Address how Kaurismaki frames globalization, migration, and xenophobia in “Le Havre.”
Please watch Kaurismaki’s film “Le Havre” linked here https://ww9.soap2day.day/le-havre-soap2day/ and please read the two attached files and please write a blog post (500-1500 words) responding to one of the following prompts (500-1500 words).
2. Address how Kaurismaki frames globalization, migration, and xenophobia in “Le Havre.”
3. Explore how Balibar’s “World Borders, Political Borders” intersects with Kaurismaki’s “Le Havre.”
4. Explore how Zizek’s “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism” intersects with Kaurismaki’s “Le Havre.”
Requirements: 500-1500 Words
28Slavoj ŽižekMulticulturalism, Or, the CulturalLogic of Multinational CapitalismThose who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism, are wellaware of the key role played by the notion of the ‘typical’: truly progressive lit-erature should depict ‘typical heroes in typical situations.’ Writers who pre-sented a bleak picture of Soviet reality were not simply accused of lying; theaccusation was rather that they provided a distorted reflection of social realityby depicting the remainders of the decadent past, instead of focusing on thephenomena which were ‘typical’ in the sense of expressing the underlying his-torical tendency of the progress towards Communism. Ridiculous as thisnotion may sound, its grain of truth resides in the fact that each universal ideo-logical notion is always hegemonized by some particular content which coloursits very universality and accounts for its efficiency.
29Why Is the Single Mother ‘Typical’?In the rejection of the social welfare system by the New Right in the us,for example, the universal notion of the welfare system as inefficient issustained by the pseudo-concrete representation of the notorious African-American single mother, as if, in the last resort, social welfare is a pro-gramme for black single mothers—the particular case of the ‘single blackmother’ is silently conceived as ‘typical’ of social welfare and of what iswrong with it. In the case of the anti-abortion campaign, the ‘typical’ caseis the exact opposite: a sexually promiscuous professional woman whovalues her career over her ‘natural’ assignment of motherhood—althoughthis characterization is in blatant contradiction to the fact that the greatmajority of abortions occur in lower-class families with a lot of children.This specific twist, a particular content which is promulgated as ‘typical’of the universal notion, is the element of fantasy, of the phantasmaticbackground/support of the universal ideological notion. To put it inKantian terms, it plays the role of ‘transcendental schematism’, translat-ing the empty universal concept into a notion which directly relates andapplies to our ‘actual experience’. As such, this phantasmatic specifica-tion is by no means an insignificant illustration or exemplification: it isat this level that ideological battles are won or lost—the moment weperceive as ‘typical’ the case of abortion in a large lower-class familyunable to cope with another child, the perspective changes radically.1This example makes clear in what sense ‘the universal results from a con-stitutive split in which the negation of a particular identity transformsthis identity in the symbol of identity and fullness as such’:2theUniversal acquires concrete existence when some particular contentstarts to function as its stand-in. A couple of years ago, the English yel-low press focused on single mothers as the source of all evils in modernsociety, from budget crises to juvenile delinquency. In this ideologicalspace, the universality of ‘modern social Evil’ was operative only throughthe split of the figure of ‘single mother’ into itself in its particularity anditself as the stand-in for ‘modern social Evil’. The fact that this linkbetween the Universal and the particular content which functions as itsstand-in is contingentmeans precisely that it is the outcome of a politicalstruggle for ideological hegemony. However, the dialectic of this strug-gle is more complex than in its standard Marxist version—of particularinterests assuming the form of universality: ‘universal human rights areeffectively the rights of white male property owners…’ To work, the rul-ing ideology has to incorporate a series of features in which the exploitedmajority will be able to recognize its authentic longings. In other words,each hegemonic universality has to incorporate at least twoparticularcontents, the authentic popular content as well as its distortion by the relations of domination and exploitation. Of course, fascist ideology‘manipulates’ authentic popular longing for true community and socialsolidarity against fierce competition and exploitation; of course, it ‘dis-torts’ the expression of this longing in order to legitimize the contin-uation of the relations of social domination and exploitation. However,1Another name for this short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular is, of course,‘suture’: the operation of hegemony ‘sutures’ the empty Universal to a particular content.2Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, London 1996, pp. 14–15.
303See Etienne Balibar, La crainte des masses, Paris 1997.in order to be able to achieve this distortion of authentic longing, it has first to incorporate it…Etienne Balibar was fully justified in reversingMarx’s classic formula: the ruling ideas are precisely notdirectly the ideas of those who rule.3How did Christianity become the ruling ideol-ogy? By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and aspirations of theoppressed—truth is on the side of the suffering and humiliated, powercorrupts, and so on—and rearticulating them in such a way that theybecame compatible with the existing relations of domination.Desire and its ArticulationOne is tempted to refer here to the Freudian distinction between thelatent dream-thought and the unconscious desire expressed in a dream.The two are not the same: the unconscious desire articulates itself, in-scribes itself, through the very ‘perlaboration’, translation, of the latentdream-thought into the explicit text of a dream. In a homologous way,there is nothing ‘fascist’ (or ‘reactionary’ and so forth) in the ‘latent dream-thought’ of fascist ideology (the longing for authentic community andsocial solidarity); what accounts for the properly fascist character of fas-cist ideology is the way this ‘latent dream-thought’ is transformed andelaborated by the ideological ‘dream-work’ into the explicit ideologicaltext which continues to legitimize social relations of exploitation anddomination. And is it not the same with today’s right-wing populism?Are liberal critics not too quick in dismissing the very values populismrefers to as inherently ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘proto-fascist’?Non-ideology—what Fredric Jameson calls the utopian moment presenteven in the most atrocious ideology—is thus absolutely indispensable:ideology is in a way nothing but the form of appearance, the formal distortion/displacement, of non-ideology. To take the worst imaginable case, was Nazianti-Semitism not grounded in the utopian longing for an authenticcommunity life, in the fully justified rejection of the irrationality of capitalist exploitation? Our point, again, is that it is theoretically andpolitically wrong to denounce this longing as a ‘totalitarian fantasy’, thatis, to search in it for the ‘roots’ of fascism—the standard mistake of theliberal-individualist critique of fascism: what makes it ‘ideological’ is itsarticulation, the way this longing is made to function as the legitimiza-tion of a very specific notion of what capitalist exploitation is (the resultof Jewish influence, of the predominance of financial over ‘productive’ capital—only the latter tends towards a harmonious ‘partnership’ withworkers) and of how we are to overcome it (by getting rid of the Jews).The struggle for ideological and political hegemony is thus always thestruggle for the appropriation of the terms which are ‘spontaneously’ expe-rienced as ‘apolitical’, as transcending political boundaries. No wonder thatthe name of the strongest dissident movement in the Eastern EuropeanCommunist countries was Solidarity: a signifier of the impossible fullnessof society, if there ever was one. It was as if, in Poland in the 1980s, whatLaclau calls the logic of equivalence was brought to an extreme: ‘Com-munists in power’ served as theembodiment of non-society, of decay andcorruption, magically uniting everyone against themselves, including the
