Thinking Politics in The Dark Knight Rises

In as much as one can draw any generalizations about the Dark Knight Trilogy, its political punch is found principally in its hidden meanings. The revived Batman film series operates at a double register; that is, two distinct, but interconnected, levels. On a first, tentative level we can say that the films sedate and distract us from reality through idealizations of friendship, family, romance, politics, economics or whatever. If Hollywood sells anything, after all, it is entertainment. But on the obscene underside, these fantastic films tell a different story. Here, the true referent is our current socio-political conjunctures.

It is no secret that Nolan’s last Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises (hereafter TDKR), does not directly approach its true (political) focus. Rather, the film maintains its authentic topic at a distance. But why must TDKR obfuscate its true historical reference? Because any serious challenge to the existing order quickly engenders guarded attitudes. Nowhere is this more accurate than with respect to lost causes; namely, politically radical ones.

Here one thinks, for example, of totalitarianism. Far from being a meaningful theoretical concept, forcing us to acquire new insight about political alternatives, the notion of ‘totalitarianism’ actually prevents us from thinking. The motif of revolution is so monstrous that the slightest inclination of engaging in political projects that aim to undermine the normal state of affairs and transform reality is immediately denounced as ethically dangerous and illegitimate. In other words, it is dismissed as potentially ‘totalitarian’.

It is no small matter then that the form of TDKR makes it possible to neutralize this prohibition against thinking about grand solutions. What the movie does is nothing less than take into account the very idea of applying a radical political project directly to reality. Such a politics (whatever remains of it) dares to directly confront the entire field of state power. That the movie dreams about a grand, all-encompassing, leftist strategy of directly taking over the state apparatus at all is significant, even if it is not really meant seriously as a project that we might try to live.

It has now become fashionable to assert that those who still insist on fighting the entire domain of politics are stuck in the old paradigm. The new (postmodern) politics adopts a different, apparently more modest mode of engagement. Rather than directly confronting the state or bombarding it with impossible demands, the new politics creates spaces outside the scope and control of state power to tinker with its edges. Since the state has betrayed its responsibility for justice, extra-statal practices are required to change the social structure themselves.

The basic predicament of our capital-saturated society is whether to resist the state with out-and-out revolution or from effective localized subversion. Should movements directly engage the state in a highly centralized form of political organization or remain closer to the mode of functioning as nomadic groups? One does not have to be a profound observer to see that this conundrum is shared by the final Batman movie.

Bruce Wayne believes that insisting on demands from those in power is futile. They simply cannot be fulfilled. This belief of Bruce Wayne is nowhere more apparent than in his exchanges with Alfred. Alfred dares to raise the thorny issue that Batman should hang up his cape and assist those in power through other, more civic, means: “The city needs Bruce Wayne. Your resources, your knowledge. It doesn’t need your body.” During another scene Alfred pointedly asks, “Aren’t the police supposed to be investigating that?” To which Bruce Wayne replies, “They don’t have the tools to analyze it.” Few can disagree with Alfred’s response that “They would if you gave it to them.”

Bruce Wayne rightly calls into question this flat solution, noting that “One man’s tool is another man’s weapon.” This is, after all, the same symptomatic point that emerges apropos of every new social gesture: true revolutionary potential is exploited and then betrayed by the very system it originally contradicts. Consequently, Bruce Wayne keeps the cape and continues to act in the shadows, effectively pulling the strings of political life from the periphery.

It is no small coincidence that Bruce Wayne also lives a philanthropic life beyond the cave, highlighting as it does the same commitment to transforming society outside the ambit of state power. And not wholly unlike the work of charity by George Soros or Bill Gates, the immense donations to public welfare – in this case to orphanage homes – reestablishes a balance to the capitalist system, thereby postponing its crisis, which in this context involves unemployed youth uniting in the sewers and forming a revolution.

Here it is worth pointing to the fact that the film’s villain, Bane, also recognizes the ethical call engendered by the experience of injustice and wrongs. At the same time, the political procedure is clearly different. Rather than remain in the backwaters of society (read sewers) with the downtrodden, Bane and his brawlers openly struggle for hegemony.

Surprisingly, the film’s main antagonist proves to be a very philosophical rebel (not completely unlike the other villains of the trilogy). He explains his actions in terms of the failings of the ruling order. Bane does not rebel because he is infected by godless immorality, but because the rulers of Gotham City have shirked their responsibilities in protecting those with no proper place in society. For this reason, the politically organized underworld is truly a product of misrule, ethically impelled to turn against its oppressors and create something radically new. In the language of Bane, it is “necessary evil.”

That there is more going on in the film than simple run-of-the-mill violence is obvious enough. What makes the character of Bane so convincing is not the explosion of physical strength as such, but the concrete twist he gives it. The politics of revolutionary justice embodied in Bane is that of radical egalitarian violence. Rather than fighting on the side of the hierarchical social order, Bane’s excess of power is on the side of the part of no-part, defined here as the unaccounted for of society.

