The Liberal Stalinist
He likes to portray himself as an outsider, a performer, the
peripatetic circus man; the clown.
He is always buzzing about!
A gadfly revelling in the cries and angry rebuffs, the yelps of
irritation, his iconoclastic wit provokes amongst the overly serious and slow
of mind. He loves to upset people,
although we all know it is only harmless fun and academic games. A Bruce Forsyth of the conference
circuit who is careful always to remind us with a well-timed wink that his
risqué jokes and theoretical provocations will not upset the children.
I’ve not read a single one of his books, though he has
written many. I’ve read a few
articles, and they are enough: too thin to be worth recalling. It is the reason, I suspect, he’s so in
demand: light entertainment for the thinking classes and some serious comedy
for the rest, who’ll find it easy enough amongst the glossy pages of the Sunday
supplements. The headmaster and
the civil servant allowed for once to giggle (“those academics, hey?”) and to
congratulate themselves on their own cleverness; not worrying overly much about
the passages they do not understand; it is, after all, what you would expect
when an amateur meets a professional on the latter’s familiar terrain. “He has a brain that’s for sure”, they
might say, pleased to have understood just a bit of what they have read. “Though I haven’t lost it either; could
still find my way around Hegel if only the wife would let me…”
I’ve written about
Zizek before; and I’ve got another piece in draft, that I may finish one
day. Three pieces about a minor
thinker, with little originality, and who will vanish like newspaper print on
the day the fashions end… I cannot
justify myself, dear reader. I’d
like to say, to make this piece worth reading, to give it at least some value,
that he represents a wider phenomenon, and is therefore important as a symbol
of our contemporary predicament.
That we can understand our culture through a study of this one man is
the reason I yearn to give you.
This is not altogether untrue.
He is the intellectual supermodel
who creates fake controversy so that the products she advertises sell in their
millions – in his case all that expensive internet space around his Guardian articles.
Every age has them, to a greater or lesser degree. A close look at Zizek potentially an
insight into our own peculiarly mediated world, which needs well-educated
people who are yet also strangely ignorant; their knowledge of subjects, even
(especially?) amongst university graduates, often extraordinarily thin; the
commentariat the source for most of their opinions.1 But that is not the reason I have
written this piece. A guilty
pleasure, a spasm of emotion; the craving for ice cream… Yes, I am afraid, my friends, that’s
the sum of it.
The London riots have tickled his fancy, and he has decided to write about them. Typically, he stands in the middle of the road shouting abuse at those on either side. Conservatives and liberals have got it wrong, it seems; which is probable, they often do – we tend not to read the newspapers, the home for most politicos, for original thought. Then he quotes Stalin (of course), a thrill shuddering down the page, and proceeds to tell us what the real problems are…
The London riots have tickled his fancy, and he has decided to write about them. Typically, he stands in the middle of the road shouting abuse at those on either side. Conservatives and liberals have got it wrong, it seems; which is probable, they often do – we tend not to read the newspapers, the home for most politicos, for original thought. Then he quotes Stalin (of course), a thrill shuddering down the page, and proceeds to tell us what the real problems are…
The first paragraph begins with a good story. A man suspected of stealing walks out
of the factory each night with an empty wheelbarrow.2 It takes a while for the authorities to
realise it is the wheelbarrow that he is stealing. He then tells us what all the other commentators have
missed: the riots have no meaning at all!
They are simply an outburst, “a blind acting out”, that have no purpose
beyond the reflexive gestures themselves.
They are politically insignificant and thus a symbol of our
non-ideological age.3 He then sets up a simple dichotomy:
What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when
the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive
violence?
All this is rather odd for a supposedly stellar
thinker, who questions all presuppositions. For according to the conventional wisdom this is a non-ideological age: living in the end of history,
as some have argued, we are all just problem solvers now.4 Inevitably this common sense view
turns out to be incorrect – will humans ever throw off their religious
mentalities? -, for when considered a little more closely our time seems one of
fundamentalisms, where evangelicals on all sides are aggressively “hot”: Western neo-liberals; Wahhabists and
Shiite clerics; Christians and ultra-Darwinists…5 This is a religious age, and we have
the wars to prove it.
