so many Afghans greeted that success. The pictures of women showing their smiling faces to the world, of men shaving their beards, of girls in school, of boys playing soccer: all this was no doubt a slap in the face to leftist theories of American imperialism, but also politically disarming. There was (and is) still a lot to worry about: refugees, hunger, minimal law and order. But it was suddenly clear, even to many opponents of the war, that the Taliban regime had been the biggest obstacle to any serious effort to address the looming humanitarian crisis, and it was the American war that removed the obstacle. It looked (almost) like a war of liberation, a humanitarian intervention.

But the war was primarily neither of these things; it was a preventive war, designed to make it impossible to train terrorists in Afghanistan and to plan and organize attacks like that of September 11. And that war was never really accepted, in wide sections of the left, as either just or necessary. Recall the standard arguments against it: that we should have turned to the United Nations; that we had to prove the guilt of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and then organize international trials; and that the war, if it was fought at all, had to be fought without endangering civilians. The last point was intended to make fighting impossible. I haven't come across any arguments that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars. But among last fall's antiwar demonstrators, "Stop the bombing" wasn't a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing-or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

It's too soon to hazard a "Can There Be A Decent Right?" rewrite - a view through the lens of an unhappy Iraq, rather than a happy Afghanistan. (Maybe it'll all turn out alright. Knock on wood.) I'll just suggest a first draft for those last few lines, hopefully appearing sometime early in the new year in the pages of the National Review or Weekly Standard, after the resolution of the election one way or the other give folks the breathing space to stop standing by their man no matter what:

The truth is that most right-wingers were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to supporting the war, and they were prepared to support it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

Well, anyway, that's enough for now. I've written this post in haste. I shall feel free to edit it at leisure.

Comments

[bob mcmanus]

"They are not seriously interested in seeking to shrink government, let alone drown it in the tub."

I am nowhere as certain of this as you are, and tend toward uying Krugman's theorey that they are revolutionaries, seeking to destroy the system while having an absurd faith that they can control what rises from the ashes. They are constrained by politics and a need for pork, but would they have passed even larger tax cuts if possible?

Bush as Abraham was brutal, and even farther than I would go.

[Russell Arben Fox]

Damn, this was brilliant. Zizek and Levy and Walzer and Trilling and Bush all in one post, with just the right note of personal reflection dropped in at the end. You are really good at this John.

I'm sure there are some nits I could pick here and there. For instance, one might argue that the Republican party has been intellectually and/or electorally paralyzed into a negative, angry confrontation with liberalism at least partially by the class and cultural divide between the truly affirmative vision of anti-modern social conservatism which it has helped cultivate, and its concurrent commitment to a merely individualistic (and usually rather elite, economically speaking) strain of government distrust which is as old as America itself. And the (somewhat lamented, almost entirely dead) "national greatness" movement in 1990s-era neoconservatism complicates your analysis further, because there again you had a purposeful, civic vision of the U.S. sitting uncomfortably amidst a bunch of professional activists who otherwise didn't have a communitarian bone in their bodies. (I talk about that some more here.) But anyway, to develop those nits fully would take more time than I have right now. Again, great post--one of your very best, I think.

[noctos]

"Zizek styles himself a 'Kierkegaardian-Leninist'."

Did he write that himself? I guess I could see the Lenin influence but not really Kierkegaard. I mean there's obviously some of Kierkegaard's thinking present in Zizek but that's mainly through his Heidegger interpretations. I always saw him as a Heideggerian and above all a true Lacan devotee (eg texts like these)

Great post again though.

[jholbo]

The term is his. It is possible, of course, that he doesn't really mean it. But he does talk about how the true revolutionary needs to teleologically suspend the ethical, as per Fear and Trembling. (I don't think Zizek actually knows what Kierkegaard means by that term, though. At any rate, he gets it wrong.)

[Ray Davis]

Great stuff, but I'm afraid you're overly optimistic about the Republican party being essentially oppositional and thus unstable. The party is essentially *plutocratic*, deploying church-and-gladiators to distract the unwealthy. Its pork is ideologically based, not an unfortunate side-effect: government, like everything else, is viewed as a way to centralize wealth.

What's stopped plutocratic rule in the past hasn't been incoherency but catastrophe. The only difference now is the extent of the catastrophe we face, largely because the achievements of progressivism and the New Deal have given us so much more to lose.