It is important not to overlook the fact here that Bane’s bodily discipline, concentration, and strength of will is what qualified him for the villain role in TDKR. For Nolan, “With Bane, physicality is the thing.” According to the original story, the childhood and early adult life of Bane was spent in a penitentiary environment where, it would seem, he possessed nothing. Indeed, the aged-out orphans of Gotham City similarly had nothing to their name.

This is significant, given that those who have nothing have only their discipline. Here, true freedom can only be regained through extreme corporeal discipline and the spirit of sacrifice, in which one is ready to risk everything. (As the critical reader will perhaps suspect, this sounds close to something like ‘fanatical fundamentalists’ who have only their discipline, their capacity to act together).

What takes place in TDKR is the event of momentarily canceling status quo realities and redistributing social control. Here, the all-too-easy liberal-democratic gesture is rendered inefficient at breaking out of Western modernity and its political deadlocks. Here, one is forced to actively think about grand solutions and lost causes.

The basic lesson is that Bane’s political commitments were clearly right steps in the wrong direction. Taking control of Gotham City was an appropriate gesture, the best thing he ever did, the only tragedy being that he was almost right. The authentic Event momentarily unleashed unprecedented forces of social transformation, a moment in which everything seemed possible. The misfortunes of the fate of revolutionary terror therefore confront us with the need – not to reject in toto, but – to reinvent true political options.

And thus we welcome the fact that “true ideas are eternal, they always return every time they are proclaimed dead.” God forbid that we might take them seriously…

 

Material Consulted

Eugene Holland, “Beyond Critique” in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus

Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

____, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

____, “Mao Tse-Tung, The Marxist Lord of Misrule” in Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao

____, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Gotham City“

Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations

The current political conjecture, after a long-running string of defeats for the Left, conveys an oppressive, immobilizing pessimism. According to Adrian Johnson in Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, the innovative experiments in emancipatory politics of the 20th century have not fared well. Given this scenario, “the era of revolutionary politics certainly looks to be over” (p. xiv). It is therefore difficult not to see capitalism nowadays as the only game in town; “the sole viable option available for organizing humanity’s multiple forms of group coexistence” (p. xxvii). How likely is it then that today’s political circumstances will remain imperious to abrupt ruptures and turns in history?

Given the established run of capitalism, Johnson detects two pitfalls to the present-day political situation: complacent quietism and hubristic utopianism. The first danger is overconfidence or the belief in historical teleologies proffering guarantees “to the effect that socialism can’t fail eventually to succeed” (p. xvi). In the view of economism, “the flow of sociohistorical trends inevitably will carry one effortlessly to the shores of a post-capitalist paradise” (p. xv). The dialectics of history, in other words, unambiguously point to a utopian society beyond capitalism.

This tall tale messianism, the sanguine faith in historical eventualism, however, has been steadily discredited by the lengthy string of losses suffered by the Left. The alternative response, what Johnson describes as the cheap-and-easy option, is underconfidence; that is, lapsing into total cynical despair and weariness given the ongoing series of disheartening defeats. The temptation of comfortable discouragement “fundamentally accepts that the partnership of liberal democratic state apparatuses and poorly regulated free markets indeed is here to stay” (p. xvi). The representatives of underconfidence therefore urge people to passively accept the unsurpassable enveloping limit of what remains historically possible and “resign themselves to refining what merely exists as already established” (p. xvi).

The third alternative to overconfident economic determinism and immobilizing despair is revolutionary ruptures, what Badiou calls an “event” and Žižek an “act”. For Badiou and Žižek global capitalism is not an inescapable enclosure. They plead for this acknowledgment on the basis that “the apparently impossible happened in the past [and] it will occur again in incalculable, unforeseeable forms in the future too” (p. xvii). Such reality-shattering shifts cannot however be anticipated by diagnosing already-present socioeconomic tensions, as traditional Marxist analysis would have it. On the contrary, they irrupt unexpectely and rewrite the rules of what is and isn’t possible. Acts of insurrection, Johnson argues, are “untimely interventions that appear possible only after the fact of actually transpiring—and before which such interventions are impossible qua unimaginable in the eyes of the popular political imagination” (p. xviii).

Insomuch as Žižek delineates this untimely development of accidents avec Hegel, it is a quite new, heterodox understanding of the dialectic. The alternative use of the notion of dialectics posits history as a series of unexpected upheavals and twists, rather than a zigzagging but ultimately linear progress: “Žižek’s Hegelian Geist is an illusion of perspective floating atop a volatile historical-material mixture of contingencies and retroactions” (p. xix). To the lay mind there is much in the long-running cadence of variables and accidents that must appear miraculous, but the momentous abrupt turns of history are the non-miraculous outcomes of “unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces” unfolding throughout time (p. xix).