Of course, this is not the world of Marx and Lenin, of
the class war and the Bolshevik vanguard.6 It is not the world of Zizek’s youth,
in Yugoslavia. All those ideas and
causes that were so exciting in the first half of the 20th century,
and which made a brief comeback in the sixties, had run their course by the
time he was a young man.7 Clapped out then they have disappeared
now, like the Trabant his parents may once have owned. This world, fading away in the
seventies, except for the billboard posters and television adverts that
proclaimed its eternal vitality, has gone. And so, therefore, in the typical logic of the confused and
egocentric mind, has all ideology.
For if my religion has been junked then all must follow it onto the
scrap heap! Zizek, like many
intellectuals, has not quite grown up; nostalgic for a childhood that never
really existed.
The theoretical junk shop that was Eastern Europe may
give us a clue to his mode of thought.
Zizek’s youth was spent during a period when the ideological propaganda
was obviously phoney, and completely out of sync with the declining realities.8 He is also an intellectual for whom
ideas are more important than things.9 Someone, therefore, who is more likely
to be affected by the propaganda than the ordinary person who is only too aware
of the material shortcomings of an increasingly dysfunctional society.10 What an odd place to be!11 To live inside an ideological reality
which you know is fake; and yet which you still partly believe in.12 If you are of a particular cast of mind
this realisation, that you are living inside a collapsing ideology, can be
intoxicating. There is the
revelation: I can do anything with thought!13 Because it is not real there are no
restrictions imposed by experience and simple facts. You can think anything! You can even make up your own fictions and call them truth;
arguing that you are no different from the party hacks in the official
journals. And you’re right! Indeed, what you do is better – because
it is the truth. You’ve hardly started and already
you’ve encountered a paradox. How
liberating! and yet how deadly: cut off from the realities of experienced life
will render most of such thought sterile and illusionary. For in those times where there is a
disconnect between ideology and daily experience the tendency will be for
intellectuals to retreat into ideas; and so trap themselves inside the minds of
other thinkers.14 Derrida and Deleuze the enlightened
architects who make the sophisticated playpens where the intelligent children
can have their fun; the windows covered up with Freudian case histories, the
floor strewn with D.W. Winnicott’s lecture notes…
One of the games intellectuals like to play is to
reduce the complexities of the world to simple opposites (them or us) to which
specific values (good or bad) are given.
And we, dear reader, are then expected to make our choice, which they
believe is so full of fate and dread.15 Like unbelievers on the verge of
baptism we must decide between heaven and hell; in this case between playing by
the rules (thus losing our identity) or by committing violence (which destroys
us). Of course, there are people
who will happily choose either alternative, seeing no problem in our reverend’s
simple formulation. To a large
extent their share his faith in our lack of individual liberty: “it was determined, wasn’t it?” - by God, by the genes, by the class struggle; or
even by the Big Bang long ago.16 Like him, they will be of a religious
cast of mind. They have faith in
our un-freedom.
If only life was so simple. We could pension off thinking.17
Although modern capitalism is extremely powerful and
globally persuasive it doesn’t follow there are no alternatives, and that the
only response is reflexive violence.
Even within capitalism itself there are different and competing models –
American, European, the gangster capitalism of post-Soviet Russia, and the
developmental states of East Asia.
In Britain there has been two kinds of capitalism in my lifetime: social
democracy and today’s neo-liberalism; or what some call “privatized-Keynesian”.18 It is arguable that these differences
are just as important, if not more so, than the conflict between Russian
Communism (a form of primitive state capitalism for under-developed countries;
thus its appeal to the Third World) and the West after 1917.19 The twentieth century is
therefore not the history of a battle between socialism and capitalism, ending
in the former’s defeat in 1989.
