Return of the managerial demiurge (11 Jan 2012)

It sort of veers in a different direction by the end, but Žižek's new LRB essay is actually a pretty lucid explanation of the terminology from autonomist Marxism, sewing the jargon together in a cohesive whole. Here's his quick summary of Hardt and Negri's Multitude argument:

Only with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (production of ideas, texts, programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is ‘hegemonic’ in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘commons’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Žižek argues that profit in contemporary capitalism comes not from commodity production and circulation but from being able to privatize the commons by force and extract rents through regimes of intellectual property enforcement and that sort of thing. He offers Microsoft as an example, but for me the paradigmatic example is Facebook, which collects rents (indirectly, from advertisers and data collectors) for hosting our "social graph" and tries to embed itself into our everyday social practices.

Later in the article Žižek sounds less like Negri and more like Wright Mills when he starts describing the disappearance of the 19th century entrepreneurs and the emergence of the white collar classes, the salarymen, the managerial demiurge. Since immaterial production is a collective thing, different salaries for different people can't be justified by their differing levels of productivity or the relative rarity of their skills, as neoclassical economists would have it. Instead, wage levels are determined by preexisting status, which tends to be arbitrary.

The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency.

So much for meritocracy. The middle class, then, consists not of a bunch of hard-working burghers but of people who inherited their political privilege (winners of the family lottery) and learned how to leverage it or learned how to adapt themselves so they could serve as ideologically useful token success stories. They pull in "surplus wage" -- a term that doesn't seem very useful to me, but which is supposed to mean the amount over the sustenance wage that capitalism presumably would drive everyone's wages to, ceteris paribus. The "surplus" idea seems to muddy the water; the point is that pre-existing class status determines pay in corporate structures, which try to calibrate the size of the middle class relative to the potential for mass unrest. Make as few middle managers as necessary to forestall revolt, and pay them enough to feel special and indebted to the status quo system.

What's more, Žižek, drawing on Jean-Pierre Dupuy, claims that success has to seem arbitrary to us, basically to make us to depressed to rebel. If success could be deserved, earned, we would have reason to be outraged when hard work doesn't beat status. As it is, we can always mistake privilege for luck. Žižek interprets the rise in protests recently as partly attributable to would-be meritocrats discovering there is no meritocracy and their modicum of inherited privilege no longer makes the grade. They won't get their "surplus wage" but will be precarious like everyone else.

Paradoxes (14 Oct 2010)

I'm not sure that there is a unifying theme to what follows, but I wanted to clear some tabs and have a vague nagging feeling that these items should be blogged about together.

1. This is from the interminable recent profile of Nick Denton, the Gawker Media impresario, in the New Yorker:

“I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability,” Denton told me. “Which is actually terrifying if you’re a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.”

I think that is true about online sociality as well, that the measurability is more profoundly disruptive than the immediacy or convenience of it. In our friendships, we once were, like traditional journalists, much more apt to push the aspects of our personality that we thought they ought to like, to use Denton's phrasing. But know we have the means to question that way of going about things, we have new tools to fuel self-doubt and second-guess ourselves and our social instincts. We have data-collecting tools to elevate our suspicions about what our friends really think of us, make all our paranoias viable. This can't help but affect our behavior. The data doesn't constitute real knowledge of some pre-existing truth about our social life, but instead posits its own truth, a new and, in my opinion, debilitating epistemology.

2. This is from a piece by Slavoj Žižek in the new LRB about the Chinese Communist Party:

An anecdote from Deng Xiaoping’s era illustrates the weirdness of the Party hierarchy. Deng was still alive, though retired from the post of general secretary, when one of the top members of the nomenklatura was purged. The official reason was that, in an interview with a foreign journalist, he had divulged a state secret: namely, that Deng was still the supreme authority and was effectively taking all the decisions. In fact everybody knew that Deng was still pulling the strings; it’s just that it was never allowed to be officially stated. The secret was not simply a secret: it announced itself as a secret. Thus, today, it isn’t that people are supposed not to know that a hidden Party structure shadows the state agencies: they are supposed to be fully aware that there is such a hidden network.

This exemplifies Žižek's theory of ideology as a kind of open secret, a kind of doing it anyway despite knowing it is all lies and pretense. A variant on that is the Lacanian premise of the big other, the overriding social fiction that legitimizes localized bad behavior, allows one to excuse oneself. The Big Other makes us do bad things; it's not our fault. This is the governing paradox of authoritarian regimes. I also think it governs Facebook in some way, but I haven't worked it out yet.

3. This is from Jonah Weiner's Slate article about GIF files making a comeback:

In the two minutes it might take me to load a viral video and watch it in full, I can watch the money shots of 15 different viral videos. Yes, we're talking about decadent levels of impatience, inanity, and time-wasting here, but GIFs allow us to waste less time online—or, rather, to waste it more efficiently.