One can be excused for thinking that such explosive, subversive events that break away from and shatter the slow-moving inertia of status quo realities is altogether unrealistic and utopian, but it remains the case that buying into the notion that today’s established run of things is impervious to incalculable factors and unforeseen occurrences to come is the most utopian sentiment of all. In short, the conviction that the surprises around which historical times take shape are not exhausted is less naïve than the belief that our given situated reality is here to stay permanently.

This post simultaneously published @ Indigenous Ink

Sending Levinas to Where the Wild Things Are

What would happen if Emmanuel Levinas sailed across an ocean to an island where ‘Wild Things’ lived? I fear Levinas’ story would turn out not much different than Max’s adventure in Spike Jonze’s cinematic adaptation of the iconic children’s classic, “Where the Wild Things Are.” Wild Things are uniquely and absolutely Other. They overflow and escape our categories of representation. As such, Wild Things solicit a spontaneous and singular response; one without prior preparation. For who could anticipate the epiphany of a Wild Thing? We might suspect that Levinas would be perfectly suited to “existing in a world of alien things” as his own rhetoric suggests, but Levinas does not travel all too well on Wild Thing tours.¹

And when everyone’s super, no one will be…

There have never been so many writers, artists, and philosophers. […] It is not the public that is at fault today but the excess of pretenders. But instead of recognizing their own lack of excellence, many resort to styles that will allow them to charge their lack of success to the abtuseness of the public (Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism p. 2)

What makes a philosopher a philosopher and not a second-rate, B- persona that is forgotten as soon as he or she stops writing, loses tenure or dies? For Kaufmann, a person is remembered if they are great-souled, showing integrity, courage and humor in the face of an inescapable tragic worldview, neither disillusioned nor resentful regarding how one is thrown into the world (great advertising for, lets say,…an energy drink).

Greatness or excellence is possible, according to Kaufmann, a position I distance myself from, when exceptional people–whatever that means–care more for truth than what people think. Cliche enough. Moreover, they are outspoken and frank in such matters, relying on no illusion of future reward to assuage the present burden and suffering. These self-sacrificing, great-souled individuals are, in a word, great prophets, philosophers, poets and artists in their own right, despite the ugly, fragmented or cruel world they may live in.

Thus, Kaufmann has no sympathy for expressive modern individuals who “blame their failures on the absence of a cultured audience” (p. 2). For Kaufmann, the starving artist should accept failure as his or her own guilt.

To make a leaping generalization, the big picture Kaufmann seems to convey is that philosophy today is full of “pretenders” and at no other fault than its own. But I value the situation in the exact opposite measure. True, “there have never been so many writers, artists, and philosophers”, but this is hardly a failure. As Žižek puts it,

The true victory (the true ‘negation of the negation’) occurs when the enemy talks your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat. It occurs when one’s specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by the enemy. (Slavoj Žižek presents Mao: On practice and contradiction)

In this precise sense, philosophy and the arts have not utterly failed but succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. The is very little that the cultured individual today encounters that he or she has not seen anything like before. In short, nothing is utterly strange or foreign any longer.

The n+1 journal recently published an article, MFA vs. NYC conveying a similar theme. Speaking of fictional and creative writing, they write: “We are all MFAs now.” In great rhetorical style, though admitting an honest assessment of the field, the editors continue.

…MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students’ work–especially shocking if you’re the student, and paying $80,000 foir the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the ’70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.

The entire article is not wholly pessimistic. Although the degree-granting programs in creative writing have jumped from 79 in 1975 to 854 today, this has created an enormous amount of unseen opportunities for teacher-writers, not limited to lecture fees, adjunctships, temporary appointments, decently paid tenures, grants and prizes. Indeed, just as many American fiction writers today are earning their income through university payrolls as publishing contracts. I would venture to guess that the situation for philosophers is not all that different.

Socio-economic activism updated!

Cynics are often the most accurate observers of reality precisely on account of their hostility. This is a particular attraction of philosophies of finitude: a permanent suspicion of meaning and motives. Developed through to its full consequences in Continental Philosophy, this means reason must turn against itself and overthrow its own sovereignty. The renunciation of rational mastery and the critique of illusory metaphysics are instances of this work. Nihilism, the breakdown of ultimate meaning and absolute truth, is clearly respectable in that it honestly assesses that there is no fixed frame of reference: humanity is always already embedded and thrown in a particular environment that colors our perception of the world. Nevertheless, our contingency upon history in the form of language, culture, society and so forth means that we are the makers and keepers of our own socio-symbolic existence, one order no less arbitrary than another.

