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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Chapter One Outline: The Negativity of the Left
Despite the increasingly apparent contradictions of global capitalism – most notably in the current financial crisis and the interactions between ecological degradation, scarcity of resources and the continued expansion of life threatening poverty – the political Left appears to have no response. If ‘What is to be done?’ was the proto-typical Leftist question, at least for those able to bear the presence of Lenin, today those who cannot have been reduced to asking, ‘How can we help?’
The Left appears to have no response to the contradictions of capitalist political economy primarily because it has lost sight of either political economy or the economy in general. The Left has been split, in terms of academia, politics and ideology, between either an apolitical economy in which the reform of administrative devices are assumed to be neutral, or a withdrawal into (postmodern) politics or cultural studies without economy. It is as if neither politics or economy can be held together at the same time; an impossible element – class struggle – prevents their fusion. In essence, capitalism and class struggle has ceased to exist for both the Left and the Right, a circumstance with which the latter appears quite content. For Radical Leftist politics to regain its strength and begin to engage with the economy, capitalism must again return to the forefront of analysis.
Against the current splitting of the Left, in this thesis I shall argue that Slavoj Zizek operates at a particular symptomatic point within Leftist discourse. Zizek embodies the impossibilities of Leftist politics because, whilst he work grapples with the same difficulties of representation that have brought the downfall of traditional Leftist essentialist (read Marxist) politics, he maintains that the Left must not abandon the political terrain either through a tragic resignation to the dilemmas of representation or by losing sight of the politics of economy, which he labels class struggle. Indeed, Zizek has come to embody the very point of class struggle, insisting on the instantiation of the impossibility of political economy.
Yet, Zizek appears both unable and unwilling to posit an alternative imaginary. Instead he argues that the status of capitalism is such that any alternative or radical action has already been accounted for by the system; in these times it is neither possible to produce revolutionary activity, nor conceive of alternative imaginaries. Because of this interpretation of capital – along with the constitutive inability of psychoanalytic theory to produce a discourse of the good – Zizek’s work has become the point of much academic and political frustration. As he himself would argue, as a symptom, the signifier ‘Zizek’ has become a point of enjoyment. Yet, it is the wager of this thesis that despite the apparent impossibilities of Lacanian politics and Zizek’s interpretation of capitalism, it is Zizek’s work that provides the most hope for the hungry.
We must ask, therefore, If Zizek ‘s work embodies a singular point of radicality against global capital, what kind of political practices stem from his work? Moreover, first we must consider the kind of theory which has led to Zizek holding this position.
The Left appears to have no response to the contradictions of capitalist political economy primarily because it has lost sight of either political economy or the economy in general. The Left has been split, in terms of academia, politics and ideology, between either an apolitical economy in which the reform of administrative devices are assumed to be neutral, or a withdrawal into (postmodern) politics or cultural studies without economy. It is as if neither politics or economy can be held together at the same time; an impossible element – class struggle – prevents their fusion. In essence, capitalism and class struggle has ceased to exist for both the Left and the Right, a circumstance with which the latter appears quite content. For Radical Leftist politics to regain its strength and begin to engage with the economy, capitalism must again return to the forefront of analysis.
Against the current splitting of the Left, in this thesis I shall argue that Slavoj Zizek operates at a particular symptomatic point within Leftist discourse. Zizek embodies the impossibilities of Leftist politics because, whilst he work grapples with the same difficulties of representation that have brought the downfall of traditional Leftist essentialist (read Marxist) politics, he maintains that the Left must not abandon the political terrain either through a tragic resignation to the dilemmas of representation or by losing sight of the politics of economy, which he labels class struggle. Indeed, Zizek has come to embody the very point of class struggle, insisting on the instantiation of the impossibility of political economy.
Yet, Zizek appears both unable and unwilling to posit an alternative imaginary. Instead he argues that the status of capitalism is such that any alternative or radical action has already been accounted for by the system; in these times it is neither possible to produce revolutionary activity, nor conceive of alternative imaginaries. Because of this interpretation of capital – along with the constitutive inability of psychoanalytic theory to produce a discourse of the good – Zizek’s work has become the point of much academic and political frustration. As he himself would argue, as a symptom, the signifier ‘Zizek’ has become a point of enjoyment. Yet, it is the wager of this thesis that despite the apparent impossibilities of Lacanian politics and Zizek’s interpretation of capitalism, it is Zizek’s work that provides the most hope for the hungry.
We must ask, therefore, If Zizek ‘s work embodies a singular point of radicality against global capital, what kind of political practices stem from his work? Moreover, first we must consider the kind of theory which has led to Zizek holding this position.
Friday, June 12, 2009
On Jameson , utopia and the practice of concrete universality
Always Historcize!
So starts one of Jameson’s most influential texts, The Political Unconscious (1981), which, like much of Jameson’s work, is highly influenced by Adorno, along with Althusser and Freud. For Jameson there is nothing which is not historical, even if Marxism is the one discourse which unities them. Jameson definition of history, however, is vitally different from that generally posited (Homer, 2006: 56). Instead, for Jameson History can be correlated with the Real, an idea predominately developed in The Political Unconscious.
This text holds to two propositions that are highly influential for our consideration of utopianism. Firstly, the political is unconscious; the activity of everyday language and politics is determined by the absent presence of an unconscious subtext that Jameson labels History. Secondly, that the unconscious itself is political. Opposed to Freud’s individualistic reading of the unconscious, like Lacan Jameson reads the unconscious as the fundamental domain of intersubjectivity. The unconscious is social not in terms of the Jungian collective unconscious, but rather what Walter Benjamin deemed the ‘nightmare of history’ (Homer, 2006:48). Not only is the unconscious structured like a language (in terms of its grammatical logic) but also structured by language and the flows of History (Clark, 1984: 67). Thus history is not so much the context for the performance of the political, but rather a subtext; each text is a re-writing of the contradictions of history itself. The text brings into being the subtext to which it has itself been a reaction (Jameson, 1977:82).
Jameson considers History to be the highest level of abstraction in his meta-commentary of interpretation. History, for Jameson, can be considered analogous to the Real (Jameson, 1977). History is that which resists symbolisation absolutely, providing a limit to the symbolic, a limit which can only be felt in its affect upon the symbolic itself. Jameson’s conflation of the Real with his notion of History is the over-riding difference between himself and Zizek in regards to their respective understanding of utopia.
In The Political Unconscious, Jameson considers an Althusserian reading of the Real, and by association, History. Here the Real appears only as an absent cause, felt in its affects rather than positive presence. Moreover, Jameson goes on to contend that the Real is the absent cause of History, thus associating both History and the Real with the unconscious, or repression. As I shall develop further latter in this chapter, this reading of the Real and the unconscious has major implications for the difference between Jameson and Zizek’s reading of utopianism and the political practice of utopia.
The other two levels in his consideration of interpretation are the political and the social. The political, instantiated in the individual text, or the practice of language itself, is the level of the ‘imaginary resolution of a real contradiction’ (Jameson, 1977: 77). Between the contradictions of History and the imaginary resolution inherent in the political text is the social, which for Jameson situates the narrative of the socially symbolic act in terms of class discourse. For Jameson class is considered a purely relational concept, the second of three levels of abstraction in analysis. Jameson considers class – in line with his designation of the social as the realm of class discourse – as a relational concept, not a category but rather a historical experience of consciousness. Nonetheless, Jameson certainly does not reject the logic Zizek presents in the operation of class struggle. Instead, Jameson postulates that a remarkably similar operation occurs in the dialectic of history. Jameson (1977:102) states;
“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis...But this history can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them”
Similarly, in regards to class, Zizek argues;
“...class struggle as antagonism is, as it were, its own obstacle, that which forever prevents its own direct expression, its translation into clear symbolic or positive terms...the wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (‘class struggle’) which overdetermines all the others and which is, as such, the concrete universal of the entire field” (Zizek, 2004b: 100-101).
The structural role of History, for Jameson is the same as Class struggle for Zizek. Both set a limit to signification, a limit which is only presented by the experience of its absence. Class struggle and History are the negative limit of all discourse and as such cannot be the subject of investigation themselves. Nor, however, are they strictly determinate in a mode similar to the Marxist base/superstructure model. Both Jameson and Zizek would argue that such a model is impossible – there is no deterministic base which acts as a positive guarantee for political life. Neither does Althusser’s notion of (economic) determination in the last instance apply, although the dialectics are similar. Instead, for both Jameson and Zizek determination by the presence of absence allows a complex dialectical interaction between what might be deemed the ‘base’ (absence) and reactions to that base. These reactions are relatively autonomous, but are nonetheless reactions to the impossibility posed by History or Class struggle. Notably, both Zizek (in Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please! (2000a)) and Jameson (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) (1991)) have argued that postmodernism is not a positive discourse in itself (if a postmodern discourse can be regarded as positive) but rather the latest discursive response to the impossibility inherent in capitalism.