The historical interactions were more nuanced than this: socialism
stopped being a revolutionary movement in the 1920s, when it became
incorporated into the national economy; a transition which was almost complete
by 1945.20 The fall of the USSR due to a
bureaucratic system that was incapable to adapting to the rapid changes in the
world economy that took place from the 1960s; the huge social, political and
cultural upheavals that destabilized the West destroying a state that could not
successfully incorporate them into its governing structures.
Such views are not easy for Zizek, who is trapped
within his simple binary oppositions;21 though always he is pretending to escape from them. You must either submit
totally to the system or smash it all up is his operating principle. It is this dilemma that millions of
people are resisting, and in thousands of different ways; and who are not
prepared to accept the lazy choice between the banksters and the extremists
with their politics of terror.
They would not recognise such an obviously cartoon world, which, and
this is surely clear, does not allow for their existence. Zizek, too busy reading Lacan and
Lenin, hasn’t the time to leave the campus to walk among the city streets and
talk to the La Monte Young enthusiasts, Quaker activists, or the volunteers at
the Rudolf Steiner schools.22 Reformers and non-conformists, in a
word, society’s eccentrics, are not allowed into this academic’s all too tidy
study.
In the internet version Mark Duggan gets an early
mention. He nowhere appears in the
print version. This makes the
arguments in the paper copy easier for Zizek to sustain.
Alain Badiou has argued
that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as
‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless
violence.23
Capitalism has taken over the world and transformed it
into a… void? Yet when I go Germany or France they
seem obviously different from England; although there is still much I
recognise: everyone eats and drinks, and laughs over funny jokes. While young people kiss and old people
grumble about the sharpness of the autumn wind. Clearly the culture is still structuring the economy24 and capitalism has yet to remove the internal organs of human beings; while
physical spaces have not been replaced by virtual worlds; although maybe one
day… is Badiou a prophet of the future?
It is a simple error, and typical of an intellectual
like Zizek who turns real things into words, which, bookman that he is, then
becomes the meaning of our present
reality. As if most of us
navigated around town using Hayek and Milton Friedman, rather than using our
own eyes and legs. As if we spent
all our time talking about ideas, rather than doing things. Such a view also suggests a predictable
blind spot – the aging intellectual’s ignorance about new technology. For one of the curious aspects of
websites such as Facebook, at
least for the unwary (Alain Badiou?), is their physicality: they tend to record what people have either
actually done or what they intend
to do in the near future. That is,
even the most “worldless” social space requires a community of real friends
behind it; unlike this article, or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which can exist independently of the entire
population of Great Britain. They need no one in order to exist.
Scholars have often lived like monks: think of the
early scientific revolution in the 17th century with its vast
networks of correspondence – yesterday’s European wide web – that connected
thinkers like Locke and Leibniz who never met.25 This suggests that Zizek is mistaking
his own virtual existence for a society who has never heard of him; and who are
too busy doing things to care. He
thus forgets about the campaigns against the arms industry, the Palestinian
Solidarity movements, the English Defence League, the Tamils holding up the
traffic on Parliament Square, or the Neo Fascists in most of the countries on
the continent. Alone in his study,
with the curtains drawn, and his angle poise lamp leaning over his shoulder, he
doesn’t notice these groups marching under his windows; too engrossed in
creating a paradox in Karl Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte;
the second paragraph on page 160 of the
Pelican edition, if you look hard enough.
Only Big Ideas count. And luckily Hegel and Lacan, his favourites, are the
equivalent of bling on the intellectual celebrity circuit. Thus he can be profound and popular at
the same time. If we were crude we
wouldn’t hesitate in finding the right words for this state of affairs: “you
lucky bastard!”