With everything cast into doubt in this way it is no wonder that postmodernism has been the harbinger of resistive, subversive and disruptive strategies aiming to undermine common assumptions, destabilize conventional customs, and show that things can be otherwise. Beyond these negative gestures of sabotage philosophy must turn to the latter positive task of imagining and forming new worlds. This is the contemporary predicament: either accept the loss of truth altogether and limit oneself to “the interplay of multiple meanings” or revalue and transform the current vacuum of values by establishing a new balance to society.

This tension is faced by anyone who opposes or struggles against global capitalism. More to the point, we always belong to the systems we criticize.  Using conservative concepts in any revolution is inevitable, but their limits–it is hoped–can be exposed at the same time. The capitalist machine, on the other hand, functions precisely due to its misfirings and contradictions thus rendering futile the exhaustive efforts in exposing our contingency and unraveling inconsistencies. All the frantic activity (read: activism) that has gone into breaking apart the hegemonic global social order that poisons nature and gives certain individuals clear advantages over others has oftentimes been in vain and has instead actually fueled violent social organizations to grow. In fact it appears as though nihilism fits in quite well with capitalism: it can justify nothing so it tolerates everything and antagonistic games are allowed to continue as usual.

Is there then any solution on the horizon today? With lack of resolution and a long list of failed attempts and impotent intentions it is no surprise that the modern subject, myself included, has come to peace with incommensurability, pessimism and indifference itself. Perhaps the reason hipsterism is not a vibrant response to the (post)modern deadlock is precisely because the threshold of generating positive new alternatives, for the time being, has itself been reached.

At a different level, however, perhaps the most popular rebel-clique today really knows (implicitly?) what it is doing here. In some respects I think that hipsters are using apathy and irony to update the old activism of the previous century, to make it more believable for the 21st century (here I unquestionably lift the words from Shaviro written in a difference context – see here). What I mean by this is that hipsters, read in this light, are “making new equivalents” for those aspects of activism “that might otherwise now seem antiquated” and, therefore, are very much in-line with keeping activism “intact”, albeit making “revisionist updates” in parts that look wholly unlike the activism that most liberals have become familiar with.

Given the somewhat obscure character of this comment, one I am increasingly willing to be crucified on but nonetheless jejune and a tyro in, I will provide a short series of quotes that have significantly stirred me towards this position. The authors should not be altogether surprising.

But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World Countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 260)

…the withdrawal expressed by “I would prefer not to” is not to be reduced to the attitude of “saying no to the Empire” but, first and foremost, to all the wealth of what I have called the rumspringa of resistance, all the forms of resisting which help the system to reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it—today, “I would prefer not to” is not primarily “I would prefer not to participate in the market economy, in capitalist competition and profiteering,” but— much more problematically for some—“I would prefer not to give to charity to support a Black orphan in Africa, engage in the struggle to prevent oil-drilling in a wildlife swamp, send books to educate our liberal-feminist-spirited women in Afghanistan….” (Žižek, Parallax View, p. 383)

The art of space clearing gestures, or why hipsterism is a crackpot opposition

Existentialism is a space clearing movement. Well…sort of. In effect, existentialism is “a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy” (Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevesky to Sartre, p. 11). This umbrella term was of course not accepted by most of the usual suspects that occupied it, but, making wide sweeping generalizations, it typically fits that said thinkers were markedly critical. As many argue, perhaps the label should be abandoned altogether given the disparate revolts it attempts to link by similarity. As I will argue, however, following Kaufmann, existentialists are primarily preoccupied with considered dissent and protest.

The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life—that is the heart of existentialism (p. 12)

Kierkegaard, at a glance, confirms this hypothesis. As is well known, Kierkegaard consistently rejected the belief in eternal verities in addition to the trust in reason, a common staple of traditional philosophy to be sure. For Kierkegaard it is not ethics or rationality as such that are of crucial importance, but the need to make decisions—and, in this case, wholly uninformed and irrational leaps of faith.

The reasoning is as follows: the haughty tradition of theology, ethics, metaphysics and so on have completely absolved us from the need to make decisions. This is so, according to Kierkegaard, because philosophy has given us prefabricated categories of truth, justice, etc. which defer the responsibility of making philosophical demonstrations ourselves. Doubtless, this would hardly be as troubling as it is for Kierkegaard if it was not for the fact that, as he sees it, philosophy is “a kind of whistling in the dark” or sever “self-deception” (p. 17).

In the worldview of Kierkegaard, we must behold the full spread of our possibilities, what we most certainly experience as the “dizziness of freedom”. Or again, as Kierkegaard says, we are forced make choices in “fear and trembling”. However, with Kierkegaard the matter falls between the cracks of a dualistic thinking separating reason and faith. In short, in the words of Kaufman, “Kierkegaard rashly renounced clear and distinct thinking altogether” (p. 18).