This on the other hand is the governing paradox of contemporary consumer capitalism. We are driven to find ways to be more efficient in our wastefulness.

End of Utopias (13 Nov 2009)

Slavoj Žižek has a good essay in the LRB about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He looks at the idea that the end of the socialism brought in its wake a realistic mind-set grounded in the "truth" that markets and capitalism are the only basis for a social order that works. He basically argues that after the Wall fell, the same sort of people maintained political control. Neoliberalism has its power elite, just as Warsaw Pact countries had their Politburos. What's striking about the velvet revolutions, Žižek argues, is that after the fall of the Wall, these elites turned out to be the same people:

Indeed, one could argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to indulge their dreams of a new society based on justice, honesty and solidarity, the ex-Communists were able without difficulty to accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules. Paradoxically, in the new post-Communist condition, the anti-Communists stood for the utopian dream of a true democracy, while the ex-Communists stood for the cruel new world of market efficiency, with all its corruption and dirty tricks.

He sums up the ideological usefulness of this misrecognition: free marketeers can argue that their revolution was betrayed and demand more radical reforms.

In the 1990s, it was believed that humanity had finally found the formula for an optimal socio-economic order. The experience of the last few decades has clearly shown that the market is not a benign mechanism that works best when left alone. It requires violence to create the conditions necessary for it to function. The way market fundamentalists react to the turmoil that ensues when their ideas are implemented is typical of utopian ‘totalitarians’: they blame the failure on compromise – there is still too much state intervention – and demand an even more radical implementation of market doctrine.

Markets don't exist by virtue of natural law; impersonal exchange is hardly inscribed into human genetic code. Violence, or its implied threat, establishes the terms of exchange, or worse, the arbitrary neutrality of a society governed by unimpeded markets fosters an anything-goes climate where violence between competitors is tolerated, and is inevitable.

Idiot interviewers (11 Feb 2009)

On the DVD of Žižek! the 2005 documentary about the Slovenian philosopher, there's a great clip of his appearance on NiteBeat, an American news program. Žižek, who's apparently in the midst of a misbegotten book tour, gamely tries to make Lacanian theory accessible while Barry Nolan, the proudly clueless host, makes him into a hilarious side-show -- look at this funny guy with the accent! He's all intellectual! He thinks about stuff -- how amusing! Nolan actually calls him "Denis Leary but from Slovenia." The wrap up makes it obvious that he has had Žižek on the show not because of his ideas but because the show wants to bill itself as the kind of show that has people like Žižek on it.

Anyway, Nolan seems like a genius of sympathetic listening compared with the tools on CNBC in this scarily similar clip (via Talking Points Memo), in which it takes five patronizing talking heads to willfully ignore and fail to understand guests Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, whom the producers can't resist belittling with nicknames. (Paul Krugman compared it to a classic Monty Python sketch in which Marx, Mao and Lenin are asked questions about soccer.) The entire clip makes it clear that CNBC, and by extension, its audience, wants nothing more than to trivialize analysis of the banking system's larger problems while taking credit for being hip to the fad the network believes that Roubini and Taleb represent. It's truly pathetic. Obviously, the in-studio interviewers think that recessions are caused by bad luck or something and just automatically right themselves without any intervention at all; thus the prudent thing to do is to get the right guru to tell you what indicators to look for to time one's jump back into the markets. Roubini and Taleb are mostly silent, sitting helplessly while the hosts yammer on nonsensically like House Republicans during the stimulus debate. This is what has become of the discourse of the public sphere; many -- including people who follow the financial world professionally -- watch this sort of drivel and consider themselves informed, or cynically accept it as what the other viewers want to hear, as a barometer of what conventional wisdom is. This idiocy then guides policy. It make obvious the social catastrophe that ensues when commercially viable discourse becomes the only discourse we hear.

Attacking Žižek (5 Dec 2008)

Anyone at all familiar with Žižek's work would be able to see through Adam Kirsch's hit piece in the New Republic, which basically seeks to argue that Žižek is a totalitarian anti-Semite who uses jokes as a cloak to mask his hateful agenda. Kirsch employs the usual hit-piece tactics, selectively quoting and failing to fill in the necessary context in order to interpret what is quoted, remaining willfully tone-deaf to irony (and claiming that one must do so to understand the "real" message of the work), and using tautological ad hominem attacks to bolster the argumentative claims when necessary. In all likelihood, Žižek would probably welcome this kind of attack, as it tends to reinforce his claims about leftism and liberalism while raising his profile even further. His intent is to make readers uncomfortable; Kirsch's piece makes it clear that he has somehow managed to get under Marty Peretz's skin.