Unlike Zizek, most of us work in offices. These are places full of politics. We are also aware when local hospitals
close, and neighbourhood schools are condemned as failing. We protested on the streets before
Blair went into Iraq. Burt
Bacharach wrote a protest song against George Bush… Yet few of us are communists, and not many now belong to the
mainstream political parties. This
is what Zizek means when he talks about “worldlessness”. The old ideologies, that created the
avenues and boulevards through which the “proletariat”, “the expropriating
classes” and “the producers of surplus value” could march triumphantly, have
all been bulldozed down; to be replaced by smaller and yet more tangible
concerns – libraries, the minutiae of international law,26 and meals on wheels. Although he
seems to have overlooked the political Right,27 who have built a huge metropolis, with its skyscrapers and office blocks made
out of “individual enterprise”, “the market” and “free trade”. Ideology still exists, but now it is
the Right that employs all the hegemonic concepts.28
In the internet version the tensions in the essay are
greater, for the writer has to overcome one imposing obstacle of fact: the
protest began as a rational and political response to the killing of a young
man. Only later, for reasons that
are not clear, but which seem linked to police intransigence, the protest
became violent, later spreading to other parts of the country; but
mostly London. That is, the
trigger for the riots contradicts the entire piece – it was a demonstration
against injustice. Strange Zizek
doesn’t notice this; though one suspects he has – he is no fool. He knows that in the game of ideas,
nothing really matters; certainly not facts. In this regard intellectuals often behave like newspaper
columnists, where truth is less important than comment and opinion; which
generates controversy and guarantees response, and thus popularity; and high
score ratings.29 It is one of the reasons why
post-modernism became so popular in the academy. It is very close in spirit to a media they need to believe
mirrors the mundane world, so as to confirm the reality of their own illusory
theories. For if the manufactured
world of the television studio is genuine then their crazy ideas really are the truth! 30
Notice how we have returned to the communist
apparatchiks obsessively dusting the shelves of their institutional libraries;
hiding the soiled tissues and the dried out pens behind the collected works of
Friedrich Engels and Eduard Bernstein, whose spines they buff up rigorously.31 Although these books look immaculate,
and are endlessly quoted, they are never read; the reason the rubbish can be
safely hidden behind them. The
greats turned into myths, which hide the ugliness of the ruling elite from the
ideological managers whose task is to critically support them; and which they
do, overwhelmingly.32
Zizek fits very easily into this make-believe universe. 33
After informing us of the real nature of the riots, a
non-ideological reflex, he patronises the mainstream explanations, which he
dismisses. He is not entirely
wrong. As I
have previously written, I do not think that the rioting had any general
meaning – in this I agree with him.
The riot created its own momentum, and the majority who participated
either took advantage of the situation or were transformed into rioters by the
riot itself. Zizek, however, wants
to go much further than this. He
wants to argue that such reflexive behaviour is a symbol of a wider social
phenomenon: our lack of an ideological purpose.34 The riots thus offer proof for his
theories. Like so much of this
kind of thinking, which requires jumping across immense empirical ravines, it
involves a very large non sequitur.
For you cannot go so easily from the particular to the general; from a
single riot to a cultural malaise. There are many gaps you must fill in
first. It is one of the reasons
why history, with its concern about particulars, is so troublesome for the
theorist – like a clever child in the classroom it is always jumping up with
some inconvenient question -, forcing us to work much harder to reach our
conclusions.
These teenagers and young
adults represent, in my view, nothing beyond themselves.35 Riots are relatively rare occurrences,
and tend to be triggered by some specific event, often involving the legal
system and the police.36 Their ferocity and extent will depend
on a number of factors: the resonance of the original injustice together with
wider social and economic forces, which, especially in times of recession, can
swell the ranks of the disaffected, who are always a minority and are quite
different from the political class in the local communities whose tendency is
to organise activities rather than destroy things.37 Thus I would be surprised if those
campaigning to save Kensal Rise
Library were to later smash up Kilburn High Road.38
To understand a riot we need to look at the specific
causes of its origin, which are usually different from those factors that
increase its momentum, sucking in more people and unleashing its violence. The latter will tend to arise from
within the riot itself. That is,
there are two quite different sets of causal factors. In addition, we should treat these events, at least
initially, as unique phenomena; and be puzzled by them. Walking in Hackney during the aftermath
of the riot my main reaction was one of uncertainty. What actually is going on? I thought. Zizek does not have these doubts. And when he comes to analyse the riot
he does the reverse to what I have suggested. Indeed he has no interest in what happened in London at all;
and is not prepared think about the facts on the ground, which suggest that
after the initial outbreak in Tottenham, which did have a political cause (and
therefore a political value, thus contradicting his main thesis), the rest was
semi-planned or spontaneous action arising out of the event itself. But Zizek is not concerned with these details. He wants these meaningless acts to have
meaning! He wants to turn them
into a symbol (that old scholastic impulse), and use it to reveal the truth
about our society. This is his
mistake. It is the old story of
our modern press, where after young boys murder a child the papers spend the next
month talking about the state of the nation. As if the 1990s were worse than the 1960s because a baby was
killed by two children. Mary Bell,
meanwhile, is sidelined, and quietly forgotten.