In this way, Jameson extends the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a sociological project. By considering the operation of history as a form of political unconscious, Jameson is able to consider the formation of desire and contradiction as specifically Marxist formations. For Jameson, contradictions operates in the same manner is desire in Lacan’s work, a designation which allows Jameson to bisect the traditional difficulty within Marxism of mediating between the social and the personal. Desire, as defined by history is immediately both personal and socially defined (Clark, 1984:68). Moreover, desire can be considered as contradiction and as a corollary, just as the Real is what resists, yet constitutes, desire, so does History.
History is conceived as a mode of production, but not in a strictly economic sense. Similar to class, Jameson considers the mode of production to be a differential concept; any given mode of production must relate to both previous modes of production, which may still have a presence, and anticipate future modes of production, specifically the collective dialectic of socialism. Following Raymond Williams, Jameson considers capitalism to be the dominant mode of production, but residual forms of production still exist, along with evidence of future modes (Homer, 2006:42).
Today, the dialectic of history has largely stalled around the capitalist mode of production, subsuming residual modes of production and limiting the possibilities for the emergence of future modes, or at least warping and displacing the utopian demand that drives the development of alternative modes. Here form becomes content as the processes inherent in the capitalist mode of production become sedimented in their own right (Homer, 2006:47). Much of the politics of Jameson’s work centres around the openly of the dialectic of the history to future (socialist) possibilities. The process of opening up the dialectic, when antagonistic forces previously held back by imaginary resolutions become openly contradictory, is known as cultural revolution.
Thus, not only is the unconscious structured like a language, but for Jameson the political unconscious is structured like the historic mode of production. In this way, not only ideology but individual desire is structured by the mode of production. Under global capitalism, Jameson argues that desire and subjectivity have become overtly reified, resulting in a commodity fetishism that has stalled the advancement of the collective dialectic of history.
Nonetheless, within this dialectic, the collective urge continues and is expressed not only in utopianism, but in ideology. For Jameson, therefore a utopian demand is always present within even the most reactionary forms of ideology. We can read this demand as jouissance. Although ideology works to prevent the impact of historical contradictions upon the subject, ideology is not primarily a mode of repression. Rather the subject is compensated for their passivity in the face of apparent contradiction. This compensatory gratification can be read as the element of utopia or jouissance inherent in every ideological formation. Here the utopian demand is ultimately for the fullness of society, that, contra Laclau, society does exist.
Consequently, for Jameson, all forms of class consciousness have a utopian demand in the attempt at an imaginary resolution of real contradiction, even if this imaginary resolution comes through the exclusion of other forms of class consciousness (Jameson, 1981: 289-291). The utopian dimension comes in the form the coherence and unity of a discourse of collectivity. Even today, the neo-liberal practice of class consciousness can be considered to feature a degree of utopianism simply through the presumption of a classless society which expresses collective solidarity.
Utopianism, therefore, has no relation to any specific content; one cannot designate the identity of utopia, nor construct a society that would fulfil any requirements that have been construction. Rather, utopianism is a practice, a method or a movement in which the desire for being itself is instantiated. As Jameson states; ‘Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation’. (2004:35). As Buchanan (2007:19) notes, our understanding of utopia can only be tautological; any answer to the question ‘What is utopia?’ is necessarily erroneous unless the answer is utopia itself. It is this indescribable mysteriousness of utopia which leads to science fiction and the literary genre as a whole to be the primary mode of utopian expression. Here our inability to imagine the future organises utopian images around an impossible vanishing point (Jameson, 1998: 74)
The question of utopia, therefore, is not what it is but rather how it works. Utopianism then can only be designated as a transcendental absence, the affect of which we can fits under the signifier utopia. In this sense utopianism, or at least the form of utopianism which Jameson advocates, bears an overwhelming resemblance to Lacan’s understanding of drive. As Jameson states;“... in which the structure of Utopian wish-fulfilment itself slowly swung about into its object, form therefore becoming content and transforming the Utopian wish into a wish to which in the first place” (2005:213)
Moreover, Utopianism cannot come from ‘nowhere’ but instead from the ideological positions and class consciousness available within the contemporary conditions of possibility. Jameson’s sense of utopia includes this positioned impulse or urge for being, but also the impossibility of such a position. In this sense utopianism keeps alive the possibility of a different world, but takes the form of a ‘stubborn negation of all that is’ (Jameson, 1971: 111)
The impossibility of utopia does not relate to the practical impossibilities of political life, but rather the limitations of our imaginations. Imagination, of course, is not limited to the fancy of the individual. Rather, as Jameson himself has developed, imagination is always a social creation. The unconscious is always political, the unconscious is structured like a language and informed by language which itself is shaped by ideology. Thus the limitations of our imagination is always a political limit, it is the limit of what exists within the political order. Existence is not indexed to material presence, but rather ideological recognition. In this sense, as Buchanan (1998: 18) notes, utopia is what is repressed and is felt most in points of censorship and anxiety within the text.
Thus what the utopian text invokes is our constitutive inability to imagine utopia itself (Jameson, 1982: 153). In this sense, utopia appears only as an absence and any attempt to name this absence produces an ideological closure which converts the utopian demand for an anticipatory appeal to reactionary state. Although Jameson’s position evokes connotations of Zizek’s distinction between activity and the Act, the understanding of the presence of absence in relation to utopia is the key distinction between the work of Jameson and Zizek. Both authors contend that utopia occurs at the edge of our understanding. The value of Jameson is that he conceives the utopian impulse in everyday practice. The vital difference is that whilst Jameson believes that these limits come into being through the effects of absence, Zizek’s fuller conception of the Real and universality allows for the specific identification of the limitations of discourse, even though they remain incommensurable and extimate from the dominant horizon of being.
Thus, for Jameson, utopia is at its most effective when it cannot be imagined;
“Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future – our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity of futurity – so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined” (2004: 46).
Utopia then suggests a complete overhaul of society, one that will produce much anxiety and repression of the utopian imagination (Jameson, 1998: 75). Although this anxiety can cause us to continue to grasp to the illusions which coherence our sense of being and hold us to the limitations of our current order, anxiety itself presents an energy from which to move forward (ibid: 51-53).
Whilst this form of utopianism leads itself to acquisitions of negativity, positive forms are easily subverted. Jameson argues that the designation of specific points of protest is contrary to the effectiveness of utopianism. When the specific contradictions become apparent, the tendency is to focus political demands upon these points. At this point, however, the utopian imagination becomes limited and what might have been a revolutionary demand gives way to practical political programmes (2004: 45). A salient example of this process in these times is the Green movement. Although Green ideology at times suggests an energy for widespread change that might be considered utopian, it has become too easy to divert this enthusiasm into smaller scale processes that only serve to supplement the interests of capital and escalate ecological collapse.
In this manner, Jameson’s conception of utopianism has vital similarities with Zizek’s. Zizek has often argued that politics in our time has lost its radical edge, what Jameson calls utopianism and Zizek references to the Lacanian act, and has settled for mere activity. Nonetheless, Zizek’s form of utopianism – the communist hypothesis – takes its form from the expression of actually occurring antagonisms with capitalism. Whilst he acknowledges that capital is able to include and pacify most of its symptoms, he designates the excluded or hungry populations of the world as the specific contradiction which holds a vital, utopian status. It is this designation which marks the differentiation between Jameson and Zizek’s conception of utopia, a difference which is driven by their opposing readings of the Real and the concept of universality.
Jameson considers that the notions of concept, system, universality, totality and history can be conflated (1990: 46). In doing so, his construction of the Real follows Althusser’s ‘absent cause’ as well as Adorno’s understanding of the concept. Here the concrete is concrete because - rather than being associated with discrete/empirical facts - it is the synthesis of several particular determinants such that ‘The totality could be concrete precisely because it included all of the mediations that linked the seemingly isolated facts” (Jay, 1984: 104-5). Here the Real, or the other/concrete side of the concept, is felt only in its effects and the ideological censorship that occurs around those effects. This understanding is more indebted to the Freudian unconscious than any Lacanian notion of the Real Jameson has tended to equate the notion of totality with the Althusserian notion of absent cause; totality is not available to representation - the totality can only be represented through its absence (Homer, 2006: 158).
As well as Althusser, Jameson takes his understanding of the concept from Adorno, whom he credits with a reading of the universal and particular that no other Marxist theorist has been able to achieve (Jameson, 1990: 9). That is, to be able to maintain the concept of totality and concept itself, whilst being able to consider the ‘dark side’ of the concept. For Jameson the originality of Jameson’s work stems from this ability to think;
‘an outside, or external face of the concept, which, like that of the moon, can never be visible or accessible to us: but we must vigilantly remember and reckon that other face into our sense of the concept whilst remaining within it in the old way and continuing to use and think it’ (ibid:25).
Moreover, Jameson suggests that to think this otherside is to reference the unconscious as a way to ‘endow the thinking mind with a dimension of radical otherness that...must structurally elude us, and remain forever out of reach’. It is here that the notion of totality comes in being, allowing the concept to be retained and without being reified, freeing us from the ‘spell’ of the concept to which there is nonetheless a drive (ibid: 26). Adorno, for Jameson, allows us to hold onto a belief in the concept whilst decoupling it from the thing itself of which the concept is simply an abstract representation. This representation must necessarily fail – hence the ‘dark side’ of the concept – but the notion of the concept can be maintained.
