"Like a Thief in Broad Daylight"

[fiefoe]

Slavoj Zizek

Leaders like Lenin and Mao succeeded (for some time, at least) because they invented new proverbs, which means that they imposed new customs that regulated daily lives. One of the best Goldwynisms recounts how, after being told that critics had complained that there were too many old clichés in his films, Sam Goldwyn wrote a memo to his scenario department: ‘We need more new clichés!’ He was right, and this is a revolution’s most difficult task – to create ‘new clichés’ for ordinary daily life.
It is as if the two tendencies (resistance and self-disintegration) move at different levels and cannot meet, so that we get futile protests at the same time as immanent decay and there is no way of bringing the two together in a coordinated attempt to emancipate the world from capitalism. How did it come to this? While most of the Left desperately try to protect workers’ rights against the onslaught of global capitalism, it is almost exclusively the most ‘progressive’ capitalists themselves (from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg) who talk about post-capitalism – as if the very concept of the passage from capitalism as we know it to a new post-capitalist order is being appropriated by capitalism itself.
Constantly bombarded by so-called ‘free choices’, forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not even properly qualified (or about which we possess inadequate information), increasingly we experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change.
Far from being invisible, social relationality, in its very fluidity, is the object of marketing and exchange: in ‘cultural capitalism’, one no longer sells (and buys) objects that ‘bring’ cultural or emotional experience, one directly sells (and buys) such experiences. And since social relationship is directly marketed, this means that personal relations of domination are, too – I pay others to act as my servants... The power of the market economy to reflexively appropriate resistance to itself seems inexhaustible.
when Marx defines exchange value as the mode of appearance of value, we should mobilize the entire Hegelian weight of the opposition between essence and appearance: essence exists only insofar as it appears – it does not pre-exist its appearance. In the same way, the value of a commodity is not its intrinsic substantial property which exists independently of its appearance in exchange. <> This is also why we should abandon the attempt to expand the definition of value so that all kinds of labour are recognized as a source of value – recall the great feminist demand of the 1970s to recognize housework
how will the exchange of populations be organized? When similar things happened in the past, social changes occurred in a spontaneous way, with violence and devastation; such a prospect is catastrophic in today’s conditions, with weapons of mass-destruction so readily available. One thing is clear: national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined and new levels of global cooperation invented.
We shouldn’t be shocked at China, but rather at ourselves, when we accept the same regulation while believing that we retain our full freedom and that our media just help us to realize our goals (at least in China people are fully aware that they are regulated). {um...}
The biggest achievement of the new cognitive-military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no longer necessary: individuals are much better controlled and ‘nudged’ in the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and autonomous agents of their own life.
In the late 1920s, none other than Stalin for a while financially supported the ‘human ape’ project proposed by the biologist Ilya Ivanov (a follower of Alexander Bogdanov, the target of Lenin’s critique in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ): the idea was that by coupling humans and orangutans one could create a perfect worker and soldier impervious to pain, tiredness and bad food... the humans he used were black males from the Congo, since they were supposed to be genetically closer to apes – the Soviet state financed an expensive expedition there.
supplement the famous passage in The Communist Manifesto, adding that sexual ‘one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible’, that in the domain of sexual practices ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’, and that capitalism tends to replace the standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and/or orientations? Today’s celebration of ‘minorities’ and ‘marginals’ is the predominant majority position:
The point is thus that fetishistic disavowal of ideology renders subjects more enslaved to the ideology than simple ignorance of its functioning.
One should always bear in mind that a permanent people’s presence means a permanent state of emergency – so what happens when people get tired, when they are no longer able to sustain the tension?
In capitalist countries there is, of course, another way to ease popular pressure: (more or less) free elections – recently in Egypt and Turkey, but they also worked in 1968 in France. One should never forget that the agent of popular pressure is always a minority – the number of active participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 against global economic equality was much closer to 1 per cent than to the 99 per cent of its slogan.
As Marx knew long ago, the secret is in the form itself. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king – but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides, whose function is to sign measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to that of constitutional democracy: how do we protect the dignity of the king? How do we maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true?
On the contrary, when obscenity penetrates the political scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest: the true political, economic and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. In short, public obscenity is always sustained by a concealed moralism, its practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and it is at this level that they should be attacked.
A listener asks: ‘Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?’ The radio answers: ‘In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it, it was stolen from him.’ The same goes for the French presidential elections of 2017: is it true that, in a great display of anti-fascist unity, the people of France elected an outsider and defeated a threat to Europe? In principle yes, only the victorious Macron represents a Europe out of touch with ordinary people, i.e. the very politics which gave such strength to Le Pen, and he is not an outsider but the establishment in its purest form.
The sad prospect that awaits us is that of a future in which, every four years, we will be thrown into a panic, scared by some form of ‘neo-fascist danger’, and in this way be blackmailed into casting our vote for the ‘civilized’ candidate in meaningless elections lacking any positive vision . . . Meanwhile we’ll be able to sleep in the safe embrace of global capitalism with a human face. The obscenity of the situation is breathtaking: global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism;
We should, of course, never forget that Bannon is the beacon of the alt-right while Clinton supports many progressive causes, such as the fight against racism and sexism. However, at the same time we should never forget that the LGBT+ struggle can also be co-opted by mainstream liberalism against ‘class essentialism’ of the Left.
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Trotsky thus targeted the material (technical) grid of power (railways, electricity, water supply, post, etc.), the grid without which state power hangs in the void and becomes inoperative. Let the mobilized masses fight the police and storm the Winter Palace (an act without any real relevance): the essential move is accomplished by a tiny, dedicated minority... <> Instead of indulging in a miserable moralist-democratic rejection of such a procedure, one should rather analyse it coldly and think about how to apply it today, since this insight of Trotsky has gained new actuality with the progressive digitalization of our lives in what could be characterized as the new era of posthuman power.
the lesson of the last decades is that neither massive grass-roots protests (as we have seen in Spain and Greece) nor well-organized political movements (parties with elaborated political visions) are enough – we also need a narrow, striking force of dedicated ‘engineers’ (hackers, whistle-blowers . . .) organized as a disciplined conspiratorial group. Its task will be to ‘take over’ the digital grid, to rip it out of the hands of corporations and state agencies that now de facto control it.

