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July 27, 2002
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith--based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al--Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti--Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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Weekend
Edition
July 27, 2002
Sublime
Zizek
Guarding Lenin's Tomb
by Gavin Keeney
SLAVOJ ZIZEK, the Giant of Ljubljana, is like the great brain
of Goethe's fairytale "The Green Snake and the Beautiful
Lily". In this revolutionary and allegorical tale (reputedly
inspired by Mozart's Magic Flute) there are two lands
separated by a river. There are only two ways to cross the river.
One is by ferry, and the boatman is a kind of sadist that exacts
bizarre tribute for the occasion. The other is to wait for the
giant to appear and appropriate his shadow as a type of liminal
bridge -- perhaps a metaphor for the umbra (or penumbra) of semi-consciousness
and imagination.
Zizek, as this giant (or giant brain), has cast a very long shadow
indeed in what can only be termed "cultural studies"
(though he would despise the characterization). He is effectively
the most brilliant purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower
of the French "liberator" of Freud, Zizek's Lacan is
almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games
or intellectual parables. That he has an encyclopedic grasp of
political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and
pop  cultural currents -- and that he has
no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his
imagination -- is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and
confounded his critics for over ten years. He is also a legendary
trickster (having learned his craft as part of the communist
nomenklatura in Slovenia), a kind of Don Quixote for unrepentant
Marxists and scourge of liberals, social democrats, new-age "obscurantists",
multi-culturalists, and ... You get the picture.
I first sat through a Lacanian conference at NYU in the late
1990s and understood 10% of the language. It was, however, 110%
thrilling. The sheer bravado of the performances by the French-inflected
intellectuals was delightful and sexy. It was only later,
in 2001, that I had an opportunity to hear Slavoj Zizek speak.
The event was standing room only, and the venue was a very high-brow,
conceptual art gallery called the Drawing Center in NYC. Zizek
was reading/performing "Il n'y a pas de rapport religieux"
from the latest edition of Lacanian Ink (#18), the movement's
journal. In this particular essay he rehearsed Lacan's notion
that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship but re-enscribed
it in the context of something else (in this case 'religion')
-- as he is wont to do with most all his tactical maneuvers.
The print version is illustrated with works by Damien Hirst.
More striking, however, was that this perhaps marked the beginning
of Zizek's appropriation of St. Paul. This appropriation of St.
Paul is significant insofar as when Zizek performs one of his
acts of re-writing he is taking/ripping the original out of one
context and inserting/transplanting it into another. In the case
of St. Paul, what interested him most was that here was a figure
(not a disciple!) who constructed the entire edifice of the Christian
faith on the crucifixion and resurrection. Recall that in Kazantzakis'
The Last Temptation of Christ (or at least Scorsese's)
Paul appears in the delusionary vision Jesus has -- i.e., that
he has escaped the cross and gone on to live, marry and have
children -- and repudiates Jesus as an imposter. Zizek is quick
to point out (often) that post-modernists have multiple versions
of everything -- e.g., multiple versions of Nietzsche and multiple
versions of Marx or Freud -- but he also is the master of re-branding
a concept, or a historical figure, to elucidate what might be
best termed "synchronic or structural phenomena". As
a skilled structuralist (though he'd deny this too), Zizek constructs
castles in the air and then sends a barrage of waves in pursuit
of these tentative forms. He is Neptune to his own Odysseus --
But he is also Minerva. In the case of Paul, as in the more recent
resuscitation of Lenin, we witness Zizek isolating a critical
moment, or even a failed moment, for purposes wholly related
to the exasperating state of the current critical or failed
moment -- late-modern capitalism and post-modernity.
In such an intelligence we see the mark of an archaic synthetic
brilliance -- an almost heroic intelligence -- that assembles,
analyzes and destroys. His actual performances are theatrical
events. He sweats bullets as he unpacks his torrent of complex
references, flings asides, flings aside asides, tackles a hard
kernel of Hegel or Marx, drops in an allusion to Hitchcock or
even some pop cultural trash like the Worst-Case Scenario
phenomenon or "Reality TV" to explain away our symptoms
-- to talk through our collective delusions and paranoias. His
agitated (agit-prop) presentations are exhausting for the audience
and for the actor. When he concludes, he invariable loses his
bearings and is led off stage by his host or hostess. At the
Drawing Center, he was whisked away by handlers (before the Lacanian
bacchantes/babes could get to him?).
So what is he up to? And why does he succeed, where others have
failed, in constructing an "actually-existing" alternative
to left-right politics?
The version of Lenin that Zizek is re-enscribing into radical
political discourse is ostensibly (by his own admission) the
Lenin of the October Revolution, or the Lenin that had the epiphany
that in order to have a revolution "you have to have a revolution".
Why is he doing this?
Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates
of the liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar
as it does not threaten the true coordinates. He suggests as
well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we
realize. The production of cultural difference (a trendy subject)
is to Zizek the production of the inoperative dream -- a dream
that recalls perhaps Orwell's 1984 or even Terry Gilliam's
Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized
nature substitutes for authentic freedom -- the flip side of
this is film noir. Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism
has engendered a whole range of alternative seductions to keep
the eye and brain off of the real Real. The Real only exists
as a fragment and this fragment is fast receding on the horizon
as fantasy and often phantasm intercede. These dreams and nightmares
are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are part of the coordinates
of the hegemonic. The hegemon -- the prevailing set of coordinates
-- always seeks to "take over" the Real, and, therefore,
this contaminated Real must be periodically purged.
Without descending into the Lacanian house of mirrors we can
understand this on an everyday level if we observe what Zizek
is up to with "Lenin". In his essay "Repeating
Lenin" (1997) -- ever the trickster, he convened a symposium
on Lenin in Germany in part to see what the reaction would be
-- Zizek sets up a deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively
liberate the idea of radical form. "[O]ne should not confuse
this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist
notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of 'narratives'
-- not only literature, but also politics, religion, science,
they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves
about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee
the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully
coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities,
will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly
dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the IMPOSSIBILITY
of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with 'formalism,'
with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent
particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel
of the Real, for the antagonism, which 'colors' the entire
field in question [...]" (italics added). He is interested,
as most fire-breathing artists are, in discerning the real Real
amid the rubbish of systems. In part, in appropriating "Lenin"
he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics
could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia
-- "the [pure] management of things". That Lenin failed
is immaterial, since Zizek is extracting the signifier "Lenin"
from the historical continuum which includes that failure --
or the onslaught of Stalinism.
He adds: "'Lenin' is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic
certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard's
terms, THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming,
the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown
into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates
proved useless, and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism--recall
his acerb[ic] remark apropos of some new problem: 'About this,
Marx and Engels said not a word.' The idea is not to return to
Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve
the same impulse in today's constellation." He compares
1914 to 1990, and, in a superb bit of multi-tasking, describes
how Lenin attempted to convince long-suffering Russian soldiers
to withdraw from the front and turn on the Czar. He does this
by drawing on multiple, but singular examples of times when the
Slave came face to face with the Master, as in the famous case
of Hitler's train being momentarily stalled en route through
Thuringia when a second train full of wounded soldiers pulled
alongside permitting Hitler to see them and they to see Hitler
dining in splendour. (As a Zizek-inspired aside, let us note
that this scene was folded into the recent film Enemy at the
Gates (2001), a rather mannered depiction of the Battle for
Stalingrad, wherein two snipers go up against one another and
the entire war is collapsed into a game of cat and mouse.) Zizek
marshals (martials?) several versions of this accidental (catastrophic)
confrontation which is always-already suppressed to illustrate
how the veil sometimes falls from the carefully constructed image
we have both adopted and been inducted into. This image is the
so-called Real but in fact the mirage constructed by the hegemonic
"hidden hand". Perhaps this is why Godard (and Herzog)
both came round to admitting that there were no more images available
for cinema and, as in Godard's King Lear (1987), the audience
is left effectively staring at a bare-naked light bulb.
"Today, more than ever, we should here return to Lenin:
yes, economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there,
one has to break the spell of the global capitalism--BUT the
intervention should be properly POLITICAL, not economic. The
battle to be fought is thus a twofold one: first, yes, anticapitalism.
However, anticapitalism without problematizing the capitalism's
POLITICAL form (liberal parliamentary democracy) is not sufficient,
no matter how 'radical' it is. Perhaps THE lure today is the
belief that one can undermine capitalism without effectively
problematizing the liberal-democratic legacy which -- as some
Leftists claim -- although engendered by capitalism, acquired
autonomy and can serve to criticize capitalism."
Here Zizek takes aim at all manner of post-cultural delusions
-- including Deleuzionary escapisms, and/or new Situationisms
-- in the manner that Marxists have long endorsed. On the one
hand, the Left has decided to indulge "the long march through
institutions". On the other, the new surrealist or rote
formalist is merely indulging in "ludic" games. These
games usually come with the price of disengaging from the "proper"
political, or, as with 1920s French Surrealism, playing at the
political. This severe "Socratic" agenda -- of deconstructing
the coordinates of the ruling hegemony -- is, for Zizek, impossible
if the crisis of identity plaguing the late-modern subject (the
doubling, tripling, quadrupling of identity) is not 'cauterized'
by intellectual fire.