For Jameson, the importance of the struggle over the epistemological validity of totality is the maintenance of the dimension of utopia; the possibility of radically transforming society. Thus, in turning its back on the concept of totality, for Jameson, postmodernism is rejecting any prospect of the radical transformation of capitalism and is thus a rejection of Marxism's emancipatory narrative. This is the problem of post-structuralist/negative ontological politics; it leads only to an endorsement of the status quo. Thus Jameson's demand to maintain some aspect of utopian transformation politics (Homer, 2006:178).
Whilst Jameson would no doubt reject this label, conversely, he provides a similar political step in his understanding of the mode of production and collectivity of the dialectic.). Cognitive mapping invokes a utopian imperative to derive a future configuration out of the failure of the present (Jameson, 1998: 74)What is different is the explicit labelling of such positions.
Yet both Jameson and Zizek – the former with more conviction that the latter – suggest that political visions must be developed. In response to Stavrakakis’s development of the possibilities of partial/feminine enjoyment and radical democracy, Zizek suggests that what is to be done is not the formation of new, alternative mode of being, but the consideration of political passion in its own terms, suggesting ‘the true question is: What is there to be passionate about? Which political choices fit people’s experiences as “realistic” and “feasible” (Zizek, 2008: 331).
Likewise, Jameson argues that the role of Marxism cannot be limited to ‘scientific’ analysis. Rather the question is whether Marxism can be used to develop ideological positions and present a vision for the future, certainly in his earlier work. In The Political Unconscious, (1981: 285-286) , Jameson argues that despite the tradition of the negative dialectic in Marxism, Marxism remains capable of producing a ‘positive hermeneutic’, as evidenced by, amongst others, Bloch’s work on hope and utopia. Furthermore, Jameson adds;
“a Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological texts...in which a functional method for describing cultural texts is articulated with an anticipatory one” (ibid: 296, emphasis in original).
Thus, the key point to be taken from Jameson work in regards to the positioning of a utopian response to capitalism is that there is a utopian demand inherent in every ideological text. Thus whilst ideological analysis must focus on the interpretation of the modes of enjoyment inherent in any discursive position, critique cannot remain negative, but must rather identify those positive elements that embody the utopian impulse that would allow the text to advance past its own limitations.
The task of Marxism, in other words, is to reinvent its own Utopian impulse (Homer, 2006:94). It is perhaps for this reason that Jameson designates Marxism – to which the development of ideological positions is constitutive of its approach – rather than psychoanalysis as the ultimate form of historicism. It is appears that the explicit labelling of the content of this vision is a matter more of theory and political strategy than a structured political philosophy.
But for Jameson the failure of the concept is present only as absence. Here he conflates the totality, the Real (and by association) and the unconscious with the notion of universality. By contrast, Zizek’s (previously outlined) understanding of both the Real and of universality suggests that there is more to the impossibility of objectivity than absence. Although the ‘dark side of the moon’ is only felt through its absence in the hegemonic signifying field, it nonetheless exists. Moreover, it is not so much that the dark side exists, but in the words of Pink Floyd lyrist Roger Waters, ‘There is no dark side of the moon really. matter of fact it’s all dark’. That is, it is outside of the concept is not strictly absent, but rather takes its presence as one of the particulars within the totality of universality. Zizek, in his Lacanian reading of Lacan, considers the existence of this particular to be the concrete universal.
Significantly, Jameson argues that whilst Adorno and Zizek are great dialecticians, Adorno’s tone can be considered tragic whereas Zizek (and we can compare him to Eagleton in this regard) follows a more comedic logic. It is this comedic logic which gives Zizek’s work the greater political traction (2006: 7).
Nonetheless, this traction is not immediately apparent in some versions of his work. Perhaps the most controversial element of Zizek’s oeuvre (along with the associated subtractive politics) is his notion of the Lacanian Act. Here the Act occurs as a sudden break from the existing, a moment (or suspension) of time in which the impossible occurs. This point has entertained numerous points of critiqued, predominately aimed at the supposedly conservative implications of Zizek’s work in his dismissal of mere activity in favour of the radical implications of the Act (cf. Devenney, 2007; Robinson, 2004; Robinson & Tormey, 2005). It is, however, the Act which is implied in much of Zizek’s use of utopia in which utopia is instantiated in the occurrence of impossibility, an unnameable compulsion for otherness (Brockelmann, 1996:201).
Nonetheless, another tradition exists within Zizek’s work that – whilst responding to the same impossibility of action – allows for a fuller application of utopianism. This position – the practice of concrete universality – is not far divorced from the Act and may indeed be considered to subsume the practice (ibid: 202). Moreover, this position, is not the singular truth of his work, the foundations of essence between mere appearance or the culmination of his project but rather what I want to suggest is the form of politics which holds the most potential for politics today and the hungry of tomorrow. This position has been best considered in the Parallax View.
Through the notion of the parallax, Zizek suggests that we can ‘practice’ the concrete universal by ‘confronting a[n] [abstract] universality with its ‘unbearable’ example’ (Zizek, 2006: 13). This unbearable example is, of course, the concrete universal. The concrete universal has an existence, although it is not a positive one within the hegemonic domain of abstract universality. Rather, it appears as the Real; a gap within the order of being. Nonetheless, by taking a parallax view the presence of this excluded exception becomes clear. What is important about the parallax view is not the positive existence of the exception. The exception does ‘exist’ within the ideological form of the abstract universal in a more palpable form. Poverty, for example, does exist within the ideological formations that support capitalism. Indeed its re-presented presence is often excessive, taking the forms of meaningless statistics and images over-ridden with super-ego guilt. What makes poverty – the hungry – into the concrete universal or constitutive exception is the relationship between the hungry and capitalist ideology. The hungry are ontologically excluded not because their presence cannot be acknowledged, but rather because they cannot be acknowledged as an intimate (or rather, extimate) part of universality itself.
In this sense the concrete universal has an extimate existence, outside of but produced by the abstract universal. Thus whilst concrete universality may be felt as an absence within the normative experience of capitalism, a presence does exist. As Zizek states;
“Lacan’s final lesson is not relativity and plurality of truths but the hard, traumatic fact that in every concrete constellation truth is bound to emerge in some contingent detail. In other words, although truth is context-dependent – although there is no truth in general, but always the truth of some situation – there is none the less in every plural field a particular point which articulates the truth and as such cannot be relativised; in this precise sense, truth is always One” (Zizek, 1991: 196, original emphasis)
This is a point that, we can speculate, Jameson would not reject out of hand. Rather he would suggest that the truth does emerge not as truth itself but as an affect within the symbolic order. The vital point of difference between Jameson and Zizek is that the latter contends that this truth becomes embodied in a particular point. We can, as I have throughout this thesis, label this point within capitalism as the hungry; the excluded or reserve army of labour whose suffering is constitute of the totality of capitalism. Moreover, there are deep political consequences for the presence of the concrete universal, and not just upon the bodies of those who have this status.
The presence of the concrete universal adds new leverage to the political practice of the utopian impossibility. In terms of Jameson’s reading of totality, the utopian point of impossibility emerges at the limit point of the discourse, what Jameson regards as History and Zizek class struggle. This position, however, lends itself only to a patient politics of rejecting the forms of censorship that emerge around the presence of absent and engaging in what Zizek has come to label ‘subtractive politics’. In his recent work on utopia, however, Jameson’s writing strategy has become quasi-transcendentalist (resonating with Derrida methinks). It thereby becomes quite different from subtractive politics. (By practicing the concrete universal, one is able to force this point of absence into being, not in terms of the full inclusion of the exception into the abstract universal, such that universality becomes fully constituted, but rather the violent intrusion of the disavowed foundations of the order itself. In this manner a new narrative can be created, which, if for only a historical moment, means that cause is no longer absent and utopian change is forced into our imagination.
The concrete presence – and identification – of an excluded point of exception which signals the existence of a totality is the key difference between Zizek and Jameson in regards to the hungry. This difference is embodied by their respective stances towards philosophy. Zizek openly regards himself as a philosopher. He rejects the image of the ‘crazy’ meta-philosopher, attempting to find an answer to everything, but rather contends that the role of the philosopher is to reshape the way in which we understand questions. For this reasons, despite his critics and his own statements about the need for an alternative vision, Zizek simply does not see this as his task.
