Zizek: A specialist in dissent jumps on the bandwagon.
In early 2013, culture critic Slavoj Zizek composed a letter to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, member of
feminist punk band Pussy Riot. He concluded it thus:
In the same way that Hegel, after seeing Napoleon riding through Jena, wrote that it was as
if he saw the World Spirit riding on a horse, you are nothing less than the critical awareness
of us all.
(Find it on the Guardian website.)
To someone who has just been imprisoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin for guerrilla
performance, this is an incongruous comparison. Zizek may seem to be on the same page as Pussy Riot
since he is known as a social critic. But his Napoleonic fantasy makes him sound more like
Dostoyevski’s crazed murderer Raskolnikov. What the hell is going on?
Before beginning, there is reason to be wary of
Pussy Riot. Commentators are concerned by
their commercial pornographic imagery. Then
there is the band's collusion with Amnesty,
popstar Madonna, and possibly with police.
Former collaborators have pointed out that
certain members seem more interested in fame
than revolution. Here I take Pussy Riot only at
their finest and on face value. Guerrilla
performance has the potential to forcefully
present good argument, and I will be
suggesting good argument tends to be
revolutionary. Even so, Pussy Riot are not as thought-provoking as they could be (if certainly
sometimes explicit).
Nor should Zizek be accepted uncritically, as he has indeed been by the left. Zizek’s arguments must be
objectively assessed, even if I shall suggest this runs against Zizek’s own approach. “Critical
awareness” means something different for him than it does for some, and Zizek is often misleading on
the point. To be clear about it, I'll examine and reject Zizek’s post-modernism. If you are now
wondering what “post-modernism” means, my case involves a thumbnail sketch. Then I’ll characterise
Zizek as what we don't need: a specialist in dissent. First, though, back to that crazy letter.
1. The Napoleon Comparison.
Pussy Riot attacked shops and tram tops to stress the lack of freedom in the former Soviet Union, now
an openly capitalist nation. It is of course no freer than under Stalinism. Eventually the band were
imprisoned for a cathedral performance that criticised religion as complicit with Putin.
The music was a little under-rated in all the kafuffle. Guitars and low-fi backing were impressive, and
the manic intonation expressive of a group of young women encountering Family Values in 21st
century Russia. Lyrically, amid critiques of (alcoholic) consumerism and authority and family, we even
find reference to Zizek. The reference is ambiguous, and may reflect university politics. To follow
Zizek’s Napoleon metaphor, we will need some further background.
One way to understand Zizek is via an idea influential on 20th century activism. This is Marx and
Engel’s Base-superstructure Explanation. The Explanation begins with social relations on a smaller
scale. Individuals are engaged in production; for example, in workplaces and families. This is the
productive ‘Base.’ The productive relations of the Base compose the larger scale of the 'Superstructure.'
The latter is the level of, for instance, international affairs.
Base relations are capitalist. People work together to produce, but united against exploitation they
make business less competitive. Subsequently reference to the Base explains Superstructural features
present across the globe. The need in individual workplaces to reduce pay and prevent solidarity
explains global similarities in racist discourse. The scapegoats vary, but the discourses share businessfriendly aspects. The pressure on individual families to function economically similarly explains
ubiquitous homophobic discourse. Specific relations explain generalised trends.
In the twentieth century the status of the Base-superstructure Explanation changed. In the late 19th
century Engels understood The Explanation as providing an objective analysis. Lenin endorsed it as
objective, but only in that economic struggle determines what is true. You can still find this approach in
today’s socialists. They attempt to be objective, but only on the basis of an economic outcome.
French thinker Althusser developed Lenin and became popular in the later 1960s. For him The Basesuperstructure Explanation could only be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ from the standpoint of a class power
struggle, not true or false in any other sense. Althusser helps us understand “post modernism.” His
student Foucault moved still further from taking explanations to be objective.
For Foucault and the post-modern thinkers who followed, no discourse, no explanation, should be
understood as true or false, but as assertions of power. Power is now understood as imposing limits on
people, not just on classes. Given post-modernism, The Base-superstucture Explanation is at best one
way to assert less dominant power relations by criticising dominant power. The post-modern approach
became orthodoxy on the left. Applied to the Base-superstructure Explanation we get “post-Marxism.”