314Now, when this magic moment of universal solidarity is over, the signifier which, insome post-Socialist countries, is emerging as the signifier of the ‘absent fullness’ of society,is honesty: it forms the focus of the spontaneous ideology of ‘ordinary people’ caught in theeconomic and social turbulence in which the hopes of a new fullness of Society that shouldfollow the collapse of Socialism were cruelly betrayed, so that, in their eyes, ‘old forces’(ex-Communists) and ex-dissidents who entered the ranks of power joined hands inexploiting them even more than before under the banner of democracy and freedom. Thebattle for hegemony, of course, is now focused on the particular content which will give aspin to this signifier: what does ‘honesty’ mean? And, again, it would be wrong to claimthat the conflict is ultimately about the different meanings of the term ‘honesty’: whatgets lost in this ‘semantic clarification’ is that each position claims that their honesty is theonly ‘true’ honesty: the struggle is not simply a struggle among different particular con-tents, it is a struggle which splits from within the universal itself.5Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy, Oxford 1996, p. 149.6Cited in ibid.disappointed ‘honest Communists’ themselves. Conservative nationalistsaccused the Communists of betraying Polish interests to the Soviet master;business-oriented individuals saw in them an obstacle to unbridled capital-ist activity; for the Catholic Church, Communists were amoral atheists; for the farmers, they represented the force of violent modernization whichthrew rural life off the rails; for artists and intellectuals, Communism wassynonymous with oppressive and stupid censorship; workers saw them-selves not only exploited by the Party bureaucracy, but even further humil-iated by the claims that this was done on their behalf; finally, old disillusionedleftists perceived the regime as the betrayal of ‘true Socialism’. The impos-sible politicalalliance between all these divergent and potentially antago-nistic positions was possible only under the banner of a signifier whichstands, as it were, on the very border which separates the political from thepre-political, and ‘Solidarity’ was the perfect candidate: it is politicallyoperative as designating the ‘simple’ and ‘fundamental’ unity of humanbeings which should link them beyond all political differences.4Conservative Basic InstinctsWhat does all this tell us about Labour’s recent electoral victory in theuk? It is not only that, in a model hegemonic operation, they reappropri-ated ‘apolitical’ notions like ‘decency’; what they successfully focused onwas the inherent obscenity of the Tory ideology. The Tories’ explicit ide-ological statements were always supported by their shadowy double, byan obscene, publicly unacknowledged, between-the-lines message.When, for example, they launched their infamous ‘back to basics’ cam-paign, its obscene supplement was clearly indicated by Norman Tebbitt,‘never shy about exposing the dirty secrets of the Conservative uncon-scious’:5‘Many traditional Labour voters realized that they shared ourvalues—that man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalismand territoriality.’6This, then, is what ‘back to basics’ was really about:the reassertion of ‘basic’ egoistic, tribal, barbarian ‘instincts’ which lurkbeneath the semblance of civilized bourgeois society. We all rememberthe (deservedly) famous scene from Paul Verhoeven’s film Basic Instinct(1992) in which, in the course of a police investigation, Sharon Stone fora brief moment spreads her legs and reveals to the fascinated policemenwhat is (or is it?) a glimpse of her pubic hair. A statement like Tebbitt’s isundoubtedly an ideological equivalent of this gesture, allowing a brief
32glance into the obscene intimacy of the Thatcherite ideological edifice.(Lady Thatcher herself was too ‘dignified’ to perform directly this ideo-logical Sharon-Stone-gesture too often, so the poor Tebbitt had to act asher stand-in.) Against this background, the Labour emphasis on‘decency’ was not a case of simple moralism—rather, its message wasthat they are notplaying the same obscene game, that their statements donot contain, ‘between the lines’, the same obscene message.In today’s general ideological constellation, this gesture is more impor-tant than it may seem. When the Clinton administration resolved thedeadlock of gays in the usArmy with the compromise of ‘Don’t ask,don’t tell!’—by which soldiers are not directly asked if they are gay, sothey are also not compelled to lie and deny it, and although they are notformally allowed in the Army, they are tolerated as long as they keeptheir sexual orientation private and do not actively endeavour to engageothers in it—this opportunist measure was deservedly criticized forendorsing homophobic attitudes. Although the direct prohibition ofhomosexuality is not to be enforced, its very existence as a virtual threatcompelling gays to remain in the closet affects their actual social status.In other words, what this solution amounted to was an explicit elevationof hypocrisy into a social principle, like the attitude towards prostitutionin traditional Catholic countries—if we pretend that gays in the Armydo not exist, it is as if they effectively do not exist (for the big Other).Gays are to be tolerated, on condition that they accept the basic censor-ship concerning their identity…While fully justified at its own level, the notion of censorship at work inthis criticism, with its Foucauldian background of Power which, in thevery act of censorship and other forms of exclusion, generates the excessit endeavours to contain and dominate, nonetheless seems to fall short ata crucial point: what it misses is the way in which censorship not onlyaffects the status of the marginal or subversive force that the power dis-course endeavours to dominate, but, at an even more radical level, splitsfrom within the power discourse itself. One should ask here a naive, butnonetheless crucial question: why does the Army so strongly resist pub-licly accepting gays into its ranks? There is only one possible consistentanswer: not because homosexuality poses a threat to the alleged ‘phallicand patriarchal’ libidinal economy of the Army community, but, on thecontrary, because the Army community itself relies on a thwarted/disavowedhomosexuality as the key component of the soldiers’ male-bonding.From my own experience, I remember how the old infamous YugoslavPeople’s Army was homophobic in the extreme—when someone was dis-covered to have homosexual inclinations, he was instantly turned into apariah, before being formally dismissed from the Army—yet, at thesame time, everyday army life was excessively permeated with an atmos-phere of homosexual innuendo. Say, while soldiers were standing in linefor their meal, a common vulgar joke was to stick a finger into the arse ofthe person ahead of you and then to withdraw it quickly, so that whenthe surprised victim turned around, he did not know who among the sol-diers sharing a stupid obscene smile had done it. A predominant form ofgreeting a fellow soldier in my unit, instead of simply saying ‘Hello!’,was to say ‘Smoke my prick!’ (’Pusi kurac!’ in Serbo-Croat); this formula
33was so standardized that it had completely lost any obscene connotationand was pronounced in a totally neutral way, as a pure act of politeness.Censorship, Power and ResistanceThis fragile coexistence of extreme and violent homophobia with thwarted,that is, publicly unacknowledged, ‘underground’ homosexual libidinaleconomy, bears witness to the fact that the discourse of the military com-munity can only operate by way of censoring its own libidinal founda-tion. At a slightly different level, the same goes for the practice ofhazing—the ceremonial beating up and humiliating of usMarines bytheir elder peers, who stick medals directly onto their skin, and so on.When the public disclosure of these practices (somebody secretly shotthem on video) caused such an outrage, what disturbed the public wasnot the practice of hazing itself (everybody was aware that things likethis were going on), but the fact of it being rendered public. Outside the confines of military life, do we not encounter a strictly homologousself-censoring mechanism in conservative populism with its sexist andracist bias? In the election campaigns of Jesse Helms, the racist and sex-ist message is not publicly acknowledged—at the public level, it is some-times even violently disavowed—but is instead articulated in a series ofdouble-entendres and coded allusions. This kind of self-censorship isnecessary if, in the present ideological conditions, Helms’s discourse is toremain effective. If it were to articulate directly, in a public way, its racistbias, this would render it unacceptable in the hegemonic political dis-course; if it were effectively to abandon the self-censored coded racistmessage, it would endanger the support of its targeted electoral body.Conservative populist political discourse thus offers an exemplary case ofa power discourse whose efficiency depends on the mechanism of self-censorship: it relies on a mechanism which is effective only insofar as itremains censored. Against the image, all-present in cultural criticism, ofa radical subversive discourse or practice ‘censored’ by the Power, one iseven tempted to claim that today, more than ever, the mechanism of cen-sorship intervenes predominantly to enhance the efficiency of the powerdiscourse itself.The temptation to be avoided here is the old leftist notion of ‘better forus to deal with the enemy who openly admits his (racist, homophobic…)bias, than with the hypocritical attitude of publicly denouncing whatone secretly and effectively endorses’. This notion fatefully underesti-mates the ideological and political significance of maintaining appear-ances: appearance is never ‘merely an appearance’, it profoundly affectsthe actualsocio-symbolic position of those concerned. If racist attitudeswere to be rendered acceptable in mainstream ideological and politicaldiscourse, this would radically shift the balance of the entire ideologicalhegemony. This, probably, is what Alain Badiou had in mind when he mockingly designated his work as a search for the ‘good terror’: today,in the face of the emergence of new racism and sexism, the strategyshould be to make such enunciations unutterable, so that anyone relying onthem automatically disqualifies himself—as, in our universe, those whoapprovingly refer to fascism. While one may be aware of the way inwhich authentic yearnings for, say, community, are turned by fascism,one should emphatically notdiscuss ‘how many people really died in