By contrast, Jameson is an avowed anti-philosophy because of the connotations of systematisation, reification and ultimately commodification. Jameson’s nightmare is that his work could be packaged up into a system and sold off as a ‘brand name’ theorist. In this regard, Jameson reads Zizek’s Parallax View as a failed attempt at anti-philosophy. He states;
“Clearly the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory rather than philosophy...yet theory itself was always ‘grounded’ on a fundamental (and insoluble) dilemma: namely, that the provisional terms in which it does its work inevitably over time get thematised (to use Paul de Man’s expression); they get reified (and even commodified, if I may say so) and even turn into systems in their own right”
Moreover, Jameson continues;
“ My occasional fear is, then, that by theorising and conceptualising the impossibilities designated by the parallax view, Zizek may turn out to have produced a new concept and a new theory after all, simply by naming what it is better not to call the unnameable” (2006: 8).
What Jameson misses, however, is that Zizek is a philosopher, he does produce a system and a concept, but a concept of what does not exist. Zizek is a philosopher of the Real and for that reason his philosophy – a grand philosophy of that which does not exist – will always strike a comedic tone. Fundamentally, whilst Jameson argues that the universal does not exist, but we can feel the presence of this absence in its effects upon the symbolic order in which our bodies exist, Zizek contends that it is the very non-existence of the universal which gives it is presence. If the original illusion of universality is that society is present, then for Zizek there is always a perverted truth in appearance; society has its existence, but only by the exclusion of ‘non-society’, which although banished from our horizon of understanding, nonetheless is an embodied exclusion. This embodied exclusion, which, in capitalism can be identified as the hungry or homo sacer, is the concrete universal, the part with no part which is the key to both the operation of universality and the impossibility of class struggle within capitalism.
If, however, the perverse signification of the concrete universal can advance the impossible performance of utopianism, then the naming of this horizon itself is a different matter. Both Jameson and Zizek take some measure to suggest that this future will take a communist or at least collective form, but are unwilling to advance further positive co-ordinates. Zizek labels this possibility the ‘communist hypothesis’. Zizek identifies this position follows Badiou, how has argued that without the idea of communism, there is no reason to do either philosophy, or attempt any form of collective action. Moreover, he argues that the communist hypothesis does not necessarily have any particular reference to its earlier instantiation; rather, the task today is to find a ‘new modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being’ (Badiou, 2008: 115).
Zizek (2009) repeats Badiou’s argument without contention, adding that one should not consider the hypothesis as a ‘regulative idea’ of the kind that might lead to an ethical socialism with an a priori norm (see Zizek’s previous debate with Geoff Boucher (Boucher, 2004; Zizek, 2004a)). Rather the communist hypothesis must be referenced to actual contradictions within capitalism.
As Zizek states;
“To treat communism as an eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal, that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence, of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own impossibility” (Zizek, 2009)
Not only does this continue Zizek’s long-standing dismissal of deconstruction and Derrida, but Jameson’s understanding of the impossibility of utopia (as the impossibility of our imaginations, indexed against a collectivist dialectic) is also in the firing line. Instead, Zizek argues that we use the communist hypothesis against the presence of contradictions of capitalism. It appears that for Zizek the only radical usage of the utopian urge is in this communist demand against the contradictions of capitalism. A utopian demand certainly exists within liberal attempts to reform the symptoms of capital (Sachs and the United Nations being the primary example of this approach) or the conservatism of the Bush Administration and its institutional cronies, whose more implicit demand is that society does indeed exist; it is simply threaten by enemies which it cannot recognise as having created. In the face of these alternatives, Fukuyama was certainly correct; history has come to an end.
Thus Zizek’s answer to Brockelmann (1996: 205) question ‘What, after all does it mean to be ‘against’ capitalism it that suggests nothing about what one would change in it or substitute for it?’ or Laclau’s almost hysterical demands for Zizek to reveal his alternative form of economy or radical imaginary (Laclau, 2000), is not the production of an alternative horizon, but rather the identification of point which reveal why the current horizon cannot continue. For Zizek, this is the most appropriate form of politics for the limitations of our time.
Thus the only way to restore the dialectic of history is by reference to the communist hypothesis, a hypothesis which itself can only come into being against a horizon of the contradictions of capital. Perhaps more accurately, although the presence of the communist hypothesis is necessary to generate a utopian demand, it is not the communism itself which will provoke change, but whether capitalism is able to contain its own contradictions. The task of this thesis, and any form of politics which attempts to invoke such a hypothesis, is to practice a form of analysis which exposes the constitutive contradictions of global capitalism.
Zizek argues that these contradictions are embodied in four antagonisms which threaten capitalism; the possibility of ecological collapse, the contradictions between immaterial labour, intellectual property and private property, the development of new scientific technologies which are changing the nature of life in its barest form and the new forms of exclusion, which Zizek labels new forms of apartheid. This exclusion is most notable in the rapidly expanding slums of the third world, but increasingly an underclass is developing within the western world itself. This group acts as reserve or surplus labour, the existence of which maintains the status of labour as a commodity and the capitalistic class relations. The radical potential of this group is not their poverty as such – horrific as it is – but rather the walls and divisions used to exclude them from the rest of society.
Under Zizek’s construction of the four dominant symptoms of capitalism, there is one symptom that defines the group; poverty, or rather the exclusion of those in poverty. The other three contradictions have been able to be included within the limits of capitalism. Environmentalism, despite the apparent radical possibility of a chaotic breech of nature, has become sustainable development. The contradictions of private property have become a legal challenge and bio-genetics has developed into an ethical, or even scientific, struggle. For Zizek these three elements are part of the battle for the commons.
Here Zizek follows Hardt and Negri in suggesting that the commons – particularly in the postmodern articulation of the commons in immaterial labour and knowledge – are increasingly being enclosed and privatised. In relation to these specific antagonisms, environmentalism equates to the commons of external nature, intellectual property to the commons of culture and bio-technology to the commons of internal nature. Whilst this enclosure and exploitation of what is common to all evokes the necessary use of communism, it is only the fourth symptom, that of exclusion, which adds the dimension of universality and the consequent possibility of communist ‘democracy’. Zizek adds that this level of universality – the Hegelian identification of totality embodied in the concrete subject which provides the impetus for political action – was the “communist dream of the young Marx – to bring together the universality of philosophy and the universality of the proletariat”. Thus, it is these contradictions, rather than any sense of a radical imaginary, which open up the prospect of before utopian demands and make democracy possible (Brockelmann, 1996: 199).
For Zizek, universality and democracy are intimately intertwined, abet with a characteristic twist. The excluded stand for universality preciously because they are excluded; they are the part with no part, the element whose exclusion constitutes the order. That is, the capitalist empire – both as an ideological system and symbolic/Real logic – must produce an exclusion in order to constitute itself as a set. That exclusion, of the unruly masses with no official place in the private capitalist order, is what makes the totality of Empire universal. The universal is not the failed attempt of any given set to constitute itself, but rather the set and its failure constitute the domain of universality.
Zizek links this form of universality to democracy in the Greek sense to signify the intrusion of the excluded into the socio-political space. Here Greek democracy contrasts strongly with Western-style liberal democracy. Liberal democracy seeks to include, but only that which is already symbolised within the current order. That is, liberal democracy is already formed on the basis of the exclusion of class struggle, the main instantiation of which is the masses of urban slums that act as the reserve army of labour for capitalism. By contrast, the Grecian form of democracy is based upon the inclusion of this group – the part with no part in the established order – into the demos. Such a move cannot be established by the demos themselves but rather must come from the internal destabilisation of the order. Thus democracy is universal in the sense that it includes that which is outside of itself, yet necessary for its own constitution.
Thus what is vital for both universality and democracy is not exclusion per se, but rather the interaction or gap between the excluded and the established order. The universal may be embodied by the excluded, but universality occurs through the inclusion of the excluded element. Zizek labels this approach a parallax view, where two incommensurable positions are held together. Thus, in Zizek’s communist democracy there is no specific revolutionary agent. Rather the revolutionary potential occurs in the short circuit between the order and its exclusion. The figure of the excluded confronts us – in its universal status – with the truth of its own position.
Thus, at this time in history in which capitalism reigns darkly supreme, yet is paradoxically plagued both by its own non-existence and the tormenting presence of symptoms which prove its existence, Zizek’s form of negative ontological politics is the approach which provides the most hope for the kind of radical change which would drastically improve the material circumstances of the hungry by giving them a presence beyond their mere biological being.
At this time, the opportunity exists within through a utopian demand for the impossible; for the democratic intrusion of the surplus labour of the world which has thus far operated as a necessary shadow of our order. This movement will not occur, however, only via the kind of hope that occurs when a utopian demand is disengaged from the processes of capitalism. Rather, more than ever today we are provided with an opportunity to practice an active politics of the negative by the exposal of the disavowed foundations of our order. These foundations, otherwise known as the concrete universal, offer the prospect of a dynamic and unsustainable disturbance in civilisation through the forced affective acknowledgement of the excluded as the foundations of our mode of being. To practice the concrete universal is thus to cross the mode of fantasy that coheres the horizon of being present in our civilisation, leaving ideology with no defence against that which – if we have any sense of ourselves as a species ‘good animals’ – must become unpalatable. This is Zizek’s utopian impossibility; the practice of concrete universality such that we (as a people) are forced to imagine a new mode of being. This is utopia.