[Anthony Smith]

Part of being Kierkegaardian-Leninist means understanding the "stages on life's way" where, in the religious stage we have a certain repetition of the aesthetic stage. Communism is a repetition of the bourgeoisie revolution - one that has no object but in a qualitatively different way. I think that's where the misunderstanding is coming from (though I would certainly be grouped among the "toxic philosophers"). Then again, it is marginal, so who cares?

[Kent]

Kudos once again. An excellent post, and something I will continue to think about for quite a while.

I still have a copy of your earlier post on David Frum saved to my hard drive, and read it every few months (believe it or not), chuckling and shaking my head every time. Obviously this is along the same lines. Really good stuff. (I hope keeping it on my hard drive is OK with you, btw.)

Anyway, I think I just might agree with the earlier commenter that many Republicans really do want a form of plutocratic rule. But they cannot TELL themselves that this is what they want, and they certainly cannot justify wanting this, or admit wanting it, even to themselves. Thus their incoherence when they try to explain themselves, or even understand themselves.

Their incoherence is therefore worth noting, thinking about, and pointing out as often as possible.

One other point. In my mind, I link this most recent post of yours with something I've been thinking about re: Chris Hitchens. It seems to me that Hitch abandoned the left at precisely the wrong moment. Yes, you probably used to be able to find Stalin-apologizers on the left, and yes, that is a good reason to think long and hard about whether you want to throw your lot in with such people. But just about the time Hitch realizes this and switches to the right, the number and the importance of Stalin apologizers has headed way down, and we're seeing a massive increase in the number and importance of right-wing apologizers for torture, Abu Ghraib, war crimes, and overall foreign (and domestic) policy incompetence / lying / evil.

In general, it is a foolish thing to decide to learn right (or left) politically, just because you disagree with specific people on the left (or right). There are idiots on both sides. Playing "my friends are nicer than your friends" is not a good way to establish a set of political views.

(Do I have it right, by the way? Was it Hitchens who gave this as part of his reason for abandoning the left? Or am I misunderstanding/misremembering what I read a while back?)

[Dave M]

I am actually something of a Zizek fan. As a liberal, I treat him with the same distance I treat Schmitt, as a not well-meaning critic that is nonetheless capable of illuminating some of the tensions and contradictions underlying our own ideological positions.

His "Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism" helped me come to terms with the strategic motivations of the constant conservative invocation of Communism and socialism when talking about the American left, for instance.

[Brad]

A nice post and review. On Belief is definitely not Zizek's best work, though it was the first of his I read -- perhaps his most frustating when it comes to the copy & paste phenomenon that he tries to defend in his recent book of interviews with Glyn Davis. Indeed, I had a very similar reaction as yours. I'm happy you expressed far better than I when I was describing it to a friend. He is far too cavalier here, I think, with the differences between political and religious/mythical belief, as you well note. As a friend of mine noted, it's often difficult to tell whether his empathetic reading of Lenin is a joke or academic exercise. I can empathise with your frustration, and really don't think it should be taken too seriously.

I am glad, however, that it wasn't the final book of his I gave a try. I've found considerable theological inspiration in his readings of Friedrich Schelling; and his Tarrying With the Negative and parts of the Sublime Subject of Ideology easily carry the burden of their collective hype.

[tristero]

One of the folks you quote sez that the right couldn't have appropriated postmodern textual strategy because they don't sit around all day cribbing talking points from academic fashionable nonsense.

Don't kid yourself.

If you think the far right is not intimately familiar with the numerous concepts subsumed under deconstruction and postmodernism, you are naive.

First, these are people who have built a career railing against "cultural relativism." They most certainly study the stuff.

Second, even while they condemn it loudly, the far right routinely (and quite deliberately) deploys "relativist" rhetorical techniques in their arguments with others, while simultaneously insisting that their ideas are absolutes, beyond dispute (religion comes in handy for this part).

Thus, Bush describes the conclusion of a National Intelligence Estimate as "just a guess." A report showing that there were no WMD's in Iraq actually proves the case for invasion. And a war hero is really a coward and a weakling, while a deserter is a manly man.

For heaven's sake, don't continue to underestimate these people. They are far more deteremined than you imagine. Of course they're conversant with postmodernism; Bush has never read Derrida but someone around him sure as hell understands exactly how to use pomo to confuse and demoralize the rest of us.

[ben wolfson]

Employing relativist argumentative techniques is hardly the same thing as having studied philosophical relativists, and it's eminently possible to attack positions you haven't studied closely or at all.

Children do the things you've described; most of them haven't read about postmodernism.