In his critique of contemporary capitalism Zizek finds not simply
the conditions that Marx anathematized but those same conditions
reified and made nearly intangible. "A certain excess which
was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived
as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in
capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in
the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a
system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its
own conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive
as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own 'normal' constraints
[...] Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the
opposition between use- and exchange-value: in capitalism, the
potentials of this opposition are fully realized, the domain
of exchange-values acquires autonomy, is transformed into the
specter of self-propelling speculative capital which needs the
productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its
dispensable temporal embodiment." In the era of globalization,
then, the main question is: "Does today's virtual capitalist
not function in a homologous way -- his 'net value' is zero,
he directly operates just with the surplus, borrowing from the
future?"
What Zizek is hammering away at, repeatedly and in various guises,
is the empty present-day concept of the Universal (what I would
call the meta-Real). The Universal is the form of forms (perhaps
the urform of all forms) -- as it signifies the latent content
of all possible forms. This may seem hyper Platonic, but in fact
such "higher" coordinates are the vacated premises
of modern-day political economy. It is other possible concepts
of political-economic form that are repeatedly revoked and/or
given up for mutable, indeterminate, vague, and generally empty
gestures in neo-liberalism. These empty gestures substitute for
the meta-Real where everything critical is actually manipulated.
This manipulated terrain, in Lacanian terms, interacts/intersects
with the realm of the Symbolic -- the place where the Thou Shalt
Nots are inscribed. The Symbolic, in turn, is controlled by the
collective force of the hegemonic, now "dematerialized"
structures of late capitalism. Zizek's complaints against "new
social movements" is that they are generally "one issue
movements" which do not engage the Universal. This totalizing
language is partly a linguistic convention to confer a semantic
and structuralist integrity to the idea of the Universal Singular,
but also to circumvent or defuse the endless ineffective operations
of "strictly limited goals" or "marketing"
typified by the ubiquitous and generally tolerated NGOs. How
many such organizations use a liberal, white guilt trip to raise
funds? How many of these organizations exist only because
government has been purged of its higher functions (its higher
calling)?
"In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future
is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked
as a distant promise which justified present violence -- it is
rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit
between the present and the future, we are -- as if by Grace
-- for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is
(not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed.
Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to
endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations,
but as the present hardship over which this future happiness
and freedom already cast their shadow -- in it, we ALREADY ARE
FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING
FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution
is not a Merl[eau]-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur
anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long
term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL
PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth."
Hopping from peak to peak, and periodically descending into the
valley of present-day culture for refreshment, Zizek outlines
a topology of activity that recovers revealed truths. In many
ways he is similar to a host of others who have sought to reverse
the decimation of our experience of the world. Like Giorgio Agamben
-- see Infancy and History (1993) -- he has utilized language
to re-enscribe the terms of resistance and the game of turning
things upside down to empty them out and examine them. His appropriations
are classic as well as modern. His giant brain is an effective
bridge to another world inside or opposite, above or below, or
simply always-already here. His agenda is to foster and engender
a withering critique of the structural chains that enslave late-modern
man. His nostalgia is for very large gestures -- for the meta-Real,
the Universal, and the Formal. "THIS resistance is the answer
to the question 'Why Lenin?': it is the signifier 'Lenin' which
FORMALIZES this content found elsewhere, transforming a series
of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation."
Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York, New
York. and the author of On
the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails
of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.
He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net
OUTTAKES
Slavoj Zizek's
essay Repeating
Lenin (@ Lacan.com)
The new Karl Marx--"Capitalism has now triumphed,
it is 'the only game in town', statist socialism is 'dead', and,
yes, that is what Marx had said would happen all along."
Tittering
at High Gate (The Guardian Unlimited, 05/19/02)
Zizek
reviews Lenin by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse--"In
1914, an entire world disappeared, taking with it not only the
bourgeois faith in progress, but the socialist movement that
accompanied it. Lenin (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) felt
the ground fall away from beneath his feet--there was, in his
desperate reaction, no sense of satisfaction, no desire to say
"I told you so." At the same time, the catastrophe
made possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary
historicism of the Second International." Seize
the Day (The Guardian Unlimited, 07/23/02)
Alain Badiou rehearses his reappraisal of the 20th century--"Where
are we today? The figure of active nihilism is regarded as completely
obsolete. Every reasonable activity is limited, limiting, constrained
by the burdens of reality. The best that one can do is to get
away from evil, and to do this, the shortest path is to avoid
any contact with the real. Ultimately one comes up against the
nothing, the there-is-nothing-real, and in this sense one remains
in nihilism. But since the terrorist element, the desire to purify
the real, has been suppressed, nihilism is disactivated. It has
become passive, or reactive, nihilism, that is, hostile to every
action as well as to every thought." One
Divides Into Two (CultureMachine, 2000)
Jacques Lacan Bibliography,
plus linkage (@ Psyche Matters)
See also, Thus Spake Zizek in Landscape
Formalism, Anyone ??? (Anti-Journal 2:1)
For a biography of Slavoj Zizek, see More
Zizek
Today's Features
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
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