Nietzsche shares this radical negativity towards Western philosophy also, but not quite at the expense of reason as we witness with Kierkegaard. As such, Nietzsche does not rebel against traditional philosophy and Christianity because of its rigid rationalism, but quite the opposite: together they are precisely the archenemy of reason, a barb in the flesh of authentic living.

The great mistake of philosophy, then, is its proclivity to shirk from uncomfortable objects of encounter. Specifically in regard to university professors, as state employees, philosophers have an invested motive to “justify the moral prejudices of society” (p. 23). In contradistinction to the sin of traditional philosophy, Nietzsche presents a philosophy of the future that forces us to think the uncommon, the novel and the uncomfortable. In other words, he wants to kindle a thought that forces his readers to think, wrestling with thoughts that are not easily repeatable. Or again, insights that do not allow us to remain inert of passive after the fact.

What Nietzsche does, indeed, is to move or invite his readers to become dissatisfied with all previous statements and presumptions.

Of course, we can attribute the same sort of strategy to Socrates: whoever came in contact with the infamous gadfly of Athens quickly became uneasy with their previous way of life. Stated otherwise, Socrates “was an incarnate challenge to their way of life and thinking, an exemplary personality, the embodiment of a new ethic” (p. 25). The underlying point of revolutionary acts, such as Socrates’, is that we can never go back to business as usual; some values must be repudiated and, furthermore, we require new attitudes to model ourselves on. As the best existentialists claimed in varying rhetoric, “You must change your life”!

But, and this is the significant point, this challenge to change one’s own life is indirect only and shored up by a more substantial claim regarding a better way to model ourselves off of–that is, a more critical, reflective and rational pattern of life. So while these two philosophers, in particular, re-describe and re-valorize “irrationalism”, this certainly does not disprove their competence as guides for a new positive way of being. On the contrary, it is the very inversion of priorities that retouches misery, melancholy and the wretched as the highest good.

Existentialism, in brief, is anything but self-deception. It is the very encounter with the ugly facts of existence itself. No serenity at all remains. What remains in its place is a wallowing in human depravity, an uncompromising concentration on the dark side of humanity—its inner life in particular.

In my recent post on Black Swan I made the unsubstantiated claim that Aronofsky’s films are of a “space clearing” character, clear-cutting our habitual forms of thought. Moreover, I argued that Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers, in Black Swan, fulfills artistic perfection at the cost of her own physical and mental collapse, but that this is not to be considered self-destruction in itself, for it is only regarded so in the previous regime of common sense. In a genuinely original transvaluation of state of affairs, Nina’s horrifying metamorphosis is precisely an honest and perverse point of view of existence—the very counternarrative of and considered protest against the neat and cordial scheme of things.

In what follows I hope to present an illuminating yet brief explanation of how or why space clearing gestures work at certain times and not at others (or how they might be repeated?) in reference to Žižek’s presentation of Mao. I do not think the crucial element is wholly unlike the strategy of existentialism, as Kaufmann found. To anticipate the argument, a compelling and vitriolic statement of Žižek’s, which sums up the demonstration in short, is begging the question:

It is only this reference to what happens after the revolution, to the ‘morning after’, that allows us to distinguish between libertarian pathetic outbursts and true revolutionary upheavals: the former outbursts lose their energy when one has to approach the prosaic work of social reconstruction – at this point, lethargy sets in. (p. 25)

The point is, as I read it, as follows: the first moment of any revolutionary gesture is radical negativity, a stage of reduction or subtraction that violently and painfully sweeps away the old world as the necessary precondition for the reconstruction of something otherwise. However, this act is nothing without the second. With Žižek the case is stated in this way—the first moment of subtraction is entirely for the purpose of “clearing the space and opening up the way for a new beginning” (Zizek Presents Mao, pp. 21-22). To put it in the simplest of possible terms, space clearing gestures are not negative in themselves but merely make space for the invention of new life or new social realities. Or again, as we saw with existentialism in general and Aronofsky’s Black Swan in particular, the abrupt discontinuation of any previous way of life is transposed “into a truly new positive Order” (p. 21). This, however, is truly the most difficult stage. It is very easy to tear down idols, after all. It is much more difficult to create new ones.