34Auschwitz’, ‘the good sides of slavery’, ‘the necessity of cutting back onworker’s collective rights’, and so on; the position should be here quiteunabashedly ‘dogmatic’ and ‘terrorist’, that these are notobjects of ‘open,rational, democratic discussion’.This inherent split and self-censorship of the power mechanism is to beopposed to the Foucauldian motif of the interconnection of Power andresistance. Our point is not only that resistance is immanent to Power, thatpower and counter-power generate each other; it is not only that Poweritself generates the excess of resistance which it can no longer dominate; itis also not only that—in the case of sexuality—the disciplinary ‘repression’of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture of repression itself, as in thecase of the obsessional neurotic who gets libidinal satisfaction out of thevery compulsive rituals destined to keep at bay the traumatic jouissance.This last point must be further radicalized: the Power edifice itself is splitfrom within, that is, to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to relyon an inherent excess which grounds it. To put it in the Hegelian terms ofspeculative identity, Power is always-already its own transgression, if it isto function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene supplement—the gesture ofself-censorship is co-substantial with the exercise of power. It is thus notenough to say that the ‘repression’ of some libidinal content retroactivelyeroticizes the very gesture of ‘repression’—this ‘eroticization’ of power isnot a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowedfoundation, its ‘constitutive crime’, its founding gesture which has toremain invisible if power is to function normally. What we get in the kindof military drill depicted in the first part of Kubrick’s Vietnam film FullMetal Jacket(1987), for example, is not a secondary eroticization of the dis-ciplinary procedure which creates military subjects, but the constitutiveobscene supplement of this procedure which renders it operative.The Logic of CapitalSo, back to the recent Labour victory, one can see how it not onlyinvolved a hegemonic reappropriation of a series of motifs which wereusually inscribed into the Conservative field—family values, law andorder, individual responsibility; the Labour ideological offensive alsoseparated these motifs from the obscene phantasmatic subtext which sustained them in the Conservative field—in which ‘toughness on crime’ and ‘individual responsibility’ subtly referred to brutal egotism,to the disdain for victims, and other ‘basic instincts’. The problem, how-ever, is that the New Labour strategy involved its own ‘message betweenthe lines’: we fully accept the logic of Capital, we will not mess aboutwith it.Today, financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference towhich legitimizes the demands to cut social spending, health care, sup-port of culture and scientific research, in short, the dismantling of thewelfare state. Is, however, this permanent crisis really an objective fea-ture of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of theshift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital, resulting from thegrowing role of new technologies as well as from the direct international-ization of Capital and the co-dependent diminished role of the Nation-State which was further able to impose certain minimal requirements
35and limitations to exploitation? In other words, the crisis is an ‘objectivefact’ if and only if one accepts in advance as an unquestionable premisethe inherent logic of Capital—as more and more left-wing or liberal par-ties have done. We are thus witnessing the uncanny spectacle of social-democratic parties which came to power with the between-the-linesmessage to Capital ‘we will do the necessary job for you in an even moreefficient and painless way than the conservatives’. The problem, ofcourse, is that, in today’s global socio-political circumstances, it is prac-tically impossible effectively to call into question the logic of Capital:even a modest social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyondthe limit acceptable to the Capital ‘effectively’ leads to economic crisis,inflation, a fall in revenues and so on. Nevertheless, one should alwaysbear in mind how the connection between ‘cause’ (rising social expendi-ture) and ‘effect’ (economic crisis) is not a direct objective causal one: it isalways-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism and strug-gle. The fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis‘really follows’, in no way ‘proves’ that the necessity of these limits is anobjective necessity of economic life. It should rather be conceived as aproof of the privileged position Capital holds in the economic and politi-cal struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner threatens that ifyou do X, you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Yeffectively ensues.An irony of history is that, in the Eastern European ex-Communist coun-tries, the ‘reformed’ Communists were the first to learn this lesson. Whydid many of them return to power via free elections? This very returnoffers the ultimate proof that these states have effectively entered capital-ism. That is to say, what do ex-Communists stand for today? Due to theirprivileged links with the newly emerging capitalists—mostly membersof the old nomenklatura‘privatizing’ the companies they once ran—theyare first and foremost the party of big capital; furthermore, to erase thetraces of their brief, but nonetheless rather traumatic experience withpolitically active civil society, as a rule they ferociously advocate a with-drawal from ideology, a retreat from active engagement in civil society topassive, apolitical consumerism—the very two features which character-ize contemporary capitalism. Dissidents are thus astonished to discoverthat they played the role of ‘vanishing mediators’ on the path fromsocialism to capitalism in which the same class as before rules under anew guise. It is therefore wrong to claim that the return of the ex-Communists to power signals how people are disappointed at capitalismand long for the old socialist security—rather, in a kind of Hegelian‘negation of negation’, it is only with the return to power of ex-Communists that socialism was effectively negated; that is, what thepolitical analysts (mis)perceive as the ‘disappointment at capitalism’ iseffectively the disappointment at an ethico-political enthusiasm forwhich there is no place in ‘normal’ capitalism.77Retroactively, one thus becomes aware of how deeply the phenomenon of so-called ‘dissi-dence’ was embedded in the socialist ideological framework, of the extent to which ‘dissi-dence’, in its very utopian ‘moralism’ (preaching social solidarity, ethical responsibility,and so forth) provided the disavowed ethical core of socialism: perhaps, one day, historianswill note that—in the same sense in which Hegel claimed that the true spiritual result ofthe Peloponnesian war, its spiritual End, is Thucidydes’s book about it—dissidence’ wasthe true spiritual result of Really Existing Socialism.
36At a somewhat different level, the same logic underlies the social im-pact of cyberspace: this impact does not derive directly from technologybut relies on the network of social relations, that is, the predominant way digitalization affects our self-experience is mediated by the frame of the late capitalist globalized market economy. Bill Gates has com-monly celebrated cyberspace as opening up the prospect of what he calls‘friction-free capitalism’—this expression renders perfectly the socialfantasy which underlies the ideology of cyberspace capitalism, of awholly transparent, ethereal medium of exchange in which the last trace of material inertia vanishes. The crucial point here is that the ‘friction’ we dispose of in the fantasy of ‘friction-free capitalism’, doesnot only refer to the reality of material obstacles which sustain anyexchange process, but, above all, to the Real of traumatic social antago-nisms, power relations, and so forth which brand the space of socialexchange with a pathological twist. In his Grundrissemanuscripts, Marxpointed out how the very material disposition of a nineteenth-centuryindustrial production site directly materializes the capitalist relationshipof domination—the worker as a mere appendix subordinated to themachinery owned by the capitalist; mutatis mutandis, the same goes forcyberspace. In the social conditions of late capitalism, the very material-ity of cyberspace automatically generates the illusory abstract space of‘friction-free’ exchange in which the particularity of the participants’social position is obliterated.The predominant ‘spontaneous ideology of cyberspace’ is so-called‘cyber-revolutionism’ which relies on the notion of cyberspace—or theWorld Wide Web—as a self-evolving ‘natural’ organism.8Crucial here is the blurring of the distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’: theobverse of the ‘naturalization of culture’ (market, society as living organ-ism) is the ‘culturalization of nature’ (life itself is conceived as a set ofself-reproducing data—‘genes are memes’).9This new notion of Life is thus neutral with respect to the distinction of natural and cultural or ‘artificial’ processes. The Earth (as Gaia) and the global market, theyboth appear as gigantic self-regulated living systems whose basic struc-ture is defined in terms of the process of coding and decoding, of transmitting information. The idea of the World Wide Web as a livingorganism is often evoked in contexts which may seem liberating—say,against state censorship of the Internet. However, this very demonizationof the state is thoroughly ambiguous, since it is predominantly appro-priated by right-wing populist discourse and/or market liberalism: itsmain targets are the state interventions which try to maintain a kind of minimal social balance and security. The title of Michael Rothschild’sbook—Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism—is indicative here.10So,while cyberspace ideologists can dream about the next evolutionary stepin which we will no longer be mechanically interacting ‘Cartesian’ in-dividuals, in which each ‘person’ will cut his or her substantial link to his individual body and conceive of itself as part of the new holistic Mind which lives and acts through him or her, what is obfuscated in such a direct ‘naturalization’ of the World Wide Web or market is the 8See Tiziana Terranova, ‘Digital Darwin’, New Formations, no. 29, Summer 1996.9See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford 1989.10Michael L. Rothschild, Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, Armonk, ny1992.