The disintegration of the shared ethical basis of our lives is clearly signalled by the abolition of universal military conscription in many developed countries: the very notion of being ready to risk one’s life for a common-cause army appears more and more pointless, if not directly ridiculous, so that the armed forces, as the body in which all citizens equally participate, are gradually becoming a mercenary force. This disintegration affects the two sexes differently: men are slowly turning into perpetual adolescents, with no clear passage of initiation into maturity
I am not sure which position I should take in a particular political struggle, but when I learn the position of my enemy, I automatically assume the opposite one. One should add that Lenin provided a scathing critique of this stance (ironically, his target was Rosa Luxemburg6). Such was the case in the cultural Cold War: when, in the late 1940s, Western culture was perceived as promoting universalist cosmopolitanism (under Jewish influence), pro-Soviet Communists from the USSR to France decided to turn patriotic, promoting their own cultural tradition and attacking imperialism for destroying it.
although Immanuel Kant’s views are racist, he nonetheless contributed to the process which led to contemporary emancipatory struggles – to put it bluntly, there is no Marxism and no socialism without Kant.)
Walter Benn Michaels: The problem is that the whole idea of cultural identity is incoherent, and that the dramas of appropriation it makes possible provide an increasingly economically stratified society with a model of social justice that addresses everything except that economic stratification.
We should persist in the properly dialectical approach: such an acceptance of identity in no way invalidates universality, it merely renders it ‘concrete’ in the Hegelian sense... Each way of life implies its own universality: it is not just about itself but also about how to relate to others, and the two cannot be separated.
brutal Chinese colonization of Tibet is a fact, but this fact should not blind us to what kind of country Tibet was before 1949, and even before 1959 – a harsh feudal society with an extreme hierarchy regulated in detail.
what about the opposite strategy, which resides in strengthening local traditions in order to make colonial domination more efficient? No wonder the British colonial administration of India elevated The Laws of Manu – an ancient detailed justification for and manual of the caste system – into the seminal text to be used as a reference for establishing the legal code that would render possible the most efficient domination of India;
Many tribes wisely spend the income earned from casinos and mining rights on this restoration or, as Richard Wagner put it, ‘die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der sie Schlug’ (only the spear that struck you heals the wound).
Susan Buck-Morss: human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope.
The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West provided the very standards by which it (as well as its critics) measures its criminal past.
Against this view, Freud and Lacan consistently emphasized that perversion, far from being subversive, is the hidden obverse of power: every form of power needs perversion as its inherent transgression which sustains it. In order to be operative, every ideological edifice has to be inconsistent: its explicit norms have to be supplemented by higher-level implicit norms which tell us how to deal with those explicit norms (when to obey them and when to violate them). In other words, an ideology does not just consist of its explicit norms; it always comprises an obscene underside which violates those explicit norms – this inconsistency is what makes it an ideology.
isn’t Lubitsch’s indirectness also conditioned by the Hays Code censorship? Adorno wrote somewhere that a really good film would follow all the rules of Hays Code, although not in order to obey the law but out of an immanent necessity
This is how ideology works in classic Hollywood: nothing is totally repressed, everything can be unambiguously signalled in a codified way (if someone remarks that a guy smells of perfume, it means he is gay, etc.)
"Climb Every Mountain": Significantly, when The Sound of Music was shown in (still socialist) Yugoslavia in the late 1960s, this scene – the three minutes of this song – was the only part of the film which was censored. The anonymous socialist censor thereby displayed his profound sense of the truly dangerous power of Catholic ideology: far from being the religion of sacrifice, of renunciation of earthly pleasures (in contrast to the pagan affirmation of the life of passions), Catholicism offers a devious stratagem to indulge in our desires without having to pay the price for them,
Miranda’s lover feels castrated because he gets too much from her, more than he really asked for – he asked her to voice all the obscenities that pop up in her mind, and what he gets is the exception on which his universality was based. He experiences castration here – not lack, but this ‘too much’ is castrating.
the way MeToo addresses the issue. In downplaying the complexity of sexual interaction, it not only blurs the line between lewd misconduct and criminal violence but also cloaks invisible forms of extreme psychological violence as politeness and respect.
One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles... Consequently, one should also talk about female manipulation and emotional brutality (ultimately as a desperate reply to male domination): women fight back any way they can. And one should admit that, in many parts of our society in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure, so the proper strategy should be to address male anxieties too and to strive for a pact between women’s struggle for emancipation and male concerns.
The underlying paradox is that love, as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal; it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as an undeserved grace. Perhaps there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if the revolution demands it.
Marx: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
However, there are today, in our Western world, two other forms of the opium of the people: the opium and the people. As the rise of populism demonstrates, the opium of the people is also ‘the people’ itself, the fuzzy populist dream destined to obfuscate our own antagonisms. And, last but not least, for many among us the opium of the people is opium itself, escape into drugs –