The utopia of the communist hypothesis holds no content, no vision for the future, only an acknowledgement that the future must be different. As Jameson (2004:36) states; “even if we succeed in reviving utopia itself, the outlines of a new and effective practical politics for the era of globalisation will at once become visible, but only that we will never come to one without it”. Thus, as Buchanan (1998) notes, the practice of generating a new world is a utopian urge, but there is nothing utopian about the resulting society, which will be, like any other instantiation of human community, profoundly complicated.
Moreover, inherent in the demands of both Jameson and Zizek, and indeed any form of politics which takes its orientation from a negative ontology is a minimal demand, most beautifully articulated by Adorno in his Moralita Minnima: ‘There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand; that no one should go hungry’
As for the content of this vision or hypothesis, Zizekian psychoanalysis provides neither answers nor guarantees for the future. Zizek, in his own words, ‘Has a hat, but does not have a rabbit’. Rather in these dark times of global capitalism when neither rabbits nor their rabid breeding are possible, Zizek has set his sights on the critique of the fetishtic Hamsters produced by others. Without the instantiation of the co-ordinates of class struggle and the operation of the concrete universal, we are forced to grasp the commodified Hamster’s provided by capitalism.
Thus, in terms of the shape of the future, Zizek provides no options other than to suggest we need a new one. Yet, because of the performance of the impossibility of utopia, his work is certainly not conservative. Instead, it relies upon the opening of the space of utopian. Only then can Jameson’s dialectic of collectivity, otherwise known as the communist hypothesis, flourish.
But what form will the future hold? There can be no guarantee, but politics will continue. Utopia – in the sense of the fullness of being and the arrival of jouissance – will not occur. Instead the future may well take the shape of one of the approaches critiqued in this text, a version of Laclau’s radical democracy (indeed, in How to Begin from the Beginning Zizek suggests that there is no longer a singular revolutionary agent, but rather emancipatory politics will come from a dynamic combination of different agents and antagonisms. Where Zizek differs from Laclau is the identification of the excluded as the base for these agents and antagonisms and our implication in the universality of this position), or Madra and Ozselcuk’s feminine class relationship, but Zizek provides no suggestion as to what that might be, nor should we demand it from him. Instead, what is required is that at this time in the history of humanity when global capitalism reigns darkly supreme, it is the utopian practice of Zizekian psychoanalysis that is required. The rest is history.
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So starts one of Jameson’s most influential texts, The Political Unconscious (1981), which, like much of Jameson’s work, is highly influenced by Adorno, along with Althusser and Freud. For Jameson there is nothing which is not historical, even if Marxism is the one discourse which unities them. Jameson definition of history, however, is vitally different from that generally posited (Homer, 2006: 56). Instead, for Jameson History can be correlated with the Real, an idea predominately developed in The Political Unconscious.
This text holds to two propositions that are highly influential for our consideration of utopianism. Firstly, the political is unconscious; the activity of everyday language and politics is determined by the absent presence of an unconscious subtext that Jameson labels History. Secondly, that the unconscious itself is political. Opposed to Freud’s individualistic reading of the unconscious, like Lacan Jameson reads the unconscious as the fundamental domain of intersubjectivity. The unconscious is social not in terms of the Jungian collective unconscious, but rather what Walter Benjamin deemed the ‘nightmare of history’ (Homer, 2006:48). Not only is the unconscious structured like a language (in terms of its grammatical logic) but also structured by language and the flows of History (Clark, 1984: 67). Thus history is not so much the context for the performance of the political, but rather a subtext; each text is a re-writing of the contradictions of history itself. The text brings into being the subtext to which it has itself been a reaction (Jameson, 1977:82).
Jameson considers History to be the highest level of abstraction in his meta-commentary of interpretation. History, for Jameson, can be considered analogous to the Real (Jameson, 1977). History is that which resists symbolisation absolutely, providing a limit to the symbolic, a limit which can only be felt in its affect upon the symbolic itself. Jameson’s conflation of the Real with his notion of History is the over-riding difference between himself and Zizek in regards to their respective understanding of utopia.
In The Political Unconscious, Jameson considers an Althusserian reading of the Real, and by association, History. Here the Real appears only as an absent cause, felt in its affects rather than positive presence. Moreover, Jameson goes on to contend that the Real is the absent cause of History, thus associating both History and the Real with the unconscious, or repression. As I shall develop further latter in this chapter, this reading of the Real and the unconscious has major implications for the difference between Jameson and Zizek’s reading of utopianism and the political practice of utopia.
The other two levels in his consideration of interpretation are the political and the social. The political, instantiated in the individual text, or the practice of language itself, is the level of the ‘imaginary resolution of a real contradiction’ (Jameson, 1977: 77). Between the contradictions of History and the imaginary resolution inherent in the political text is the social, which for Jameson situates the narrative of the socially symbolic act in terms of class discourse. For Jameson class is considered a purely relational concept, the second of three levels of abstraction in analysis. Jameson considers class – in line with his designation of the social as the realm of class discourse – as a relational concept, not a category but rather a historical experience of consciousness. Nonetheless, Jameson certainly does not reject the logic Zizek presents in the operation of class struggle. Instead, Jameson postulates that a remarkably similar operation occurs in the dialectic of history. Jameson (1977:102) states;
“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis...But this history can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them”
Similarly, in regards to class, Zizek argues;
“...class struggle as antagonism is, as it were, its own obstacle, that which forever prevents its own direct expression, its translation into clear symbolic or positive terms...the wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (‘class struggle’) which overdetermines all the others and which is, as such, the concrete universal of the entire field” (Zizek, 2004b: 100-101).
The structural role of History, for Jameson is the same as Class struggle for Zizek. Both set a limit to signification, a limit which is only presented by the experience of its absence. Class struggle and History are the negative limit of all discourse and as such cannot be the subject of investigation themselves. Nor, however, are they strictly determinate in a mode similar to the Marxist base/superstructure model. Both Jameson and Zizek would argue that such a model is impossible – there is no deterministic base which acts as a positive guarantee for political life. Neither does Althusser’s notion of (economic) determination in the last instance apply, although the dialectics are similar. Instead, for both Jameson and Zizek determination by the presence of absence allows a complex dialectical interaction between what might be deemed the ‘base’ (absence) and reactions to that base. These reactions are relatively autonomous, but are nonetheless reactions to the impossibility posed by History or Class struggle. Notably, both Zizek (in Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please! (2000a)) and Jameson (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) (1991)) have argued that postmodernism is not a positive discourse in itself (if a postmodern discourse can be regarded as positive) but rather the latest discursive response to the impossibility inherent in capitalism.
In this way, Jameson extends the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a sociological project. By considering the operation of history as a form of political unconscious, Jameson is able to consider the formation of desire and contradiction as specifically Marxist formations. For Jameson, contradictions operates in the same manner is desire in Lacan’s work, a designation which allows Jameson to bisect the traditional difficulty within Marxism of mediating between the social and the personal. Desire, as defined by history is immediately both personal and socially defined (Clark, 1984:68). Moreover, desire can be considered as contradiction and as a corollary, just as the Real is what resists, yet constitutes, desire, so does History.
History is conceived as a mode of production, but not in a strictly economic sense. Similar to class, Jameson considers the mode of production to be a differential concept; any given mode of production must relate to both previous modes of production, which may still have a presence, and anticipate future modes of production, specifically the collective dialectic of socialism. Following Raymond Williams, Jameson considers capitalism to be the dominant mode of production, but residual forms of production still exist, along with evidence of future modes (Homer, 2006:42).
Today, the dialectic of history has largely stalled around the capitalist mode of production, subsuming residual modes of production and limiting the possibilities for the emergence of future modes, or at least warping and displacing the utopian demand that drives the development of alternative modes. Here form becomes content as the processes inherent in the capitalist mode of production become sedimented in their own right (Homer, 2006:47). Much of the politics of Jameson’s work centres around the openly of the dialectic of the history to future (socialist) possibilities. The process of opening up the dialectic, when antagonistic forces previously held back by imaginary resolutions become openly contradictory, is known as cultural revolution.
Thus, not only is the unconscious structured like a language, but for Jameson the political unconscious is structured like the historic mode of production. In this way, not only ideology but individual desire is structured by the mode of production. Under global capitalism, Jameson argues that desire and subjectivity have become overtly reified, resulting in a commodity fetishism that has stalled the advancement of the collective dialectic of history.
Nonetheless, within this dialectic, the collective urge continues and is expressed not only in utopianism, but in ideology. For Jameson, therefore a utopian demand is always present within even the most reactionary forms of ideology. We can read this demand as jouissance. Although ideology works to prevent the impact of historical contradictions upon the subject, ideology is not primarily a mode of repression. Rather the subject is compensated for their passivity in the face of apparent contradiction. This compensatory gratification can be read as the element of utopia or jouissance inherent in every ideological formation. Here the utopian demand is ultimately for the fullness of society, that, contra Laclau, society does exist.