37set of power relations—of political decisions, of institutional conditions—which ‘organisms’ like the Internet (or the market or capitalism…)need in order to thrive.Ideological UndergroundWhat one should do is thus reassert the old Marxist critique of ‘reifica-tion’: today, emphasizing the depoliticized ‘objective’ economic logicagainst the allegedly ‘outdated’ forms of ideological passions is thepre-dominant ideological form, since ideology is always self-referential, thatis, it always defines itself through a distance towards an Other dismissedand denounced as ‘ideological.11Jacques Rancière gave a poignantexpression to the ‘bad surprise’ which awaits today’s postmodern ideo-logues of the ‘end of politics’: it is as if we are witnessing the ultimateconfirmation of Freud’s thesis, from Civilization and its Discontents, onhow, after every assertion of Eros, Thanatos reasserts itself with avengeance. At the very moment when, according to the official ideology,we are finally leaving behind the ‘immature’ political passions (theregime of the ‘political’—class struggle and other ‘out-dated’ divisiveantagonisms) for the ‘mature’ post-ideological pragmatic universe ofrational administration and negotiated consensus, for the universe, freeof utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate administration of socialaffairs goes hand in hand with aestheticized hedonism (the pluralism of ‘ways of life’)—at this very moment, the foreclosed political is cele-brating a triumphant comeback in its most archaic form: of pure, un-distilled racist hatred of the Other which renders the rational toler-ant attitude utterly impotent.12In this precise sense, contemporary‘postmodern’ racism is the symptomof multiculturalist late capitalism,bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the liberal-democraticideological project. Liberal ‘tolerance’ condones the folklorist Otherdeprived of its substance—like the multitude of ‘ethnic cuisines’ in acontemporary megalopolis; however, any ‘real’ Other is instantly de-nounced for its ‘fundamentalism’, since the kernel of Otherness resides inthe regulation of its jouissance: the ‘real Other’ is by definition ‘patriar-chal’, ‘violent’, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming cus-toms. One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of‘repressive tolerance’, reconceiving it as the tolerance of the Other in itsaseptic, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the Real of theOther’s jouissance.13The same reference to jouissanceenables us to cast a new light on the hor-rors of the Bosnian war, as they are reflected in Emir Kusturica’s film,Underground(1995). The political meaning of this film does not resideprimarily in its overt tendentiousness, in the way it takes sides in thepost-Yugoslav conflict—heroic Serbs versus the treacherous, pro-NaziSlovenes and Croats—but, rather, in its very ‘depoliticized’ aestheticistattitude. That is to say, when, in his conversations with the journalists ofCahiers du cinéma, Kusturica insisted that Undergroundis not a political11See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Introduction’, in Mapping Ideology, Verso, London 1995.12See Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, Verso, London 1995, p. 22.13For a more detailed account of the role of jouissancein the process of ideological identifi-cation, see Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London 1997, ch. 2.
3814‘Propos de Emir Kusturica, Cahiers de cinéma, no. 492, June 1995, p. 69.15As to this Western perception of the Balkans as a fantasy-screen, see Renata Salecl, TheSpoils of Freedom, London 1995.film at all but a kind of liminal trance-like subjective experience, a‘deferred suicide’, he thereby unknowingly put on the table his truepolitical cards and indicated that Undergroundstages the ‘apolitical’phantasmatic background of the post-Yugoslav ethnic cleansing and warcruelties. How? The predominant cliché about the Balkans is that theBalkan people are caught in the phantasmatic whirlpool of historicalmyth—Kusturica himself endorses this view: ‘In this region, war is anatural phenomenon. It is like a natural catastrophe, like an earthquakewhich explodes from time to time. In my film, I tried to clarify the stateof things in this chaotic part of the world. It seems that nobody is able tolocate the roots of this terrible conflict.’14What we find here, of course,is an exemplary case of ‘Balkanism’, functioning in a similar way toEdward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’: the Balkans as the timeless spaceonto which the West projects its phantasmatic content. Together withMilche Manchevski’s Before the Rain(which almost won the Oscar for thebest foreign film in 1995), Undergroundis thus the ultimate ideologicalproduct of Western liberal multiculturalism: what these two films offerto the Western liberal gaze is precisely what this gaze wants to see in theBalkan war—the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythicalcycle of passions, in contrast to decadent and anaemic Western life.15The weak point of the universal multiculturalist gaze does not reside in its inability to ‘throw out the dirty water without losing the baby’: it is deeply wrong to assert that, when one throws out nationalist dirtywater—‘excessive’ fanaticism—one should be careful not to lose thebaby of ‘healthy’ national identity, so that one should trace the line ofseparation between the proper degree of ‘healthy’ nationalism whichguarantees the necessary minimum of national identity, and ‘excessive’nationalism. Such a common sense distinction reproduces the very national-ist reasoning which aims to get rid of ‘impure’ excess. One is therefore temptedto propose a homology with psychoanalytic treatment, whose aim is alsonot to get rid of the dirty water (symptoms, pathological tics) to keep thebaby (the kernel of the healthy Ego) safe, but, rather, to throw out thebaby (to suspend the patient’s Ego) to confront the patient with his ‘dirtywater’, with the symptoms and fantasies which structure his jouissance. In the matter of national identity, one should also endeavour to throwout the baby (the spiritual purity of national identity) to render visiblethe phantasmatic support which structures the jouissancein the nationalThing. And the merit of Undergroundis that, unknowingly, it rendersvisible this dirty water.The Time MachineUndergroundbrings to the light of day the obscene ‘underground’ of pub-lic, official discourse—represented in the film by the Titoist Communistregime. One should bear in mind that the ‘underground’ to which thefilm’s title refers is not only the domain of ‘deferred suicide’, of the eter-nal orgy of drinking, singing and copulating, which takes places in thesuspension of time and outside public space: it also stands for the ‘under-
39ground’ workshop in which the enslaved workers, isolated from the restof the world, and thus misled into thinking that World War iiis stillgoing on, work day and night and produce arms sold by Marko, the heroof the film, their ‘owner’ and the big Manipulator, the only one whomediates between the ‘underground’ and the public world. Kusturicarefers here to the old European fairy-tale motif of diligent dwarfs (usuallycontrolled by an evil magician) who, during the night, while people areasleep, emerge from their hiding-place and accomplish their work (setthe house in order, cook the meals), so that when, in the morning, peopleawaken, they find their work magically done. Kusturica’s ‘underground’is the last embodiment of this motif which is found from RichardWagner’s Rhinegold(the Nibelungs who work in their undergroundcaves, driven by their cruel master, the dwarf Alberich) to Fritz Lang’sMetropolisin which the enslaved industrial workers live and work deepbeneath the earth’s surface to produce wealth for the ruling capitalists.This schema of the ‘underground’ slaves, dominated by a manipulativeevil Master, takes place against the background of the opposition be-tween the two figures of the Master: on the one hand, the ‘visible’ publicsymbolic authority, on the other hand, the ‘invisible’ spectral apparition.When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he acts as anappendix to his symbolic title, that is, it is the ‘big Other’, the symbolicinstitution, who acts through him: suffice it to recall a judge who may bea miserable and corrupted person, but the moment he puts on his robeand other insignia, his words are those of Law itself. On the other hand,the ‘invisible’ Master—whose exemplary case is the anti-Semitic figureof the ‘Jew’ who, invisible to the public eye, pulls the strings of sociallife—is a kind of uncanny double of public authority: he has to act inshadow, invisible to the public eye, irradiating a phantom-like, spectralomnipotence.16Marko from Kusturica’s Undergroundis to be located inthis lineage of the evil magician who controls an invisible empire ofenslaved workers: he is a kind of uncanny double of Tito as the publicsymbolic Master. The problem with Undergroundis that it falls into thecynical trap of presenting this obscene ‘underground’ from a benevolentdistance. Underground, of course, is multi-layered and self-reflective, itplays with a multitude of clichés (the Serbian myth of a true man who,even when bombs fall around him, calmly continues his meal, and so on)which are ‘not to be taken literally’—however, it is precisely through suchself-distance that ‘postmodern’ cynical ideology functions. In a well-known andmuch-reprinted piece, ‘Fourteen Theses on Fascism’ (1995), UmbertoEco enumerated the series of features which define the kernel of the fascist attitude: dogmatic tenacity, the absence of humour, insensibilityto rational argument…he couldn’t have been more wrong. Today’s neo-fascism is more and more ‘postmodern’, civilized, playful, involvingironic self-distance, yet for all that no less fascist.So, in a way, Kusturica is right in his interview with Cahiers du cinéma: hedoessomehow ‘clarify the state of things in this chaotic part of the world’by way of bringing to light its ‘underground’ phantasmatic support. He thereby unknowingly provides the libidinal economy of the ethnic16See Slavoj Žižek, ‘’I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master’, in Renata Salecland Slavoj Žižek, eds, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Durham, nc1996.