Zizek endorses a post-modern/post-Marxist approach. 1
The Base-structure Explanation is illustrative as a central activist story that links productive relations
with widespread trends. By dint of referring to smaller constituents/relata and explaining only some of
the larger level, I believe the explanation can be coherently understood as a viable “explanatory
reduction.” However it is controversial. It is also just an example. Importantly, its status was
challenged when social power became more important to assessing explanations than reliance on
explanatory achievement. Equally Zizek has analysed many discourses qua power. Zizek’s semiotics is
relatedly informed by his open reading of libidinous drives. He understands what people believe and
enjoy in terms of power. Or could believe and enjoy, as when he tells us Africans would decorate
charity pump handles with kitsch if they could (! ibid p.249). What he is not interested in is arguing for
a position anyone should accept irrelevant of of their position in the mesh of power. Zizek is not
concerned with truth. For him, a social critic is not concerned with, for instance, facts about irrigation.
So Zizek thinks Pussy Riot are asserting themselves rather than truth-telling. Their discourse and use of
symbols allows them to impose limits on Putin’s authority, and contest limits imposed. As an assertion
of power they were on the front foot. They attracted attention, and people sided with them. Their
enemies, like Putin, came to seem unreasonable (Zikek's reference to Hegel is a reference to Hegel's
idea of a figure or figures representing reason on a world-historic stage).
Hence Zizek’s puzzling letter to the punk rock band. Zizek uses his Napoleonic image on the basis that
Napoleon also got on the front foot, and people also rallied around. For some Napoleon also
symbolised reason as a modern leader opposing feudal monarchs.
In his recent Living in End Times p.204 Zizek warns against subjectivism, and also Adorno’s etc ideas that instrumental
reason is the problem. But Zizek understands explanatory categories and reasoning only from the vantage of struggle. The only
objectivity available is some reasoning must be recognised as useful in struggle. Compare with Lenin above.
1
Note that Napoleon did not make logical arguments to show he was right. He made armies and wars.
Zizek has Napoleon representing reason only in so far as Napoleon asserted an economistic/scientistic
operation of power and opposed waning feudal power. Similarly, Zizek neither wants nor expects a
punk band to make arguments, even implicitly. This is reason as the weight of numbers: more people
want to live in the way tabled by Pussy Riot’s self-assertions than want to live in the old matrix of
power relations presided over by the likes of Putin.
Putting aside the stereotyping of punks as mindless, we might now wonder if Zizek has not emptied out
important content. Pussy Riot are not just soldiers in coloured balaclavas rather than epaulettes. They
seem reasonable in a different sense to Zizek’s. They make fun of contradictions, religion and bad
arguments. The falsity of the discourse they attack should not simply be bracketed off when we
understand their contesting discursive effects.
2. An Alternative view to Zizek’s.
The anarchist tradition, at its most basic, offers an alternative to Zizek’s approach. The best of
anarchism encourages think it yourself (TIY) as well as do it yourself (DIY).
To understand TIY we might start with The Vienna Circle philosophers. They
opposed Hitler using evidence and logic. For them, any argument or statement
made by Hitler should be assessed by reference to the evidence provided for it,
and his logic. Once this was done Hitler was revealed as mystical in the worst
sense. Fleeing persecution in Germany, Vienna Circle members helped develop
understandings of logic, critical thinking and the use of evidence.
Today the resulting tradition informs Analytical Philosophy, the university alternative to post
modernism. Of course, in our conservative universities, the Analytics rarely use the impressive critical
techniques their tradition has developed to examine important premises and arguments. But they do
draw on an intellectual skill base that studies fallacies along with valid arguments, and that involves
being aware of how we can and should handle evidence.
Activists should use this Analytic skill set. They could then act on the basis of the arguments they
could rehearse, not due to the decrees of left leaders or central committees. Each individual could
criticise claims made by hierarchical power for herself (these claims would almost always be false).