Consequently, for Jameson, all forms of class consciousness have a utopian demand in the attempt at an imaginary resolution of real contradiction, even if this imaginary resolution comes through the exclusion of other forms of class consciousness (Jameson, 1981: 289-291). The utopian dimension comes in the form the coherence and unity of a discourse of collectivity. Even today, the neo-liberal practice of class consciousness can be considered to feature a degree of utopianism simply through the presumption of a classless society which expresses collective solidarity.
Utopianism, therefore, has no relation to any specific content; one cannot designate the identity of utopia, nor construct a society that would fulfil any requirements that have been construction. Rather, utopianism is a practice, a method or a movement in which the desire for being itself is instantiated. As Jameson states; ‘Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation’. (2004:35). As Buchanan (2007:19) notes, our understanding of utopia can only be tautological; any answer to the question ‘What is utopia?’ is necessarily erroneous unless the answer is utopia itself. It is this indescribable mysteriousness of utopia which leads to science fiction and the literary genre as a whole to be the primary mode of utopian expression. Here our inability to imagine the future organises utopian images around an impossible vanishing point (Jameson, 1998: 74)
The question of utopia, therefore, is not what it is but rather how it works. Utopianism then can only be designated as a transcendental absence, the affect of which we can fits under the signifier utopia. In this sense utopianism, or at least the form of utopianism which Jameson advocates, bears an overwhelming resemblance to Lacan’s understanding of drive. As Jameson states;“... in which the structure of Utopian wish-fulfilment itself slowly swung about into its object, form therefore becoming content and transforming the Utopian wish into a wish to which in the first place” (2005:213)
Moreover, Utopianism cannot come from ‘nowhere’ but instead from the ideological positions and class consciousness available within the contemporary conditions of possibility. Jameson’s sense of utopia includes this positioned impulse or urge for being, but also the impossibility of such a position. In this sense utopianism keeps alive the possibility of a different world, but takes the form of a ‘stubborn negation of all that is’ (Jameson, 1971: 111)
The impossibility of utopia does not relate to the practical impossibilities of political life, but rather the limitations of our imaginations. Imagination, of course, is not limited to the fancy of the individual. Rather, as Jameson himself has developed, imagination is always a social creation. The unconscious is always political, the unconscious is structured like a language and informed by language which itself is shaped by ideology. Thus the limitations of our imagination is always a political limit, it is the limit of what exists within the political order. Existence is not indexed to material presence, but rather ideological recognition. In this sense, as Buchanan (1998: 18) notes, utopia is what is repressed and is felt most in points of censorship and anxiety within the text.
Thus what the utopian text invokes is our constitutive inability to imagine utopia itself (Jameson, 1982: 153). In this sense, utopia appears only as an absence and any attempt to name this absence produces an ideological closure which converts the utopian demand for an anticipatory appeal to reactionary state. Although Jameson’s position evokes connotations of Zizek’s distinction between activity and the Act, the understanding of the presence of absence in relation to utopia is the key distinction between the work of Jameson and Zizek. Both authors contend that utopia occurs at the edge of our understanding. The value of Jameson is that he conceives the utopian impulse in everyday practice. The vital difference is that whilst Jameson believes that these limits come into being through the effects of absence, Zizek’s fuller conception of the Real and universality allows for the specific identification of the limitations of discourse, even though they remain incommensurable and extimate from the dominant horizon of being.
Thus, for Jameson, utopia is at its most effective when it cannot be imagined;
“Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future – our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity of futurity – so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined” (2004: 46).
Utopia then suggests a complete overhaul of society, one that will produce much anxiety and repression of the utopian imagination (Jameson, 1998: 75). Although this anxiety can cause us to continue to grasp to the illusions which coherence our sense of being and hold us to the limitations of our current order, anxiety itself presents an energy from which to move forward (ibid: 51-53).
Whilst this form of utopianism leads itself to acquisitions of negativity, positive forms are easily subverted. Jameson argues that the designation of specific points of protest is contrary to the effectiveness of utopianism. When the specific contradictions become apparent, the tendency is to focus political demands upon these points. At this point, however, the utopian imagination becomes limited and what might have been a revolutionary demand gives way to practical political programmes (2004: 45). A salient example of this process in these times is the Green movement. Although Green ideology at times suggests an energy for widespread change that might be considered utopian, it has become too easy to divert this enthusiasm into smaller scale processes that only serve to supplement the interests of capital and escalate ecological collapse.
In this manner, Jameson’s conception of utopianism has vital similarities with Zizek’s. Zizek has often argued that politics in our time has lost its radical edge, what Jameson calls utopianism and Zizek references to the Lacanian act, and has settled for mere activity. Nonetheless, Zizek’s form of utopianism – the communist hypothesis – takes its form from the expression of actually occurring antagonisms with capitalism. Whilst he acknowledges that capital is able to include and pacify most of its symptoms, he designates the excluded or hungry populations of the world as the specific contradiction which holds a vital, utopian status. It is this designation which marks the differentiation between Jameson and Zizek’s conception of utopia, a difference which is driven by their opposing readings of the Real and the concept of universality.
Jameson considers that the notions of concept, system, universality, totality and history can be conflated (1990: 46). In doing so, his construction of the Real follows Althusser’s ‘absent cause’ as well as Adorno’s understanding of the concept. Here the concrete is concrete because - rather than being associated with discrete/empirical facts - it is the synthesis of several particular determinants such that ‘The totality could be concrete precisely because it included all of the mediations that linked the seemingly isolated facts” (Jay, 1984: 104-5). Here the Real, or the other/concrete side of the concept, is felt only in its effects and the ideological censorship that occurs around those effects. This understanding is more indebted to the Freudian unconscious than any Lacanian notion of the Real Jameson has tended to equate the notion of totality with the Althusserian notion of absent cause; totality is not available to representation - the totality can only be represented through its absence (Homer, 2006: 158).
As well as Althusser, Jameson takes his understanding of the concept from Adorno, whom he credits with a reading of the universal and particular that no other Marxist theorist has been able to achieve (Jameson, 1990: 9). That is, to be able to maintain the concept of totality and concept itself, whilst being able to consider the ‘dark side’ of the concept. For Jameson the originality of Jameson’s work stems from this ability to think;
‘an outside, or external face of the concept, which, like that of the moon, can never be visible or accessible to us: but we must vigilantly remember and reckon that other face into our sense of the concept whilst remaining within it in the old way and continuing to use and think it’ (ibid:25).
Moreover, Jameson suggests that to think this otherside is to reference the unconscious as a way to ‘endow the thinking mind with a dimension of radical otherness that...must structurally elude us, and remain forever out of reach’. It is here that the notion of totality comes in being, allowing the concept to be retained and without being reified, freeing us from the ‘spell’ of the concept to which there is nonetheless a drive (ibid: 26). Adorno, for Jameson, allows us to hold onto a belief in the concept whilst decoupling it from the thing itself of which the concept is simply an abstract representation. This representation must necessarily fail – hence the ‘dark side’ of the concept – but the notion of the concept can be maintained.
For Jameson, the importance of the struggle over the epistemological validity of totality is the maintenance of the dimension of utopia; the possibility of radically transforming society. Thus, in turning its back on the concept of totality, for Jameson, postmodernism is rejecting any prospect of the radical transformation of capitalism and is thus a rejection of Marxism's emancipatory narrative. This is the problem of post-structuralist/negative ontological politics; it leads only to an endorsement of the status quo. Thus Jameson's demand to maintain some aspect of utopian transformation politics (Homer, 2006:178).
Whilst Jameson would no doubt reject this label, conversely, he provides a similar political step in his understanding of the mode of production and collectivity of the dialectic.). Cognitive mapping invokes a utopian imperative to derive a future configuration out of the failure of the present (Jameson, 1998: 74)What is different is the explicit labelling of such positions.
Yet both Jameson and Zizek – the former with more conviction that the latter – suggest that political visions must be developed. In response to Stavrakakis’s development of the possibilities of partial/feminine enjoyment and radical democracy, Zizek suggests that what is to be done is not the formation of new, alternative mode of being, but the consideration of political passion in its own terms, suggesting ‘the true question is: What is there to be passionate about? Which political choices fit people’s experiences as “realistic” and “feasible” (Zizek, 2008: 331).
Likewise, Jameson argues that the role of Marxism cannot be limited to ‘scientific’ analysis. Rather the question is whether Marxism can be used to develop ideological positions and present a vision for the future, certainly in his earlier work. In The Political Unconscious, (1981: 285-286) , Jameson argues that despite the tradition of the negative dialectic in Marxism, Marxism remains capable of producing a ‘positive hermeneutic’, as evidenced by, amongst others, Bloch’s work on hope and utopia. Furthermore, Jameson adds;
“a Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological texts...in which a functional method for describing cultural texts is articulated with an anticipatory one” (ibid: 296, emphasis in original).
Thus, the key point to be taken from Jameson work in regards to the positioning of a utopian response to capitalism is that there is a utopian demand inherent in every ideological text. Thus whilst ideological analysis must focus on the interpretation of the modes of enjoyment inherent in any discursive position, critique cannot remain negative, but must rather identify those positive elements that embody the utopian impulse that would allow the text to advance past its own limitations.