Indeed, this notion collates into some pithy and profound statements on Žižek’s part that present the full flavor of revolutionary fervor, albeit in Hegelian steeped vocabulary:

Those who oscillate, those who are afraid to take the second step of overcoming this form itself, are those who (to repeat Robespierre) want a ‘revolution without revolution’… (pp. 16-17)

…those who advocate qualitative change without struggle of the opposites really oppose change and advocate the continuation of the same; those who advocate change without qualitative jumps really oppose change and advocate immobility… (p. 14)

Why revolution at all, if we do not think that ‘the customary order of things should never be restored’? (p. 21)

This is doubtless not the first appearance of a custom revolutionary dialectic on the part of the Hegelian scholar Slavoj Žižek. In spite of my hesitation of over quoting, I shall conclude this section by embedding perhaps one of my favorite quotes penned by the Slovenian:

…the Nietzschean passage from Lion to Child: it is not yet possible for us, caught as we are in the web of the reflective attitude of nihilism, to enter the “innocence of becoming,” the full life beyond justification; all we can do is engage in “self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness,” that is, bring the moralistic will-to-truth to its self-cancellation, because aware of the truth about will-to-truth itself (that it is an illusion of and for the weak). We “cannot create new values,” we can only be the Lion who, in an outburst of active nihilism, clears the table and thus “creates freedom for new creation”; it is after us that the Child will appear who will mark “a new Beginning, a sacred Yes”. (Parallax View, p. 43)

In my estimation, hipsters easily fit this bill. They (we?) are the caustic rebels who, in strong negative form, senselessly abuse modern social evil. Unquestionably accurate, hipsters possess “a bottomless well of impassioned scorn”, as Stuff Hipsters Hate recounts. Gold star plus 2 points for the postmodern subculture! As much as a sure thing, hipsters recognize that traditional metaphysics–right along with its values, aesthetics, etc.–lies in ruins. By their tongue-in-cheek space creating gestures, hipsters clear the table, so to speak, of false illusions and make room for something original and positive to be posited. But in agreement with Bruno Latour and those I encounter while traveling who confess they frequent less economically developed countries more often than not for the fact that they do not have enough discretionary surplus as of yet to develop hipster subcultures, all the flash-pan denunciation of hipsters has gone stale. In this sense, hipsters only prolong a long standing critique against all the usual -isms and -ologies. Hipsterism, in other words, is not a fresh solution.

I am not as comfortable bombastically lampooning other once-popular rebel-clique groups that I do not currently occupy, but I venture to guess that the same sociology of critique could apply to the beat generation, hippies, punks, grunge rockers, scenesters and so on. In most all cases, apathy and indifference set in overnight, and the once-rebellious movement quickly turned into a commodified and marketed, diasporic identity for big-business. The measured dissent, in the end, was nothing but a pathetic outburst. What is missing and what truly counts, in Žižek’s words, is the “morning after”–the beginning of a new order of things. In other words, protests are only worth the breath if, after destroying the established state of affairs, they provide positive alternatives beyond the status quo. Thus, Kaufmann is absolutely spot on when he notes that genuine philosophical challenges to our way of life are only secondary to the jihad of revealing an original and positive way of being in the world. I find it telling then that Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher and political theorist who was a radical activist of the student movement in the 1960s, wrote in 1941 that “the dialectical contradiction”, what happens after the revolution, “is distinguished from all pseudo- and crackpot opposition, beatnik and hipsterism” (Reason and Revolution, p. xi). Case in point.

Deleuze and the IDF

One of the micro-topics I have increasingly become interested in as I study philosophy is the nature in which some philosophical positions or movements are complicit with capitalism (particularly, those that are strictly anti-capitalist themselves). I have mused on this insight elsewhere (here and here and here). Today I came across an interesting point raised by Žižek that discloses a strong parallel between Deleuze and the Israeli Defense Force. Although the extensive passage quoted at length is not capitalistic in nature per se, Žižek relates the self-revolutionizing principle inherent to capitalism here, a logic that requires resistance, the uncommon and the novel in order to perpetually defer its inherent contradiction from reaching a point of crisis.

It was recently made public that, in order to conceptualize the Israeli Defense Force’s urban warfare against thePalestinians, the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze and Guattari, especially to A Thousand Plateaux, using it as ‘operational theory’ – the catchwords used are ‘Formless Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, Velocity vs Rhythms’, ‘The Wahhabi War Machine’, “Postmodern Anarchists’, ‘Nomadic Terrorists’. One of the key distinctions they rely on is the one between ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space, which reflect the organizational concepts of the ‘war machine’ and the ‘state apparatus’. The IDF now often uses the term ‘to smooth out space’ when they want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. Palestinian areas are thought as ‘striated’ in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks, and so on:

“The attack conducted by units of the IDF on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by a means of a series of micro-tactical actions’. During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of overground tunnels carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare: ‘a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux’.”

So what follows from all this? Not, of course, the nonsensical accusation that Deleuze and Guattari were theorists of militaristic colonization – but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being simply ‘subversive’, also fits the (military, economic and ideologico-political) operational mode of contemporary capitalism. How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing? [Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction, pp. 26-27]

In what follows we are presented with a typical formulation of Žižek’s style, to raise an articulate and profound problem but only to answer it with a cliche quotidian response: in this case, in fewer words, be at peace with the conflict. The quoted remark is certainly disturbing, perhaps even more so for those enamored by Deleuze and his affirmative concept of difference. Although to the credit of Deleuze, I think he is well versed in the natural tendency of capitalism to axiomize – his word – the very forces that oppose it.