40slaughter in Bosnia: the pseudo-Bataillean trance of excessive expendi-ture, the continuous mad rhythm of drinking-eating-singing-fornicat-ing. And, therein consists the ‘dream’ of the ethnic cleansers, therein resides theanswer to the question ‘How were they able to do it?’ If the standard definitionof war is that of ‘a continuation of politics by other means’, then the factthat Radovan Karadz×ic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, is a poet, ismore than a gratuitous coincidence: ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was the‘continuation of (a kind of) poetryby other means.’‘Concrete’ Versus ‘Abstract’ UniversalityHow, then, is this multiculturalist ideological poetry embedded in today’sglobal capitalism? The problem which lurks beneath it is that of univer-salism. Etienne Balibar discerned three levels of universality in today’ssocieties: the ‘real’ universality of the process of globalization and thesupplementary process of ‘internal exclusions’ (the extent to which, now,the fate of each of us hinges on the intricate web of global market rela-tions); the universality of the fiction which regulates ideological hege-mony (Church or State as the universal ‘imagined communities’ whichallow the subject to acquire a distance towards his immersion in hisimmediate social group—class, profession, sex, religion—and posit him-self as a free subject); the universality of an Ideal, as exemplified by therevolutionary demand for égaliberté(equality-freedom) which remains anunconditional excess, setting in motion permanent insurrection againstthe existing order, and can thus never be ‘gentrified’, included in theexisting order.17The point, of course, is that the boundary between these three universalsis never stable and fixed: égalibertécan serve as the hegemonic idea whichenables us to identify with our particular social role (I am a poor artisan,but precisely as such, I participate in the life of my Nation-State as anequal and free citizen), or as the irreducible excess which destabilizeseach fixed social order. What was in the Jacobin universe the destabil-izing universality of the Ideal, setting in motion the incessant process of social transformation, became later the ideological fiction allowing each individual to identify with his specific place in the social space. InHegelese, the alternative here is the following: is the universal ‘abstract’(opposed to concrete content) or ‘concrete’ (in the sense that I experiencemy very particular mode of social life as the specific way of my participa-tion in the universal social order)? Balibar’s point, of course, is that thetension between the two is irreducible: the excess of abstract-negative-ideal universality, its unsettling-destabilizing force, can never be fullyintegrated into the harmonious whole of a ‘concrete universality.18How-ever, there is another tension, the tension between the two modes of ‘con-crete universality’ itself, which seems more crucial today. That is to say,the ‘real’ universality of today’s globalization through the global market17See Balibar, La crainte des masses, pp. 421–54.18Here, the parallel is clear with Laclau’s opposition between the logic of difference (soci-ety as a differential symbolic structure) and the logic of antagonism (society as ‘impossi-ble’, thwarted by an antagonistic split). Today, the tension between the logic of differenceand the logic of antagonism assumes the form of the tension between the liberal-democra-tic universe of negotiation and the ‘fundamentalist’ universe of struggle between Goodand Evil.
41involves its own hegemonic fiction (or even ideal) of multiculturalist tol-erance, respect and protection of human rights, democracy, and so forth;it involves its own pseudo-Hegelian ‘concrete universality’ of a worldorder whose universal features of the world market, human rights anddemocracy, allow each specific ‘life-style’ to flourish in its particularity.So a tension inevitably emerges between this postmodern, post-nation-state, ‘concrete universality’, and the earlier ‘concrete universality’ of theNation-State.Hegel was the first to elaborate the properly modern paradox of indiv-idualization through secondary identification. At the beginning, the subjectis immersed in the particular life-form into which he was born (family,local community); the only way for him to tear himself away from hisprimordial ‘organic’ community, to cut his links with it and to asserthimself as an ‘autonomous individual’, is to shift his fundamental alle-giance, to recognize the substance of his being in another, secondarycommunity which is universal and, simultaneously, ‘artificial’, no longer‘spontaneous’ but ‘mediated’, sustained by the activity of independentfree subjects—nation versus local community; a profession in the mod-ern sense (a job in a large anonymous company) versus the ‘personalized’relationship between an apprentice and his master-artisan; the academiccommunity of knowledge versus the traditional wisdom passed fromgeneration to generation. In this shift from primary to secondary identi-fication, primary identifications undergo a kind of transubstantiation:they start to function as the form of appearance of the universal sec-ondary identification—say, precisely by being a good member of myfamily, I thereby contribute to the proper functioning of my Nation-State. The universal secondary identification remains ‘abstract’ insofar asit is directly opposed to the particular forms of primary identification,that is, insofar as it compels the subject to renounce his primary identifi-cations; it becomes ‘concrete’ when it reintegrates primary identifica-tions, transforming them into the modes of appearance of the secondaryidentification. This tension between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ universalityis clearly discernible in the precarious social status of the early ChristianChurch: on the one hand, there was the zealotry of the radical groupswhich saw no way to combine the true Christian attitude with the exist-ing space of predominant social relations, and thus posed a serious threatto the social order; on the other hand, there were the attempts to re-concile Christianity with the existing structure of domination, so thatparticipation in social life and occupying a place within a hierarchy werecompatible with being a good Christian—indeed, accomplishing yourdeterminate social role was not only seen as compatible with being aChristian, it was even perceived as a specific way to fulfil the universalduty of being a Christian.In the modern era, the predominant social form of the ‘concrete univer-sal’ is the Nation-State as the medium of our particular social identities:the determinate form of my social life (as, say, worker, professor, pol-itician, farmer, lawyer) is the specific mode of my participation in theuniversal life of my Nation-State. With regard to this logic of tran-substantiation which guarantees the ideological unity of a Nation-State,the United States of America plays a unique role of exception: the keyelement of the standard ‘American Ideology’ consists in the endeavour to
42transubstantiate the very fidelity to one’s particular ethnic roots into anexpression of ‘being American’: in order to be ‘a good American’, onedoes not have to renounce one’s ethnic roots—Italians, Germans, Blacks,Jews, Greeks, Koreans, they are ‘all Americans’, that is, the very particu-larity of their ethnic identity, the way they ‘stick to it’, makes themAmericans. This transubstantiation by means of which the tension be-tween my particular ethnic identity and my universal identity as a mem-ber of a Nation-State is surpassed, is threatened today: it is as if thepositive charge of pathetic patriotic identification with the universalframe of the American Nation-State has been seriously eroded; ‘Ameri-canness’, the fact of ‘being American’, less and less gives rise to the sub-lime effect of being part of a gigantic ideological project—‘the Americandream’—so that the American state is more and more experienced as asimple formal framework for the coexistence of the multiplicity of eth-nic, religious or life-style communities.Modernism in ReverseThis gradual collapse—or, rather, loss of substance—of the ‘Americandream’ bears witness to the unexpected reversalof the passage from pri-mary to secondary identification described by Hegel: in our ‘postmod-ern’ societies, the ‘abstract’ institution of secondary identification isincreasingly experienced as an external, purely formal frame that is notreally binding, so that one is more and more looking for support in ‘primordial’, usually smaller (ethnic, religious) forms of identification.Even when these forms of identification are more ‘artificial’ than nationalidentification—as is the case with the gay community—they are more‘immediate’ in the sense of seizing the individual directly and over-whelmingly, in his specific ‘way of life’, thereby restraining the ‘abstract’freedom he possesses in his capacity as the citizen of a Nation-State.What we are dealing with today is thus a reverse process to that of theearly modern constitution of a Nation: in contrast to the ‘nationalizationof the ethnic’—the de-ethnicization, the ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) of theethnic into the national—we are now dealing with the ‘ethnicization ofthe national’, with a renewed search for (or reconstitution of) ‘ethnicroots’. The crucial point here, however, is that this ‘regression’ from sec-ondary to ‘primordial’ forms of identification with ‘organic’ communi-ties is already ‘mediated’: it is a reactionto the universal dimension of theworld market—as such, it occurs on its terrain, against its background.For that reason, what we are dealing with in these phenomena is not a‘regression’ but rather the form of appearance of its exact opposite: in akind of ‘negation of negation’, this very reassertion of ‘primordial’ identifica-tion signals that the loss of organic-substantial unity is fully consummated.To make this point clear, one should bear in mind what is perhaps thefundamental lesson of postmodern politics: far from being a ‘natural’unity of social life, a balanced frame, a kind of Aristotelian entelechiatowards which all previous development advances, the universal form ofthe Nation-State is rather a precarious, temporary balance between therelationship to a particular ethnic Thing (patriotism, pro patria mori, andso forth) and the (potentially) universal function of the market. On theone hand, it ‘sublates’ organic local forms of identification into the uni-versal ‘patriotic’ identification; on the other hand, it posits itself as a