The task of Marxism, in other words, is to reinvent its own Utopian impulse (Homer, 2006:94). It is perhaps for this reason that Jameson designates Marxism – to which the development of ideological positions is constitutive of its approach – rather than psychoanalysis as the ultimate form of historicism. It is appears that the explicit labelling of the content of this vision is a matter more of theory and political strategy than a structured political philosophy.
But for Jameson the failure of the concept is present only as absence. Here he conflates the totality, the Real (and by association) and the unconscious with the notion of universality. By contrast, Zizek’s (previously outlined) understanding of both the Real and of universality suggests that there is more to the impossibility of objectivity than absence. Although the ‘dark side of the moon’ is only felt through its absence in the hegemonic signifying field, it nonetheless exists. Moreover, it is not so much that the dark side exists, but in the words of Pink Floyd lyrist Roger Waters, ‘There is no dark side of the moon really. matter of fact it’s all dark’. That is, it is outside of the concept is not strictly absent, but rather takes its presence as one of the particulars within the totality of universality. Zizek, in his Lacanian reading of Lacan, considers the existence of this particular to be the concrete universal.
Significantly, Jameson argues that whilst Adorno and Zizek are great dialecticians, Adorno’s tone can be considered tragic whereas Zizek (and we can compare him to Eagleton in this regard) follows a more comedic logic. It is this comedic logic which gives Zizek’s work the greater political traction (2006: 7).
Nonetheless, this traction is not immediately apparent in some versions of his work. Perhaps the most controversial element of Zizek’s oeuvre (along with the associated subtractive politics) is his notion of the Lacanian Act. Here the Act occurs as a sudden break from the existing, a moment (or suspension) of time in which the impossible occurs. This point has entertained numerous points of critiqued, predominately aimed at the supposedly conservative implications of Zizek’s work in his dismissal of mere activity in favour of the radical implications of the Act (cf. Devenney, 2007; Robinson, 2004; Robinson & Tormey, 2005). It is, however, the Act which is implied in much of Zizek’s use of utopia in which utopia is instantiated in the occurrence of impossibility, an unnameable compulsion for otherness (Brockelmann, 1996:201).
Nonetheless, another tradition exists within Zizek’s work that – whilst responding to the same impossibility of action – allows for a fuller application of utopianism. This position – the practice of concrete universality – is not far divorced from the Act and may indeed be considered to subsume the practice (ibid: 202). Moreover, this position, is not the singular truth of his work, the foundations of essence between mere appearance or the culmination of his project but rather what I want to suggest is the form of politics which holds the most potential for politics today and the hungry of tomorrow. This position has been best considered in the Parallax View.
Through the notion of the parallax, Zizek suggests that we can ‘practice’ the concrete universal by ‘confronting a[n] [abstract] universality with its ‘unbearable’ example’ (Zizek, 2006: 13). This unbearable example is, of course, the concrete universal. The concrete universal has an existence, although it is not a positive one within the hegemonic domain of abstract universality. Rather, it appears as the Real; a gap within the order of being. Nonetheless, by taking a parallax view the presence of this excluded exception becomes clear. What is important about the parallax view is not the positive existence of the exception. The exception does ‘exist’ within the ideological form of the abstract universal in a more palpable form. Poverty, for example, does exist within the ideological formations that support capitalism. Indeed its re-presented presence is often excessive, taking the forms of meaningless statistics and images over-ridden with super-ego guilt. What makes poverty – the hungry – into the concrete universal or constitutive exception is the relationship between the hungry and capitalist ideology. The hungry are ontologically excluded not because their presence cannot be acknowledged, but rather because they cannot be acknowledged as an intimate (or rather, extimate) part of universality itself.
In this sense the concrete universal has an extimate existence, outside of but produced by the abstract universal. Thus whilst concrete universality may be felt as an absence within the normative experience of capitalism, a presence does exist. As Zizek states;
“Lacan’s final lesson is not relativity and plurality of truths but the hard, traumatic fact that in every concrete constellation truth is bound to emerge in some contingent detail. In other words, although truth is context-dependent – although there is no truth in general, but always the truth of some situation – there is none the less in every plural field a particular point which articulates the truth and as such cannot be relativised; in this precise sense, truth is always One” (Zizek, 1991: 196, original emphasis)
This is a point that, we can speculate, Jameson would not reject out of hand. Rather he would suggest that the truth does emerge not as truth itself but as an affect within the symbolic order. The vital point of difference between Jameson and Zizek is that the latter contends that this truth becomes embodied in a particular point. We can, as I have throughout this thesis, label this point within capitalism as the hungry; the excluded or reserve army of labour whose suffering is constitute of the totality of capitalism. Moreover, there are deep political consequences for the presence of the concrete universal, and not just upon the bodies of those who have this status.
The presence of the concrete universal adds new leverage to the political practice of the utopian impossibility. In terms of Jameson’s reading of totality, the utopian point of impossibility emerges at the limit point of the discourse, what Jameson regards as History and Zizek class struggle. This position, however, lends itself only to a patient politics of rejecting the forms of censorship that emerge around the presence of absent and engaging in what Zizek has come to label ‘subtractive politics’. In his recent work on utopia, however, Jameson’s writing strategy has become quasi-transcendentalist (resonating with Derrida methinks). It thereby becomes quite different from subtractive politics. (By practicing the concrete universal, one is able to force this point of absence into being, not in terms of the full inclusion of the exception into the abstract universal, such that universality becomes fully constituted, but rather the violent intrusion of the disavowed foundations of the order itself. In this manner a new narrative can be created, which, if for only a historical moment, means that cause is no longer absent and utopian change is forced into our imagination.
The concrete presence – and identification – of an excluded point of exception which signals the existence of a totality is the key difference between Zizek and Jameson in regards to the hungry. This difference is embodied by their respective stances towards philosophy. Zizek openly regards himself as a philosopher. He rejects the image of the ‘crazy’ meta-philosopher, attempting to find an answer to everything, but rather contends that the role of the philosopher is to reshape the way in which we understand questions. For this reasons, despite his critics and his own statements about the need for an alternative vision, Zizek simply does not see this as his task.
By contrast, Jameson is an avowed anti-philosophy because of the connotations of systematisation, reification and ultimately commodification. Jameson’s nightmare is that his work could be packaged up into a system and sold off as a ‘brand name’ theorist. In this regard, Jameson reads Zizek’s Parallax View as a failed attempt at anti-philosophy. He states;
“Clearly the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory rather than philosophy...yet theory itself was always ‘grounded’ on a fundamental (and insoluble) dilemma: namely, that the provisional terms in which it does its work inevitably over time get thematised (to use Paul de Man’s expression); they get reified (and even commodified, if I may say so) and even turn into systems in their own right”
Moreover, Jameson continues;
“ My occasional fear is, then, that by theorising and conceptualising the impossibilities designated by the parallax view, Zizek may turn out to have produced a new concept and a new theory after all, simply by naming what it is better not to call the unnameable” (2006: 8).
What Jameson misses, however, is that Zizek is a philosopher, he does produce a system and a concept, but a concept of what does not exist. Zizek is a philosopher of the Real and for that reason his philosophy – a grand philosophy of that which does not exist – will always strike a comedic tone. Fundamentally, whilst Jameson argues that the universal does not exist, but we can feel the presence of this absence in its effects upon the symbolic order in which our bodies exist, Zizek contends that it is the very non-existence of the universal which gives it is presence. If the original illusion of universality is that society is present, then for Zizek there is always a perverted truth in appearance; society has its existence, but only by the exclusion of ‘non-society’, which although banished from our horizon of understanding, nonetheless is an embodied exclusion. This embodied exclusion, which, in capitalism can be identified as the hungry or homo sacer, is the concrete universal, the part with no part which is the key to both the operation of universality and the impossibility of class struggle within capitalism.
If, however, the perverse signification of the concrete universal can advance the impossible performance of utopianism, then the naming of this horizon itself is a different matter. Both Jameson and Zizek take some measure to suggest that this future will take a communist or at least collective form, but are unwilling to advance further positive co-ordinates. Zizek labels this possibility the ‘communist hypothesis’. Zizek identifies this position follows Badiou, how has argued that without the idea of communism, there is no reason to do either philosophy, or attempt any form of collective action. Moreover, he argues that the communist hypothesis does not necessarily have any particular reference to its earlier instantiation; rather, the task today is to find a ‘new modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being’ (Badiou, 2008: 115).
Zizek (2009) repeats Badiou’s argument without contention, adding that one should not consider the hypothesis as a ‘regulative idea’ of the kind that might lead to an ethical socialism with an a priori norm (see Zizek’s previous debate with Geoff Boucher (Boucher, 2004; Zizek, 2004a)). Rather the communist hypothesis must be referenced to actual contradictions within capitalism.