Once the riots have been left behind Zizek can set his
talents free.
When, in the 1990s, the
Conservatives launched their ‘back to basics’ campaign, its obscene complement
was revealed by Norman Tebbit: ‘Man is not just a social but also a territorial
animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of
tribalism and territoriality.’ This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about:
the unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised,
bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’.
In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of ‘repressive
desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives could be
desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist control –
viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what we saw was
not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced
by capitalist ideology.
This is clever and has some truth, but not in way
perhaps Zizek would accept. Apart
from the few exceptions there were no beasts on the streets of Hackney, only
the monsters created by the journalists and TV presenters who described them as
such. As some have commented, myself
included, the riots were relatively civilised – my experience was very
different from the images portrayed by the helicopter cameras. Or maybe this is what he means by an
ideological “beast”: a moderate version of the original, a kind of Liberal
Democrat of the jungle. However, I
do not think this is quite what Zizek intends. Rather, he is arguing that this excursion into smash and
grab39 is the extreme expression of capitalism’s consumer desire, from out of which it
arises. Businesses need us to be
“wild things” so that we impetuously buy their products; and the inevitable
result is what we witnessed on Mare Street and Walworth Road.40 A brilliant series by Adam Curtis on
advertising makes this very point.
But as always Zizek needs to go further: capitalism turns us into
“capitalist beasts”. We don’t do shopping, we are shoppers, consuming things is our contemporary
essence; an untamed desire for more and more stuff turning the High Street into
a savannah full of desperate hunting packs.41 Bingo! The riots have thus revealed our underlying animal nature,
now modified by product placement and the hard sell.42
But then how is this different from the rioting in
pre-capitalist societies, our own included? Isn’t such behaviour universal when order breaks down; and
thus bears little relation to the prevailing ideology, believed here to be
determinate? More
importantly, it misses something essential in the modern psyche, brilliantly
brought out in a recent review by Jenny Diski:
…Souhami breaks with the
police procedural narrative… to cite the Stanford experiment of 1972 in which
small children were left alone in a room for 15 minutes with a marshmallow: if
they didn’t eat it they would get two later on. Follow-ups 14 years on
suggested that the 30 per cent who held out had ‘better coping skills, were
more socially competent, self-assertive, trustworthy, dependable and
academically successful’…
Dagmar’s murderer would
have eaten the marshmallow immediately. Souhami presents Sinclair, boy and man,
as constitutionally unable to resist immediate gratification. ‘If he saw
something he wanted he took it. He didn’t see the wrong in it, only the
gratification if it worked. It was his tactic for survival and a behaviour
pattern that became entrenched. He was impulsive, aggressive and anxious and
his life quickly became chaotic.’…
There is no suggestion that his many siblings suffered from the same
problems, so although the size and poverty of the family he was born into are
acknowledged as being implicated in his greed, they aren’t presented as an
excuse, or as a solution to the mystery of why an individual fails to develop
an average degree of self-control. It seems reasonable to suppose that the
irresistible urgency of passing desires is at the root of much lifelong
recidivism then and now. (He saw, he
wanted)
The essence of a civilised life is self-restraint. This is what brings us the ultimate
rewards. Anyone who works in an
office knows this to be true. Of
course, this self-control is in tension with the needs of industry, which
requires no restraint on our spending desires. However, even the largest corporations don’t encourage us to
bunk off work and shop when the inspiration takes us. How then would they manufacture Slavoj Zizek t-shirts?43
One of the interesting aspects of contemporary life,