43kind of pseudo-natural boundary of the market economy, delimiting‘internal’ from ‘external’ commerce—economic activity is thus ‘subli-mated’, raised to the level of the ethnic Thing, legitimated as a patrioticcontribution to the nation’s greatness. This balance is constantly threat-ened from both sides, from the side of previous ‘organic’ forms of partic-ular identification which do not simply disappear but continue theirsubterranean life outside the universal public sphere, as well as from theside of the immanent logic of Capital whose ‘transnational’ nature isinherently indifferent to the boundaries of Nation-State. And today’snew ‘fundamentalist’ ethnic identifications involve a kind of ‘desub-limation’, a process of disintegration of this precarious unity of the‘national economy’ into its two constituent parts, the transnational mar-ket function and the relationship to the ethnic Thing.19It is thereforeonly today, in contemporary ‘fundamentalist’ ethnic, religious, life-stylecommunities, that the splitting between the abstract form of commerce and the relationship to the particular ethnic Thing, inaugurated by theEnlightenment project, is fully realized: today’s postmodern ethnic orreligious ‘fundamentalism’ and xenophobia are not only not ‘regress-ive’,but, on the contrary, offer the supreme proof of the final emancipation of the economic logic of market from the attachment to the ethnicThing.20Therein resides the highest speculative effort of the dialectic of social life: not in describing the process of mediation of the prim-ordial immediacy—say, the disintegration of organic community in‘alienated’ individualist society—but in explaining how this very pro-cess of mediation characteristic of modernity can give birth to new forms of ‘organic’ immediacy. The standard story of the passage fromGemeinschaftto Gesellschaftshould therefore be supplemented by anaccount of how this process of becoming-society of community gives rise to different forms of new, ‘mediated’ communities—say, the ‘life-style communities’.MulticulturalismHow, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of Nation-State in our era of global capitalism? Perhaps, this relationship is bestdesignated as ‘auto-colonization’: with the direct multinational func-tioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the standard oppositionbetween metropolis and colonized countries; a global company as it werecuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country oforigins as simply another territory to be colonized. This is what disturbs19One of the minor, yet tell-tale, events that bear witness to this ‘withering-away’ of theNation-State is the slow spreading of the obscene institution of private prisons in the usaand other Western countries: the exercise of what should be the monopoly of the State(physical violence and coercion) becomes the object of a contract between the State and aprivate company which exerts coercion on individuals for the sake of profit—what wehave here is simply the end of the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence which(according to Max Weber) defines the modern State.20These three stages (pre-modern communities, the Nation-State and today’s emergingtransnational ‘universal society’) clearly fit the triad of traditionalism, modernism, andpostmodernism, elaborated by Fredric Jameson: here also, the retro-phenomena that char-acterize postmodernism should not deceive us—it is only with postmodernism that thebreak with pre-modernity is fully consummated. The reference to Jameson’s Postmodern-ism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Verso, London 1993) in the title of this essay isthus deliberate.
44so much the patriotically oriented right-wing populists, from Le Pen toBuchanan: the fact that the new multinationals have towards the Frenchor American local population exactly the same attitude as towards thepopulation of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of poetic jus-tice in this self-referential turn? Today’s global capitalism is thus again akind of ‘negation of negation’, after national capitalism and its interna-tionalist/colonialist phase. At the beginning (ideally, of course), there iscapitalism within the confines of a Nation-State, with the accompanyinginternational trade (exchange between sovereign Nation-States); whatfollows is the relationship of colonization in which the colonizing coun-try subordinates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) thecolonized country; the final moment of this process is the paradox of col-onization in which there are only colonies, no colonizing countries—thecolonizing power is no longer a Nation-State but directly the globalcompany. In the long term, we shall all not only wear Banana Republicshirts but also live in banana republics.And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism ismulticulturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global posi-tion, treats eachlocal culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘re-spected’. That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialistcolonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same asthe relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multicultur-alism: in the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multi-culturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular culture. In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referentialform of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ communitytowards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance renderedpossible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is aracism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multi-culturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the partic-ularvalues of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position asthe privileged empty point of universalityfrom which one is able to appreci-ate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the multicultur-alist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’sown superiority.What about the rather obvious counter-argument that the multicultur-alist’s neutrality is false, since his position silently privileges Euro-centrist content? This line of reasoning is right, but for the wrongreason. The particular cultural background or roots which always sup-port the universal multiculturalist position are not its ‘truth’, hiddenbeneath the mask of universality—‘multiculturalist universalism isreally Eurocentrist’—but rather the opposite: the stain of particularroots is the phantasmatic screen which conceals the fact that the subjectis already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of uni-versality. Let me recall here my own paraphrase of de Quincey’s witticismabout the simple art of murder: how many people have began with aninnocent group sex orgy and ended with sharing meals in a Chinese
45restaurant!21The point of this paraphrase is to reverse the standard rela-tionship between the surface-pretext and the unacknowledged wish:sometimes, the most difficult thing is to accept the appearance at its sur-face value—we imagine multiple phantasmatic scenarios to cover it upwith ‘deeper meanings.’ It may well be that my ‘true desire’ to be dis-cerned behind my refusal to share a Chinese meal is my fascination withthe fantasy of a group orgy, but the key point is that this fantasy whichstructures my desire is in itself already a defence against my ‘oral’ drivewhich goes its way with absolute coercion…What we find here is the exact equivalent of Darian Leader’s example ofthe man in a restaurant with his date, who, when asking the waiter forthe table, says ‘Bedroom for two, please!’ instead of ‘Table for two,please!’ One should turn around the standard Freudian explanation (’Ofcourse, his mind was already on the night of sex he planned after themeal!’): this intervention of the subterranean sexual fantasy is rather thescreen which serves as the defence against the oral drive which effectivelymatters to him more than sex.22In his analysis of the French revolutionof 1848(in The Class-Struggles in France), Marx provides a similar exam-ple of such a double deception: the Party of Order which took over afterthe Revolution, publicly supported the Republic, yet secretly, it believedin Restoration—they used every opportunity to mock republican ritualsand to signal in any way possible where ‘their heart is’.23The paradox,however, was that the truth of their activity resided in the external formthey privately mocked and despised: this republican form was not a meresemblance beneath which the royalist desire lurked—it was rather thesecret clinging to Royalism which enabled them to fulfil their actual historical function, to implement the bourgeois republican law andorder. Marx himself mentions how members of the Party of Order foundimmense pleasure in their occasional Royalist ‘slips of the tongue’against the Republic—referring, for instance, to France as a Kingdom intheir parliamentary debates: these slips of the tongue articulated theirphantasmatic illusions which served as the screen enabling them to blindthemselves for the social reality of what was going on on the surface.The Machine in the GhostAnd, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for today’s capitalist who stillclings to some particular cultural heritage, identifying it as the secretsource of his success—Japanese executives participating in tea cere-monies or obeying the bushido code—or for the inverse case of theWestern journalist in search of the particular secret of the Japanese suc-cess: this very reference to a particular cultural formula is a screen for theuniversal anonymity of Capital. The true horror does not reside in theparticular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital, butrather in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machineblindly running its course, that there is effectively no particular SecretAgent who animates it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in21Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, New York 1993, p. 1.22See Darian Leader, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, London 1996.23Karl Marx, ‘The Class Struggles in France: 1848to 1850’, in Surveys from Exile. PoliticalWritings: Volume 2, London 1973.