As Zizek states;
“To treat communism as an eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal, that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence, of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own impossibility” (Zizek, 2009)
Not only does this continue Zizek’s long-standing dismissal of deconstruction and Derrida, but Jameson’s understanding of the impossibility of utopia (as the impossibility of our imaginations, indexed against a collectivist dialectic) is also in the firing line. Instead, Zizek argues that we use the communist hypothesis against the presence of contradictions of capitalism. It appears that for Zizek the only radical usage of the utopian urge is in this communist demand against the contradictions of capitalism. A utopian demand certainly exists within liberal attempts to reform the symptoms of capital (Sachs and the United Nations being the primary example of this approach) or the conservatism of the Bush Administration and its institutional cronies, whose more implicit demand is that society does indeed exist; it is simply threaten by enemies which it cannot recognise as having created. In the face of these alternatives, Fukuyama was certainly correct; history has come to an end.
Thus Zizek’s answer to Brockelmann (1996: 205) question ‘What, after all does it mean to be ‘against’ capitalism it that suggests nothing about what one would change in it or substitute for it?’ or Laclau’s almost hysterical demands for Zizek to reveal his alternative form of economy or radical imaginary (Laclau, 2000), is not the production of an alternative horizon, but rather the identification of point which reveal why the current horizon cannot continue. For Zizek, this is the most appropriate form of politics for the limitations of our time.
Thus the only way to restore the dialectic of history is by reference to the communist hypothesis, a hypothesis which itself can only come into being against a horizon of the contradictions of capital. Perhaps more accurately, although the presence of the communist hypothesis is necessary to generate a utopian demand, it is not the communism itself which will provoke change, but whether capitalism is able to contain its own contradictions. The task of this thesis, and any form of politics which attempts to invoke such a hypothesis, is to practice a form of analysis which exposes the constitutive contradictions of global capitalism.
Zizek argues that these contradictions are embodied in four antagonisms which threaten capitalism; the possibility of ecological collapse, the contradictions between immaterial labour, intellectual property and private property, the development of new scientific technologies which are changing the nature of life in its barest form and the new forms of exclusion, which Zizek labels new forms of apartheid. This exclusion is most notable in the rapidly expanding slums of the third world, but increasingly an underclass is developing within the western world itself. This group acts as reserve or surplus labour, the existence of which maintains the status of labour as a commodity and the capitalistic class relations. The radical potential of this group is not their poverty as such – horrific as it is – but rather the walls and divisions used to exclude them from the rest of society.
Under Zizek’s construction of the four dominant symptoms of capitalism, there is one symptom that defines the group; poverty, or rather the exclusion of those in poverty. The other three contradictions have been able to be included within the limits of capitalism. Environmentalism, despite the apparent radical possibility of a chaotic breech of nature, has become sustainable development. The contradictions of private property have become a legal challenge and bio-genetics has developed into an ethical, or even scientific, struggle. For Zizek these three elements are part of the battle for the commons.
Here Zizek follows Hardt and Negri in suggesting that the commons – particularly in the postmodern articulation of the commons in immaterial labour and knowledge – are increasingly being enclosed and privatised. In relation to these specific antagonisms, environmentalism equates to the commons of external nature, intellectual property to the commons of culture and bio-technology to the commons of internal nature. Whilst this enclosure and exploitation of what is common to all evokes the necessary use of communism, it is only the fourth symptom, that of exclusion, which adds the dimension of universality and the consequent possibility of communist ‘democracy’. Zizek adds that this level of universality – the Hegelian identification of totality embodied in the concrete subject which provides the impetus for political action – was the “communist dream of the young Marx – to bring together the universality of philosophy and the universality of the proletariat”. Thus, it is these contradictions, rather than any sense of a radical imaginary, which open up the prospect of before utopian demands and make democracy possible (Brockelmann, 1996: 199).
For Zizek, universality and democracy are intimately intertwined, abet with a characteristic twist. The excluded stand for universality preciously because they are excluded; they are the part with no part, the element whose exclusion constitutes the order. That is, the capitalist empire – both as an ideological system and symbolic/Real logic – must produce an exclusion in order to constitute itself as a set. That exclusion, of the unruly masses with no official place in the private capitalist order, is what makes the totality of Empire universal. The universal is not the failed attempt of any given set to constitute itself, but rather the set and its failure constitute the domain of universality.
Zizek links this form of universality to democracy in the Greek sense to signify the intrusion of the excluded into the socio-political space. Here Greek democracy contrasts strongly with Western-style liberal democracy. Liberal democracy seeks to include, but only that which is already symbolised within the current order. That is, liberal democracy is already formed on the basis of the exclusion of class struggle, the main instantiation of which is the masses of urban slums that act as the reserve army of labour for capitalism. By contrast, the Grecian form of democracy is based upon the inclusion of this group – the part with no part in the established order – into the demos. Such a move cannot be established by the demos themselves but rather must come from the internal destabilisation of the order. Thus democracy is universal in the sense that it includes that which is outside of itself, yet necessary for its own constitution.
Thus what is vital for both universality and democracy is not exclusion per se, but rather the interaction or gap between the excluded and the established order. The universal may be embodied by the excluded, but universality occurs through the inclusion of the excluded element. Zizek labels this approach a parallax view, where two incommensurable positions are held together. Thus, in Zizek’s communist democracy there is no specific revolutionary agent. Rather the revolutionary potential occurs in the short circuit between the order and its exclusion. The figure of the excluded confronts us – in its universal status – with the truth of its own position.
Thus, at this time in history in which capitalism reigns darkly supreme, yet is paradoxically plagued both by its own non-existence and the tormenting presence of symptoms which prove its existence, Zizek’s form of negative ontological politics is the approach which provides the most hope for the kind of radical change which would drastically improve the material circumstances of the hungry by giving them a presence beyond their mere biological being.
At this time, the opportunity exists within through a utopian demand for the impossible; for the democratic intrusion of the surplus labour of the world which has thus far operated as a necessary shadow of our order. This movement will not occur, however, only via the kind of hope that occurs when a utopian demand is disengaged from the processes of capitalism. Rather, more than ever today we are provided with an opportunity to practice an active politics of the negative by the exposal of the disavowed foundations of our order. These foundations, otherwise known as the concrete universal, offer the prospect of a dynamic and unsustainable disturbance in civilisation through the forced affective acknowledgement of the excluded as the foundations of our mode of being. To practice the concrete universal is thus to cross the mode of fantasy that coheres the horizon of being present in our civilisation, leaving ideology with no defence against that which – if we have any sense of ourselves as a species ‘good animals’ – must become unpalatable. This is Zizek’s utopian impossibility; the practice of concrete universality such that we (as a people) are forced to imagine a new mode of being. This is utopia.
The utopia of the communist hypothesis holds no content, no vision for the future, only an acknowledgement that the future must be different. As Jameson (2004:36) states; “even if we succeed in reviving utopia itself, the outlines of a new and effective practical politics for the era of globalisation will at once become visible, but only that we will never come to one without it”. Thus, as Buchanan (1998) notes, the practice of generating a new world is a utopian urge, but there is nothing utopian about the resulting society, which will be, like any other instantiation of human community, profoundly complicated.
Moreover, inherent in the demands of both Jameson and Zizek, and indeed any form of politics which takes its orientation from a negative ontology is a minimal demand, most beautifully articulated by Adorno in his Moralita Minnima: ‘There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand; that no one should go hungry’
As for the content of this vision or hypothesis, Zizekian psychoanalysis provides neither answers nor guarantees for the future. Zizek, in his own words, ‘Has a hat, but does not have a rabbit’. Rather in these dark times of global capitalism when neither rabbits nor their rabid breeding are possible, Zizek has set his sights on the critique of the fetishtic Hamsters produced by others. Without the instantiation of the co-ordinates of class struggle and the operation of the concrete universal, we are forced to grasp the commodified Hamster’s provided by capitalism.
Thus, in terms of the shape of the future, Zizek provides no options other than to suggest we need a new one. Yet, because of the performance of the impossibility of utopia, his work is certainly not conservative. Instead, it relies upon the opening of the space of utopian. Only then can Jameson’s dialectic of collectivity, otherwise known as the communist hypothesis, flourish.
But what form will the future hold? There can be no guarantee, but politics will continue. Utopia – in the sense of the fullness of being and the arrival of jouissance – will not occur. Instead the future may well take the shape of one of the approaches critiqued in this text, a version of Laclau’s radical democracy (indeed, in How to Begin from the Beginning Zizek suggests that there is no longer a singular revolutionary agent, but rather emancipatory politics will come from a dynamic combination of different agents and antagonisms. Where Zizek differs from Laclau is the identification of the excluded as the base for these agents and antagonisms and our implication in the universality of this position), or Madra and Ozselcuk’s feminine class relationship, but Zizek provides no suggestion as to what that might be, nor should we demand it from him. Instead, what is required is that at this time in the history of humanity when global capitalism reigns darkly supreme, it is the utopian practice of Zizekian psychoanalysis that is required. The rest is history.
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