She can then most effectively convince others, and these others in turn convince. For critical thinking
enables us to be maximally convincing. The more immediate result is my idea of revolution; a chain
reaction of independent thinking nevertheless permitting joint action.
A new society would come into being when this exponentially expanding process reached critical mass.
The ends justify the means since the ends are just the means. Thinking "livers" are exactly the end
outcome we want: social relations between full independently thinking persons, consciously fulfilling
enabled life projects. A society of associated producers.
A sense of truth-seeking and objectivity is required. Sure, our premises are always selected due to
social interests. But there is reason to believe only some premises, and these lead only to some
conclusions — as determined by the disinterested application of critical thinking. The critique of
capitalism as exploitative, as demanding intellectual passivity as part of generalised creative passivity,
would give us the best explanation of what revolution seeks to abolish. The explanation of why today's
society is undesirable, and why it is irrational not seek to destroy it, would stand irrespective of your
position in the matrix of social power relations. It is what you should believe, not just what you do
believe or can believe. Similarly, Base-Superstructure explanation could again be endorsed as objective
as part of this explanation.
Critical thinking, logical argument given evidence and sound premises: these activities must
differentiate activists from their opponents. Take 1) The Environment and 2) Racism. 1) The science
tells us we need renewables. 2) The human genome project tells us that old biological theories of
racism are false: marker and development genes are different. Activists should
promote both conclusions, not treat science as a discursive enactment of power
and bracket off its truth claims. There is nothing to fear from logical, evidencebased inquiry into how to live, and how to end exploitation.
Zizek implicitly pooh-poohs the tools of critical thinking as a ruse of power, and
at best of rhetorical strategic use. But, tho it might seem that argument both as
objective truth-seeking and as power struggle changes power relations, the
former enables us to be more convincing. Argument also leads to a better outcome: a society of selfdetermined persons. Zizek and the post-Marxists are “specialists in dissent.” We do not need specialists
in creativity like artists, or specialists in nudity like strippers, we also do not need specialists in dissent.
People thinking rigorously for themselves. That is what Zizek and post modern academics don’t want
when they present us with an elaborate analysis of discourse as power. They want their convoluted
recondite schemas, usually expressed in difficult prose, to replace you and I applying cold hard
criticism to everyday life.
3. Conclusions
Activists have an anarchist alternative to Zizek’s ideas of assertions of power. At their best Pussy Riot
themselves are also better understood along basic anarchist lines than as the Napoleonic figures of
Zizek’s awkward letter. Pussy Riot tell us alcohol is condoned as a way to keep people dumbed down
and happy. They tell us that Putin’s rule is supported by religious faith. On this reading, despite their
imprisonment Pussy Riot remain powerful and contest power. But in that sense that they tell the truth.
They think for themselves and encourage others to do the same.
Clearly Zizek has jumped into the band van, and it is an indicator of a deeper problem with his work
and today’s activism. Since Althusser in the later 1960s, the left has increasingly bought a post modern
approach. Post modernism leaves activists unconvincing. It leaves them unable to valorise the
independent thought that is both needed for effective activism and is the activist's proper end goal. By
contrast a new direction in activism could involve activists playing devils advocates — charitably
taking up and defending right wing positions to other activists, so these others could learn how to
knock ‘em down. Arguments on the right are usually wrong since a life without exploitation is always
attractive, and one with it impossible to defend.
Zizek tries to make up for his own short fallings by identifying with exciting music. We need to reject
Zizek and all post modernism, this time to successfully contest patriarchal class society. Don’t be
fooled by the charlatans or think you need a specialist in dissent. Use critical thinking yourself, always.
TIY in the exclusion zone and beyond.
Gerald Keaney. Thanks to Rose Cook for proofing and the criticism of Pussy Riot.
DJ Tigermoth was spinning some great tunes at the shady palms cafe, including some Devo, a favourite
of many PUKE personnel. Full marks. But when I got up and did some robot dancing — original
though inspired by Devo themselves, he stopped the track. If we worry about social dance regulations
we'd all be bored out of our brains. DJs — one more try if you want to smash crappy Brisbane nonculture — Gerald Keaney