46the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in thevery heart of each (particular living) ghost.The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multicultur-alism—the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds—whichimposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the mas-sive presence of capitalism as universalworld system: it bears witness tothe unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world. It iseffectively as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allowsus to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism—since, as wemight put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay—critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural dif-ferences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact. So we are fighting our pcbattles for the rights of ethnicminorities, of gays and lesbians, of different life-styles, and so on, whilecapitalism pursues its triumphant march—and today’s critical theory, in the guise of ‘cultural studies’, is doing the ultimate service to the unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in theideological effort to render its massive presence invisible: in a typicalpostmodern ‘cultural criticism’, the very mention of capitalism as worldsystem tends to give rise to the accusation of ‘essentialism’, ‘fundamen-talism’ and other crimes.The structure here is that of a symptom. When one is dealing with a uni-versal structuring principle, one always automatically assumes that—inprinciple, precisely—it is possible to apply this principle to all its poten-tial elements, and that the empirical non-realization of the principle ismerely a matter of contingent circumstances. A symptom, however, is anelement which—although the non-realization of the universal principlein it appears to hinge on contingent circumstances—hasto remain anexception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: ifthe universal principle were to apply also to this point, the universal sys-tem itself would disintegrate. As is well known, in the paragraphs oncivil society in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel demonstrated how the largeclass of ‘rabble’ (Pöebel) in modern civil society is not an accidental resultof social mismanagement, inadequate government measures or economicbad luck: the inherent structural dynamics of civil society necessarilygive rise to a class which is excluded from the benefits of civil society, aclass deprived of elementary human rights and therefore also delivered ofduties towards society, an element within civil society which negates itsuniversal principle, a kind of ‘un-Reason inherent to Reason itself’—inshort, its symptom.Do we not witness the same phenomenon today, and in even strongershape, with the growth of an underclass excluded, sometimes for genera-tions, from the benefits of affluent liberal-democratic society? Today’s‘exceptions’—the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanently unem-ployed—are the symptom of the late capitalist universal system, a grow-ing and permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of latecapitalism works: the proper capitalist utopia is that, through appropri-ate measures (for progressive liberals, affirmative action; for conserva-tives, a return to self-reliance and family values), this ‘exception’ couldbe—in the long term and in principle, at least—abolished. And is not a
47homologous utopia at work in the notion of a ‘rainbow coalition’: in theidea that, at some utopian future moment, all ‘progressive’ struggles—for gay and lesbian rights, for the rights of ethnic and religious minori-ties, the ecological struggle, the feminist struggle, and so on—will beunited in the common ‘chain of equivalences’? Again, this necessity offailure is structural: the point is not simply that, because of the empiricalcomplexity of the situation, all particular ‘progressive’ fights will neverbe united, that ‘wrong’ chains of equivalences will always occur—say,the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity withpatriarchal and homophobic ideology—but rather that emergencies of‘wrong’ enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today’s ‘progressive’ politics of establishing ‘chains of equivalences’:the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles with their con-tinuously shifting displacements and condensations is sustained by the‘repression’ of the key role of economic struggle—the leftist politics ofthe ‘chains of equivalences’ among the plurality of struggles is strictlycorrelative to the silent abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as aglobal economic system and to the acceptance of capitalist economicrelations as the unquestionable framework.24The falsity of elitist multiculturalist liberalism thus resides in the ten-sion between content and form which characterized already the firstgreat ideological project of tolerant universalism, that of freemasonry:the doctrine of freemasonry (the universal brotherhood of all men basedon the light of Reason) clearly clashes with its form of expression andorganization (a secret society with its rituals of initiation)—the veryform of expression and articulation of freemasonry belies its positive doc-trine. In a strictly homologous way, the contemporary ‘politically cor-rect’ liberal attitude which perceives itself as surpassing the limitationsof its ethnic identity (’citizen of the world’ without anchors in any par-ticular ethnic community), functions, within its own society, as a narrowelitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority ofcommon people, despised for being caught in their narrow ethnic orcommunity confines.For a Leftist Suspension of the LawHow, then, do leftists who are aware of this falsity of multiculturalistpostmodernism react to it? Their reaction assumes the form of whatHegel called the infinite judgement: the judgement which posits thespeculative identity of two thoroughly incompatible terms—Hegel’sbest-known example is from the sub-chapter on phrenology in hisPhenomenology of Spirit: ‘the Spirit is a bone’. The infinite judgementwhich encapsulates this reaction is: ‘Adorno (the most sophisticated‘elitist’ critical theorist) is Buchanan (the lowest of American rightistpopulism).’ That is to say, these critics of postmodern multiculturalistelitism—from Christopher Lasch to Paul Piccone—risk endorsing neo-conservative populism, with its notions of the reassertion of com-munity, local democracy and active citizenship, as the only politicallyrelevant answer to the all-pervasive predominance of ‘instrumentalReason’, of the bureaucratization and instrumentalization of our life-24See Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton 1995.
4825See Paul Piccone, ‘Postmodern Populism’, Telos, no. 103, Spring 1995. Exemplary hereis also the attempt by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese to oppose to the upper-middle-class femi-nism interested in the problems of literary and cinema theory, lesbian rights, and so forth,a ‘family feminism’ which focuses on the actual concerns of ordinary working women andarticulates concrete questions of how to survive within the family, with children andwork. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism is Not the Story of my Life, New York 1996. world.25Of course, it is easy to dismiss today’s populism as a nostalgicreactive formation to the process of modernization, and as such in-herently paranoiac, in search of an external cause of malignancy, of asecret agent who pulls the strings and is thus responsible for the woes of modernization—Jews, international capital, non-patriotic multicul-turalist managers, state bureaucracy and so on; the problem is rather toconceive this new populism as a new form of ‘false transparency’ which,far from presenting a serious obstacle to the capitalist modernization,paves the way for it. In other words, far more interesting than bemoan-ing the disintegration of community life through the impact of newtechnologies is to analyze how technological progress itself gives rise tonew communities which gradually ‘naturalize’ themselves—like virtualcommunities.What these leftist advocates of populism fail to perceive is that today’spopulism, far from presenting a threat to global capitalism, remains itsinherent product. Paradoxically, today’s true conservatives are rather theleftist ‘critical theorists’ who reject liberal multiculturalism as well asfundamentalist populism, those who clearly perceive the complicitybetween global capitalism and ethnic fundamentalism. They point to-wards the third domain which belongs neither to global market-societynor to the new forms of ethnic fundamentalism: the domain of the politi-cal, the public space of civil society, of active responsible citizenship—the fight for human rights, ecology and so forth. However, the problemis that this very form of political space is more and more threatened bythe onslaught of globalization; consequently, one cannot simply returnto it or revitalize it. To avoid a misunderstanding: our point is not theold ‘economic essentialist’ one according to which, in the case of Englandtoday, the Labour victory really did not change anything—and as such iseven more dangerous than continuing Tory rule, since it gave rise to themisleading impression that there was a change. There are a lot of thingsthe Labour government can achieve; it can contribute a lot to the passagefrom traditional English parochial jingoism to a more ‘enlightened’ lib-eral democracy with a much stronger element of social solidarity (fromhealth care to education), to the respect for human rights (in its diverseforms, from women’s rights to the rights of ethnic groups); one shoulduse the Labour victory as an incentive to revitalize the diverse forms ofthe struggle for égaliberté. (With the Socialist electoral victory in France,the situation is even more ambiguous, since Jospin’s programme doescontain some elements of a direct confrontation with the logic of capi-tal.) Even when the change is not substantial but a mere semblance of anew beginning, the very fact that a situation is perceived by the majorityof the population as a ‘new beginning’ opens up the space for importantideological and political rearticulations—as we have already seen, thefundamental lesson of the dialectic of ideology is that appearances domatter.