[Adam Kotsko]

I think it can be very helpful to remember that the "Thinking in Action" series is little more than a cynical marketting ploy ("Philosophy -- for people who feel guilty that they don't care about philosophy!") and to ponder whether Zizek gave it precisely the amount of respect it deserves.

[jholbo]

Ben, you are quite right about small children being 'postmodernist' in their epistemology, if the term is being used in a sort of generic way to denote illogic and evidential slovenliness. (Not a healthy usage, since it simply begs the question against the stuff having any merits. But I more or less invited that usage. Fair enough.) What I really had in mind is that calling Bush a postmodernist has an inherent implausibility because many features strongly associated with a certain sort of humanistic writing - compulsive ironizing, textual compexity, intellectual pastiche, a love of noisy, busy verbiage (for good or ill) are most definitely not associated with tongue-tied Texans. Plain-taking 'America knows what's in my heart' Bush just isn't much like Lyotard. Above all, Bush isn't French. So the statement that Bush is a postmodernist looks like an insulting paradox, waiting to be refuted. But there really is something serious to be said in this area. The Zizek comparison seems to me better, then, because the intellectual dynamics genuinely are identical. Zizek is repulsed by liberalism, and it induces in him a sort of schizophrenia - with religious fundamentalism as one of the poles. Bush, and conservatives, are repulsed by liberalism (admittedly I am punning a bit here), and this induces in them a sort of schizophrenia - with religious fundamentalism as one of the poles.

Adam, I do believe you about Zizek having better stuff on offer. Do you have a post or brief introduction to what you think is really good about the man. (I'm not just baiting you, and I promise not to be snarky. Having righteously snarked and gotten it out of my system, and am prepared to say 'Zizek has good thoughts A, B and C.')

For example, after writing the article I saw some brief quotes from Zizek in which he actually says that it is very annoying for Western leftists in liberal democratic society to get all misty-eyed about what life under communism was like. That is, he says that a certain sort of unserious assault on liberalism is one of the most annoying things there is. But so far as I can tell he does this thing himself. Unless it's all - as Kierkegaard might say - just an experiment in thought and I missed the joke. What do you take Zizek's actual political attitude to be? Is he seriously a Kierkegaardian-Leninist, or was that just a fun paradox to play with?

[jholbo]

Oh, and Brad - or anyone else who happens to know - what does Zizek say in defense of his cut-and-paste method? (I am refering to the reference, above, to some book of conversations with Zizek.) I thought about commenting a bit more extensively about this myself, above and beyond my Matrix joke. There isn't really anything wrong, in my opinion, with more or less cutting and pasting something you wrote in one essay or piece into another piece entirely. Better to tailor and tweak it at least a little for form's sake, but if it's a functional component, it works. If it works it works. I've done it myself. Sometimes I write something particularly nice - usually it's a joke - and realize it would actually be funnier in another place. So I retell my own jokes. I think I have not done so in print, and will attempt not to do so. But a couple jokes I told in my (unpublished, except on the web) dissertation made it into my long (soon to be published, I hope) mock-Platonic dialgoue. Because they worked better there. But I really can't imagine what Zizek thinks his excuse for cutting and pasting within a single chapter could be. It just proves that he didn't reread his own work after writing it. Which means it's a rush job.

[Steve]

Convincing explanation for the mutually contradictory factions within the Republican party. Seems obvious now that you've spelled it out. They have no positive common ground. That's the whole point.

[Matt Guthrie]

I would like to say three things (all sotto voce, as they mark my entrance into this discussion.)
First of all, regarding Zizek's cut-and-pasteing: Has anybody else noticed that in one of the stories in "Oblivion" David Foster Wallace cuts Zizek's discussion of the relationship between toilets and national character and pastes it into the mouths of interns at a fashion magazine?
Secondly: Can't the Kierkegaardian strain of Zizek's thought be summarized as both men looking hard at Christianity as a last resort - when other ways of giving meaning to the world have failed?
Lastly, but to my mind, most importantly: Post-modern Republicanism. I understand neither post-modernism nor Republicanism, but is not the common ground between the two nothing more than the idea that there are always multiple interpretrations of events and/or texts, and that it is possible by various means (volume, repitition, impugning the "other") to create a discourse that enters the general consciousness. Thus "Iraq is going wonderfully" vs. "Iraq is a cock-up of truly biblical proprtions" isn't a matter to be resolved by observation, but rather by making sure that the preferred interpretation/discouse/meme/truth wins out. This leads inexorably to a further similarity, which is distrust of "science" not just in the obvious (global warming) sense but also in the bigger sense of the term - that observation and empirical experimentation are valuable ways of determining "truth".
By the way, what is this place, and who are you folks? I got here completely by accident, but might stay a while, if you highfalutin' intellectual types can deal with the simplistic views of a Phoenix High School teacher.