Self-Centered Altruism

When considering ethics a standard problem to address is finding a universal medium which allows us to judge all moral experiences. Bernard Williams advocates a unique position in this respect that questions both Kantian universalism as well as utilitarianism. His suspicion is that neither moral Law nor utility are universal, but rather selfish altruism. More precise, Williams suspects that “what the agent cares about is not so much other people, as himself caring about other people” (quoted in Žižek, Parallax View, p. 47). What Williams means by this is that there is no dividing rift between doing one’s duty and pursuing personal satisfaction as conventionally held. As he puts it, doing one’s Duty often gives the agent satisfaction doing it. Hence, altruistic behavior is at root selfish. Granting Žižek his Hegelian idealism, “the ontological split is not between the One and the Other, but is strictly inherent to the One; it is the split between the One and its empty place of inscription….the split inherent to the One and the explosion of the multiple” (p. 38). Or, simply put, the antagonism is not between two polar opposites (duty and freedom) but a minimal difference internal to the same term.

Doubtless, this assumes that some sort of pathological pleasure is experienced in fulfilling one’s obligations. Absolute devotion, on the other hand, would be a “gesture of total self-renunciation” in which “we sacrifice all (the totality of our life) for nothing… This means that there is no guarantee that our sacrifice will be rewarded, that it will restore Meaning to our life—we have to make a leap of faith which, to an external observer, cannot but look like an act of madness (like Abraham’s readiness to kill Isaac)… (Parallax View, p. 80). If we can ask ourselves “what’s in it for me?” and the answer is “nothing” then we are dealing with absolute devotion. This act of sacrifice, however, is rarer than it may at first appear. If your renunciation is done for a reward, even if it be a deferred one, it ceases to be a great act of self-renunciation. We must, in other words, sacrifice for nothing. It must be an empty gesture with no calculating strategy and no sacrificial economy. Absolute devotion is to give up everything, all that really matters, for nothing. This means that the sacrificial act involves a “leap of faith” in which there is no guarantee of the act even appearing ethical. That is, because even fulfilling one’s moral duty is a reward in itself as we saw above. Most significantly, I think, is Žižek’s argument that when we sacrifice everything for the “Cause-Thing” we end up losing the “Cause-Thing” itself. According to Žižek, “after I have sacrificed everything, my happiness, my honor, my wealth, for the Cause, all of a sudden I realize that I’ve lost the Cause itself—my alienation is thereby redoubled, reflected-into-itself” (p. 83).

This topic on selfish altruism clearly has religious overtones. What is fairly obvious is that persons of faith often make sacrificial gestures of self-renunciation, but in lieu of our discussion above we can see how such acts have clear delimited incentives; viz., investing in eternal rewards. As Marion Grau outlines in Of Divine Economy and following Max Weber, asceticism often resembles the investment strategies of capitalism (p. 67). To put it harshly, quoting Harpham in Ascetic Imperative, “asceticism is capitalism without money.” Otherwise stated, seeking perfection in daily life is motivated from lack just as seeking material wealth is motivated from lack. So while desert ascetics, such as Anthony, clearly shed possessions and finances in order to gradually withdraw from the comforts of civil life, they continued to be businessmen–only in a different economy. As Grau puts it, holy men merely redirect their “keen business sense toward the acquisition of the superior profits of heaven” (p. 69). Sanctified and abject alike, everyone makes investments of desire for some form of gain, whether it be material or spiritual. Granted, holy persons believe their eternal investment has bigger and more permanent returns, but the exchange is economical all the same.

The Parallax of Belief

I think it is pretty clear that the opposed movements of belief and unbelief are always-already a minimal difference inherent to one of the terms….which term that is happens to be a parallax view, to my mind. On the one hand, theology considers atheism to always be parasitic on some form of theism. The argument goes, according to continental philosophy of religion mostly, that there is no such thing as an unbiased, universal vantage point. Moreover, one is always-already socially interpellated to view the world from a particular perspective. As such, all interpretations of reality are situated within a horizon of taken-for-granted epistemological assumptions. In other words, every position depends on act of faith. Or, in less religious terms, every positions is contingent upon an absolute presupposition. Thus, nihilism–more popularly known as atheism outside of France–is somewhat of a theology; albeit an a-theology.

On the other hand, the tension between immanence and transcendence is considered to be a minimal difference/gap in immanence itself, according to various forms of materialist discourse. Theism and atheism, in other words, are not externally opposed but are rather characterized by internal overlapping; they are both inherent to a larger whole that encompasses them both. Žižek describes this minimal difference spectacularly:

The tension between immanence and transcendence is thus also secondary with regard to the gap within immanence itself: “transcendence” is a kind of perspective illusion, the way we (mis)perceive the gap/discord that inheres to immanence itself (The Parallax View, p. 36)

The split between the theism and atheism is merely the noncoincidence with finitude itself; so says Žižek. Accordingly, there is no rapport between one and the other; no synthesis or mediation is possible between the two. Instead, with this parallax view, one must constantly shift perspectives between the two points. Given this insurmountable gap, no neutral common ground is possible. They are two sides of the same coin, but can never touch.