49Nonetheless, the post-Nation-State logic of capital remains the Realwhich lurks in the background, while all three main leftist reactions tothe process of globalization—liberal multiculturalism; the attempt toembrace populism by way of discerning, beneath its fundamentalistappearance, the resistance against ‘instrumental reason’; the attempt tokeep open the space of the political—seem inappropriate. Although thelast approach is based on the correct insight about the complicity be-tween multiculturalism and fundamentalism, it avoids the crucial ques-tion: how are we to reinvent political space in today’s conditions of globalization?The politicization of the series of particular struggles which leaves intactthe global process of capital is clearly not sufficient. What this means isthat one should reject the opposition which, within the frame of late cap-italist liberal democracy, imposes itself as the main axis of ideologicalstruggle: the tension between ‘open’ post-ideological universalist liberaltolerance and the particularist ‘new fundamentalisms’. Against the lib-eral centre which presents itself as neutral and post-ideological, relyingon the rule of the Law, one should reassert the old leftist motif of thenecessity to suspend the neutral space of Law.Of course, both the Left and the Right involve their own mode of thesuspension of the Law on behalf of some higher or more fundamentalinterest. The rightist suspension, from anti-Dreyfusards to OliverNorth, acknowledges its violation of the letter of the Law, but justifies itvia the reference to some higher national interest: it presents its violationas a painful self-sacrifice for the good of the Nation.26As to the leftistsuspension, suffice it to mention two films, Under Fire(Roger Spottis-woode, 1983) and Watch on the Rhine(Herman Shumlin, 1943). The firsttakes place during the Nicaraguan revolution, when an American photo-journalist faces a troublesome dilemma: just prior to the victory of therevolution, Somozistas kill a charismatic Sandinista leader, so the San-dinistas ask the journalist to fake a photograph of their dead leader, pre-senting him as alive and thus belying the Somozistas’ claims about hisdeath—in this way, he would contribute to a swift victory of the revolu-tion and reduce bloodshed. Professional ethics, of course, strictly pro-hibit such an act, since it violates the unbiased objectivity of reportingand makes the journalist an instrument of the political fight; the jour-nalist nevertheless chooses the ‘leftist’ option and fakes the picture. InWatch on the Rhine, based on a play by Lillian Hellmann, this dilemma iseven more aggravated: in the late 1930s, a fugitive family of Germanpolitical emigrants involved in the anti-Nazi struggle comes to stay withtheir distant relatives, an idyllic all-American small-town middle-classfamily; soon, however, the Germans face an unexpected threat in theguise of an acquaintance of the American family, a rightist who black-mails the emigrants and, via his contacts with the German embassy,endangers members of the underground in Germany itself. The father ofthe emigrant family decides to kill him and thereby puts the Americanfamily in a difficult moral dilemma: the empty moralizing solidaritywith the victims of Nazism is over; now they have effectively to takesides and dirty their hands with covering up the killing. Here also, thefamily decides on the ‘leftist’ option. ‘Left’ is defined by this readiness 26The most concise formulation of the rightist suspension of public (legal) norms was provided by Eamon de Valera: ‘The people has no right to do wrong.’
50to suspend the abstract moral frame, or, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, toaccomplish a political suspension of the Ethical.The Universality to ComeThe lesson of all this, which gained actuality in relation to the Westernreaction to the Bosnian war, is that there is no way to avoid being partial,since neutrality involves taking sides—in the case of the Bosnian war,the ‘balanced’ talk about the Balkan ethnic ‘tribal warfare’ alreadyendorses the Serbian standpoint: the humanitarian liberal equidistancecan easily slip into or coincide with its opposite and effectively toleratethe most violent ‘ethnic cleansing’. So, in short, the leftist does not sim-ply violate the liberal’s impartial neutrality; what he claims is that thereis no such neutrality. The cliché of the liberal Centre, of course, is thatboth suspensions, the rightist and the leftist, ultimately amount to thesame, to a totalitarian threat to the rule of Law. The entire consistency ofthe Left hinges on proving that, on the contrary, each of the two suspen-sions follows a different logic. While the Right legitimizes its suspen-sion of the Ethical by its anti-universalist stance, by way of a reference toits particular (religious, patriotic) identity which overrules any universalmoral or legal standards, the Left legitimizes its suspension of theEthical precisely by means of a reference to the true Universality tocome. Or, to put it in another way, the Left simultaneously accepts theantagonistic character of society (there is no neutral position, struggle isconstitutive), andremains universalist (speaking on behalf of universalemancipation): in the leftist perspective, accepting the radically antago-nistic—that is, political—character of social life, accepting the necessityof ‘taking sides’, is the only way to be effectively universal.How are we to comprehend this paradox? It can only be conceived if theantagonism is inherent to universality itself, that is, if universality itself issplit into the ‘false’ concrete universality which legitimizes the existingdivision of the Whole into functional parts, and the impossible/realdemand of ‘abstract’ universality (Balibar’s égaliberté). The leftist politi-cal gesture par excellence (in contrast to the rightist motif ‘to each his orher own place’) is thus to question the concrete existing universal orderon behalf of its symptom, of the part which, although inherent to the existing universal order, has no ‘proper place’ within it (say, illegalimmigrants or the homeless in our societies). This procedure of identify-ing with the symptomis the exact and necessary obverse of the standardcritical and ideological move of recognizing a particular content behindsome abstract universal notion (‘the “man” of human rightly is effectivelythe white male owner’), of denouncing the neutral universality as false:in it, one pathetically asserts (and identifies with) the point of inherentexception/exclusion, the ‘abject’, of the concrete positive order, as the only point oftrue universality, as the point which belies the existing concrete universal-ity. It is easy to show that, say, the subdivision of the people who live in acountry into ‘full’ citizens and temporary immigrant workers privileges‘full’ citizens and excludes immigrants from the public space proper—inthe same way in which man and woman are not two species of a neutraluniversal genus of humanity, since the content of the genus as suchinvolves some mode of ‘repression’ of the feminine; much more produc-tive, theoretically as well as politically—since it opens up the way for the
51‘progressive’ subverting of hegemony—is the opposite operation of identifying universality with the point of exclusion, in our case, of saying ‘weare all immigrant workers.’ In a hierarchically structured society, themeasure of its true universality resides in the way its parts relate to those ‘at the bottom’, excluded by and from all others—in ex-Yugo-slavia, for example, universality was represented by Albanian and Bos-nian Muslims, looked down on by all other nations. The recent patheticstatement of solidarity ‘Sarajevo is the capital of Europe’ was also anexemplary case of such a notion of exception as embodying universality:the way the enlightened liberal Europe related to Sarajevo bore witnessto the way it related to itself, to its universal notion.27This assertion of the universality of antagonism in no way entails that ‘insocial life, there is no dialogue, only war’. Rightists speak of social (orsexual) warfare, while leftists speak of social (or class) struggle. There aretwo variations on Joseph Goebbels’ infamous statement ‘When I hear theword “culture”, I reach for my pistol’: ‘When I hear the word “culture”, Ireach for my cheque-book’, pronounced by the cynical cinema producerin Godard’s Mépris, and the leftist Enlightened reversal, ‘When I hear theword “gun”, I reach for culture.’ When today’s neo-Nazi street-fighterhears the word ‘Western Christian culture’, he reaches for his gun inorder to defend it from the Turks, Arabs, Jews, thereby destroying whathe purports to defend. Liberal capitalism has no need for such direct vio-lence: the market does the job of destroying culture far more smoothlyand efficiently. In clear contrast to both these attitudes, the leftistEnlightenment is defined by the wager that culture can serve as an effi-cient answer to the gun: the outburst of raw violence is a kind of passage àl’acterooted in the subject’s ignorance—as such, it can be counteractedby the struggle whose main form is reflective knowledge.27This, perhaps, is how one should read Rancière’s notion of singulier universel: the asser-tion of the singular exception as the locus of universality which simultaneously affirmsand subverts the universality in question. When we say, ‘We are all citizens of Sarajevo’,we are obviously making a ‘false’ nomination, a nomination which violates the propergeopolitical disposition; however, precisely as such, this violation gives word to the injus-tice of the existing geopolitical order. See Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente, Paris 1995.Isaac & Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize“Fin de siècle Socialism”The 1997 Deutscher Memorial Lecture will be given byDonald Sassoonon Tuesday 2 December at 7.30pm at LSE.
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