[Del]

The truth is that most right-wingers were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to supporting the war, and they were prepared to support it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

So conservatism ends up being a sort of free-floating, objectless revolutionism. Hence the epistemological irresponsibility of many conservatives. You have no strategy, and your only real tactic is pretending to have a strategy. The looniness of the long-distance sprinter, you might say.

Allow me to suggest that the relevant movie cite here is not The Matrix: it's Memento.

[ben wolfson]

Just to clarify, John, the "you" in my comment was tristero.

[Russell Arben Fox]

"Bush, and conservatives, are repulsed by liberalism (admittedly I am punning a bit here), and this induces in them a sort of schizophrenia - with religious fundamentalism as one of the poles."

What needs to be understood, however, is why the repulsion results in schizophrenia--that is, dividedness--instead of a true antiliberalism. John says that what it comes down to is a visceral antipathy to the mere vague idea of "liberalism," and hence a random grabbing of ideas which have nothing more between them than a "shared incompatibility." But why would the grabbing of ideas be random? How can we account for the fact that making the best intellectual sense of modern Republican party ideology one can requires a turn to the Zizekian absurd? They didn't have to embrace "mutually contradictory impulses"; they didn't have to hypothesize some sort of "authoritarian-libertarian theocratic minarchy"--and even if that's what they ended up with, many people (like John!) have pointed out the confusion to them by now.

I see a few possible alternatives. 1) The Republican party really is a devious fascist movement, which intends nothing more than to create a plutocracy. Their deploy of contradictory arguments is simply an indication that it's all bread and circuses, distracting us until they have sufficient power to jail or execute their enemies. 2) The Republican party really is just fundamentally sick, psychopathic, incapable of coherent thought. All those intelligent Republicans voters you know? Mad, every single last one of them. (Note that both of these alternatives require us to assume that the religious impulse is either fake or merely another passion indistinguishable from all others, and hence presumably just as capable of being domesticated to the liberal order as, say, golf.) 3) The more respectful alternative: maybe what we have here is an attempt to find a place for the communal and the transcendent in the midst of a world which no longer embraces pragmatic liberalism merely as a political strategy but as a cultural baseline. In which case, addressing the problem of conservatism (and it is a problem; I'm surely not defending it) requires more than a wonderment at its apparent absurdity, and certainly more than Thomas Frank-style rants about how the poor, benighted believers of middle America have been abused by malicious capitalists. Maybe what we need is further thought about how secularism emerged, and whether a truly secular society is even possible.

[Kent]

Matt Guthrie asks, "Who are you folks?"

I think we're just a bunch of people who stumbled here, too, and like what we found. I have Examined Life linked from my own little web page, so I remember to check back regularly.

[Ben A]

Here I go again. Look, John, you are too quick, way too quick, to dismiss “the right” and “republicans” without engaging their ideas seriously. The accusation that Republicans lack a positive focus in domestic policy is perplexing. I would have thought the GOP is reliably for the following: school choice, restricting affirmative action, the death penalty, fewer church/state barriers, shifting social security to a individual account rather than pay-as-you-go-structure, making welfare contingent on work, Scalia-style judges, and as much support of the pro-life position as they can get away with. These are manifestly consequential and contentious policy issues. On certain topics – health care and gay rights, for example -- the GOP does largely play defense. But we shouldn’t confuse this for a lack of a larger positive program. Whether that positive program, or any subset thereof, qualifies as the position of a “decent right” seems another question.

Foreign policy. Well, what’s the use, really? You either believe that there can be a reasoned defense of Blair/Bush policy, or you don’t.

[Adam Kotsko]

John,

I promise I will write something more substantial. Tonight, I would probably die if I tried to do so, but perhaps tomorrow afternoon. In any case, you shall be educated on the philosophical worth of Zizek -- that I can guarantee.

[jholbo]

Ben A, I only have time for a short reply, although of course your comment reasonably requires a long one. (Oh, and by the by, the link in your comment is broken so I'm not really sure where you were pointing me.)