A good example of this incommensurable dialectic is Jastrow’s Duck-Rabbit. Cunningham describes the deadlock of viewing the picture as follows:

One either sees the duck or the rabbit – never both at the same time. The mind oscillates between the two. But what must be remembered is that the appearance of two (God or Nature, duck or rabbit) disguises the one picture upon which they are made manifest. In this way there is only ever one, but this one picture is able to provide the appearance of two despite their actual alternating absences: nothing as something; the completely absent rabbit as duck, which is yet equally the completely absent duck as rabbit (Genealogy of Nihilism, p. xiv)

For another clarifying example, see the Moebius strip. We are dealing here, according to Žižek, with two levels that never touch yet are excruciatingly close.

…the paradox consists in the fact that these two series never overlap: we always encounter an entity that is simultaneously—with regard to the structure—an empty, unoccupied place and—with regard to the elements—a rapidly moving, elusive object, an occupant without a place….they are not two different entities, but the front and the back of one and the same entity, that is, one and the same entity inscribed onto the two surfaces of a Moebius strip (The Parallax View, p. 122)

This comes very close to the apophatic strand of Christian theology. While some people are more comfortable with rigidly classifying people along hard lines and lumping them into oversimplified categories–especially when it comes to religion and politics–the contemporary discourse scene is much more ambivalent. Jon Stanley has an excellent essay in the recently published “God is Dead” and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself entitled “Why Every Christian Should ‘Quite Rightly Pass for an Atheist'”. He begins with some apropos quotes:

Only an atheist can be a good Christian — Ernst Bloch

Only a Christian can be a good atheist — Jürgen Moltmann

I quite rightly pass for an atheist — Jacques Derrida

His best material emerges when he speaks to the fact that the early Christians were accused of being an atheistic cult because they did not worship Caesar. That is, a Christian would “pass for an atheist” by denouncing the official religion of the Roman Empire and all that it entailed; particularly its violence. Today there is very little tolerance for “blurring the boundaries” between belief and unbelief, but this was clearly an ambiguous category for the early Christians. For Stanley, Derrida is an unlikely (or is it likely?) ally in acknowledging this tension.

Derrida has also continually drawn attention to the “porous boundaries” between atheism and theism. Leaning on the apophatic tradition of negative theology, he speaks of a certain type of atheism that “at times so resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for it,”… (p. 13)

Neoconservatism in an Age of Secularism

According to psychoanalysis, in the natural state of existence (genealogically/archeologically speaking), before there was Law and transgression, there existed an infinite amount of possibilities; no obstacles but freedom itself. The catch was that such an abyss of freedom was brutally dizzying and some constraints needed to be made to “free oneself” of freedom. In short, humanity was a helpless animal “deprived of immediate instinctual support” or innate instincts and the “too-muchness” of nature was overwhelming.

In order to counteract the dizziness of freedom a withdrawal took place in which symbolic norms and regulations were imposed and enacted for the purpose of setting a firm limit to absolute freedom. Thus, freedom was redrawn to constitute a freedom to violate the Law, which was much better than the previous state of things. So the story goes. The resultant situation, in retrospection, is a condition of arbitrarily imposed laws that were set up under the guise of “natural authority” in order to set limits for us all. In other words, the responsibility that should have been ours to “decide upon the undecidable” is already taken care of for us by an “external master.” This circumstance suites us fine, however, because it conceals from ourselves the burden of defining our own limitations. Ironically, we now experience this limitation – a firm limit imposed to liberate us from dizzying freedom – as suffocation.

It seems absurd then, from this point of view, to call for a recovery of traditional values, as if they were somehow supported by an ahistorical, vertical dimension. This is precisely what neoconservatives attempt to do in pushing forward (or is it pulling from behind?) old ideology. Žižek elaborates further on the following topic:

For Lacan, the Kantian overcoming of the “dialectic” of Law and desire—as well as the concomitant “obliteration of the space for inherent transgression”—is a point of no return in the history of ethics: there is no way of undoing this revolution, and returning to the good old times of prohibitions whose transgression sustained us. This is why today’s desperate neoconservative attempts to reassert “old values” are ultimately a failed perverse strategy of imposing prohibitions which can no longer be taken seriously….That is to say: with Kant, the reliance on any preestablished Prohibition against which we can assert our freedom is no longer viable, our freedom is asserted as autonomous, every limitation/constraint is completely self-posited (The Parallax View, pp. 93-4)