Josh Strawn posts a useful correction to the piece here, (via Larval Subjects) though his eagerness to gesture toward Lacanian exceptionalism is troubling.

When I picked up 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real' so many years ago, I gave up on reading it because I was quite certain that anyone that wanted to understand what Žižek was talking about probably needed to understand something about Lacan. What I subsequently discovered was that one does not cursorily educate oneself on Lacan, nor is it possible to do so (even after six years of immersion, it's quite hard to feel like you 'get' Lacan). This is by Lacan's design. He famously said that the way in should be difficult. It is willful obfuscation, not plain-spokenness in the vein of Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language.' Then again, Lacan wasn't teaching politics. He was the most bizarre pedagogue. One learned from him not by way of traditional study, but through experiencing him. The teacher was not to be the disseminator of knowledge so much as the figure who provoked the unquenchable desire for knowledge.

This attitude -- performative discourse as opposed to expository discourse -- is something that lay readers invariably doubt, if not resent -- that social theorists like Lacan must use a method that justifies opacity, inscrutability, and poor expression to convey otherwise inexpressible truths. It requires a leap of faith to immerse yourself in this tortuous material in order to derive the insights, but by the time you start to understand you've committed so much effort and time to understanding that you're biased toward believing. You can no longer evaluate the insights objectively. (But then the possibility of an objective perspective on such insights is often what is being called into question by the theories.) Often the end result is the true believers become a cult that's more comfortable with dismissing those who fail to climb the mountain and make the total commitment than with spreading the important ideas the cult leader is supposed to have discovered in a persuasive way. The jargon becomes insular and convoluted; the stakes in discussing the theory begin to revolve around which disciple has the true gospel rather than whatever the substance of the gospel was originally. Nothing in the "real world" is affected, because no one in a position to effect change has any idea what the cultists are talking about.

It seems to me that by telling jokes and referencing popular culture and fashioning himself as a theoretical rock star, Žižek is trying to bring Lacanian ideas to a broader audience outside the cult and restore their relevance. His books are nonetheless difficult to understand, but they try to bait lay readers into making the effort with accessible examples and comedic hyperbole. Strawn's point, that Žižek "can't shut it off" -- can't stop theorizing and derailing himself and interrupting interlocutors -- makes it seem as though he should have a blog, where a heterogeneous, inconsistent approach to events as they unfold are generally tolerated and excusable.

Obama as historical rupture (18 Nov 2008)

In this LRB essay, Slavoj Žižek ponders the significance of Obama's election. While it seems to represent a temporary triumph over political cynicism -- "what the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions" -- does it also imply some sort of decisive break in historical continuity? Has Obama introduced a whole new game rather than merely adjusting the rules of the existing politics? (See Larval Subjects' thoughts on that here.) As the transition has been assembled, we've seen some of the same Washington power players from the Clinton era shuffled back into prominence, which has led to articles (like this one) pronouncing that nothing's really changed. This allows some pundits to dismiss the outpouring of emotion when Obama won as overdramatic self-congratulation by liberals who will deserve to be disappointed by politics as usual. (Update: See leftist philosopher Simon Critchley's view here.)

Of course, politics will largely remain the same -- various interests will continue to compete for priority and so on. This is a good thing; dreams of post-partisanship are misguided in presuming some underlying consensus among peopple with irreconcilable differences. Žižek makes this point in an aside: when the financial crisis led to bipartisan action, what that meant in effect was "that democratic procedures were de facto suspended."

But it's hard to look at something like this, the first of what promises to be a weekly YouTube chat from Obama, on a government website that is almost unprecedented in its user-friendly slickness, and not feel that something is fundamentally different about this administration. That difference -- a comfort with new media and the opportunities that stem from it -- seems irreversible. (I'm sure this has already been called Politics 2.0 somewhere.) I have to admit that it's a little sinister and Big Brotherly in feel, and I am still cynical enough to suspect these traits will help make it go over well with the general public.

What Obama's team seems to want to do is establish Obama as an untarnishable brand, anchored in images of youth and progress (hence YouTube), that can then be used to win approval for policies without having to convince people of their merits. Participating in politics tends to make people uncomfortable, and few people do it at any level beyond voting. It involves compromise and confrontation and a willingness to be reminded again and again that reality falls short of ideals. But people love participating in brands -- no compromise necessary there, as the engagement takes place on the fantasy level and consists of pure vicarious pleasure. If we become invested in brand Obama, we will end up absorbing the progressive ideology he may espouse as a kind of by-product. And this can then inform the polls that inform political decisionmaking by legislators. Maybe this is nothing new; this is the "bully pulpit" theory of executive leadership. We just have been without a credible leader for so long in the U.S. that's it is hard to remember what that is like.