The efficient cause of my annoyance with Republican legislators this week is the Boston Globe series that has been linked all over the place. So you've probably seen it (and if not: worth a read.) No especial philosophical explanation of greed and venality in human life is ever needed. But I do think that Republicans bad behavior at present is philosophically amplified by an unhelpful attitude that behaving well - in government - is logically impossible. That is, the Norquistian rhetoric of 'I never saw a government program I couldn't cut' gets transmuted into a perverse excuse for any government program whatseover, however porky and indulgent of special interests. Because it's no worse than anything else anyone is doing. Tacitus had a very good post about this months ago, which I couldn't possibly track now: how 'lower tax' rhetoric works fine as a sledgehammer until the time comes at which you have to decide when to stop lowering taxes. And if you can't then put aside the sledgehammer and say 'that's a bad tax but this is a good one' then you've grown useless, even if you once had a job to do - as a gadfly, more or less. That was what I had in mind with my gadfly remark.

In the case of Bush himself, it isn't so much the lack of a justification for the war that bothers me. I do agree with you - we've had this go-round before - that there were reasons to go to war. (Whether they were sufficient or not is debatable, but given the direness of the decaying sanctions regime ... no good options, etc. Fair enough.) It's more the late revelation that the Bushies do not themselves seem to have been actuated by reasonable calculations even if those calculations in principle existed. Analogy: everyone thinks Isaac's got WMD's, so they sort of think Abraham's plan to drag him up to Moria is OK. Then, it turns out he didn't have them. Also, that Abraham was never dragging him up the mountain because of that anyway. OK. Bad joke. But it really seems like a case of a potentially reasonable (but maybe not in hindsight) course of action that wasn't being pursued for reasonable reasons at the time (never mind that maybe it turned out to be wrong in hindsight). And the big ticket item is the total failure to plan in a minimally competent way for the reconstruction. And the failure to consider mistakes made, and correct them - rather than shooting the messengers again and again. That's the real Kierkegaard analogy there: cooking the omelet of Iraq on the strength of the absurd.

I realize this doesn't really address your point. I'll try to find the time to do a longer post that is more sober and detailed on the policy side. If I find the time. I do appreciate that these sorts of charges should be backed up very thoroughly. It's not enough to wave my arms angrily.

Matt, that's rather interesting about David Foster Wallace cribbing Zizek. How odd. As to your point about these two thinkers - Kierkegaard and Zizek - turning to Christianity as a last resorts, the trouble is that Zizek gives no evidence that the first resorts have been exhausted, or that he has even bothered with them. He talks about Kierkegaardian striving after Canadian-style health-care in the US. Surely that is something we ought to seek in the old-fashioned, non-absurd fashion first. Kierkegaard seems serious to me (despite being such a joker). Zizek seems to me like a frivolous person who doesn't tell funny jokes. Not much use. (I realize you were not exactly leaping to his defense, but I think the defense doesn't fly.)

[ben A]

That seemed like a fairly long/serious reply to me!

Two points:

1. I think you're right that a general belief in the failure of government makes useful engagement in governing difficult. This, by the way, was one point made by the original neoconservatives aganist old-line Buckley conservatives in the 70s and 80s: the New Deal/strong central government is here to stay, the question is how to shape policies to have desireable (from a conservative perspective) results. The much maligned Irving Kristol is not a bad guy to look at on this topic.

2. Let me suggest a (perhaps) simpler hypothesis to explain the house GOP spending binge. Fiscal responsibility is a virtue of parties not in power. Look, I know the story know is "under Clinton, we democrats believed in balanced budgets," but I think that's a manifestly self-serving history. When in the majority, House democrats were wanton free-spenders. And the idea that a more robust theory of govenrment helped them be more discerning about spending policy seems to me unsupported. There have been decent GOPer and decent Dems trying to get good policy passed, and then there have been the vast majority who have pursued pork. I have not seen evidence suggesting the propensity for pork barreling differs substantially based on party affiliation.

[Marcus Stanley]

Not true. Clinton & the Congressional dems chose to reject the "stimulus" bill right after his election in 92, a bill that was full of pork. Instead they passed a budget that significantly cut the deficit. Look at Robert Rubin's book on this (and also Robert Reich's, which criticizes the decision). This was a period when Congress was controlled by Democrats.

Of course, one can argue that liberals have *never* controlled Congress, even when there was a Democratic majority, because the Dems in those days always had Southern conservatives (who nowadays are Republicans). This may be the first time that Congress has been controlled not just by one party, but by one ideology.

In a broader sense I think this was a brilliant post. The Republican party appears to be controlled by the inner logic of its own propaganda. The logic of propaganda is not the logic of governance. There are some deep questions being raised about whether policy can defeat really sophisticated propaganda in a political contest in an open democracy.

[Donald Johnson]

I'm one of those people who initially opposed the bombing of Afghanistan on the grounds that it could have caused a famine. I changed my mind about the war for the reasons Walzer mentioned--the obvious joy of the residents of Kabul over their liberation. Hard to argue with that.

But Walzer is intellectually dishonest. There was a very real danger of famine from the bombing campaign, not just from the Taliban. The Taliban military collapsed, the bombing levels dropped, and aid reached remote areas before the winter snows and so the famine death toll didn't reach stratospheric levels, but even so it probably was in the high thousands or low tens of thousands. (See the May 20, 2002 Guardian article by Jonathan Steele.)

It's fair to criticize people like me who were too kneejerk in our opposition to American military power (though with good historical reasons, I might add, and Bush's record in both Afghanistan and Iraq will probably make me skeptical in the future). I've realized post-Afghanistan that American military intervention, even by someone like Bush, can sometimes be the lesser of two evils. But I think the Walzer piece was only in part a serious criticism of the far left. It reads more like a cheap political shot, an attempt to settle scores with his enemies. His claim that the danger of famine was entirely the fault of the Taliban is an evasion of responsibility and not an example of decent leftism. If we are going to use force, we should be honest about the risks we are running--or to be blunt, the risks we are making innocent people run. The same criticism in different form can be leveled at people like me, when our chosen alternative policy might have left the Taliban in power.

I realize this blog entry was a criticism of the right, not the left, but I didn't think the Walzer passage should have been left unchallenged.

[Doug M]

I'd like to register my envy of John's standng in the field of Zizek-debunking. Assuming that a general conservation-of-fame law holds in the nutty academic left, Derrida's demise may well be Zizek's gain, opening up a career niche for a designated debunker. I'd vie for it if I thought I could digest Zizek's writings quickly. If only I'd started sooner, with tolerably small portions ...

[Jeff]

Your comparisons of Zizek to conservatives is really only metaphorical, doing nothing more than point out a similar trajectory in their arguments. Your point about conservatives is well-taken but really I think that your use of Zizek here amounts to little more than a decoration of the essay. Your big mistake is that you don't understand that for Zizek the primary category to think about is not Kierkegaard or Lenin or even Lacan but rather the unimaginable succession of capitalism by some truly collective form of being. That's what Zizek 'believes' in and that's what _On Belief_ is about. All of his churning through various philosophers and discourses and designs of toilet seats and whatever else is simply a way to approach obliquely a thought that could disclose the possibility of such a "miraculous" warp in time. For Zizek, liberal hegemony would seem by all accounts to preclude or foreclose the thought of such revolutionary praxis. And indeed it does. Few people are likely to agree with Zizek. But in arraying himself in the various philosophical positions he takes up (Lacanian, Jamesonian, Leninist), Zizek is not posing _against_ liberalism, but rather _beyond_ it. He is making the argument that we need to calibrate our thought from the perspective of a utopian moment _after_ capitalism, a moment unimaginable in liberalism but which he hopes to produce by using the Lacanian analytical armature to find moments of the Real within the lifeworld of liberal-capitalist hegemony. Zizek;s thought is not "against Mill," its within Mill, yet (he hopes) anchored in a Real that revolutionary praxis will one day walk through, beyond Mill.
His thought is thus tenaciously anti-capitalist, and any assessment of his work that doesn't start from this is erroneous. If you want to argue about whether Zizek is a 'serious' philosopher, you have to address your argument to his anti-capitalism and his attempts to think a revolutionary praxis. Conflating him with a bunch of gung-ho free market utopians has no meaning, and really hardly scratches the surface of what either of them are up to. Wolfowitz et al are thinkers of the end of history in free-market capitalism. Zizek is a militant thinker of an unimaginable rupture in history.

By the way, all of this is something that no postmodern thinker would ever agree to, and the way you vaguely conflate Zizek with 'other postmodern thinkers you were reading at the time' is not only an irritable mental gesture of your own, but by now such a cliche that it would seem to be almost a generic feature of the critical review of a radical thinker. They're all 'postmodernists' or 'all relativists' or 'all nihilists' or whatever. Use a straw man argument if you want, but if you name names, you gotta come to terms with the people you cite rather than just throwing them around like so many slogans.

[DS]

haceks - those diacritical hats Slovenian names like to wear...

Hacek is Czech. In Slovene it's called a stresica or a klukca (slang).

[PrelKikam]

enter text? test, sorry

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