and perhaps what makes it peculiarly modern, is the idea that civilisation must
not only accommodate animal desires - to be civilised we have to recognise, even
express, the beast inside us - but at bottom it is little more than these. It is our natural instincts, those
attributes we share with other organisms, and not the uniqueness of Homo
sapiens, that is the essence of our humanity. Fundamentally we are nothing more than animals.44 This would have been an anathema to an
older aristocratic culture, or at least those parts of it concerned with its
image and ideology, which tended to stress the uniquely human, concentrating on
our minds and our willingness to follow moral precepts.45 When people attack religion this is
really their target.46
Zizek’s rather crude formulation misses these
nuances. It is the failure of the
polemicist, who tends to lack subtlety; thus a discussion about changing
cultural attitudes to sex ends up (inevitably?) with porn. Extremes are easy to see. They also get other people angry. However, what they don’t do is describe
the majoritarian culture and the mechanisms that underpin it, surely what we
must understand if sense is to be made of the society; and which often requires
detailed work, and a feeling for actual experience.
Controversialists tend also to be literal-minded.
For of course he is misreading the Major government and
the statements of the egregious Norman Tebbit. The whole Back to Basics thing was a confused attempt to
deal with the effects of policies that were destroying communities, or at least
the livelihoods, of natural Tory voters – the small shopkeepers and the little
businessmen were being replaced by franchises and large chains; the charity
shops filling up the market towns as Tesco and Sainsbury invaded its suburbs –,
but which tended to get mixed up with the hated sexual revolution of the 1960s;
blamed for this group’s decline.47 It was an attempt to appeal to an older
gentility, of the 1950s and beyond, when the little man, the petite
bourgeois, was a secure and respected
presence in these small urban communities. It was nostalgia, aimed particularly at the elderly party
membership, that was destined to fail as big business and financial capital had
taken over the Conservative Party by then; while the easing of sexual mores
could not be so easily contained; especially with a more independent press, one
of the prices the Tories paid for their power, keen to expose every sexual
peccadillo; especially when politicians seemed ready to threaten their
commercial freedom. In an
interesting way it was an attempt to impose an ideology, which was defeated by
the very thing that Zizek believes it tried to justify: desire – power, greed,
sex, consumerism - in all its forms.
He, in the sloppy way of controversialists, has been too quick to
confine “tribalism” and “territoriality” within a single meaning, hoping we
wouldn’t notice the wonderful plazas and colourful temples they have produced
in the localities where they have flourished.48 Should I stop admiring George
Eliot and Rosamund Lehmann because they appeal to English “tribalism”? Should I become indifferent to Norwich
in order to lose my “basic” sense of “territoriality”; that is my aesthetic and
emotional responses to its streets and little side alleys, to the market place
and the cathedral close? One of
the greatest mistakes of the West, and particularly its progressives, has been
its tendency to dismiss the tribal cultures of the rest of the world as
primitive and barbarian; thus ignoring the civility and social organisation
that exists at their core.49 On this (Western) view such societies serve one purpose only – to be
transformed.50
Barbarian impulses exist in all cultures, no matter how
restrained its general behaviour.
Thus the dainty headmistress who while pouring Lady Grey into china
cups, blue gentians on a pink background, talks to her visitors about removing
the Poles and Romanians from our farms and restaurants. Removing them. One of
the interesting aspects about modern life is the civility of our cruelty – we
can anaesthetize it by using technical terms, and by getting other people to do
the job for us. Dennis Potter once exposed this mindset by having the Devil in
his Brimstone
and Treacle glory over the inhuman
details of the repatriation of British subjects. Needless to say the respectable father begins to doubt his
ideas when confronted with the horrible consequences of his beliefs. This is such an important insight! People are far more humane than their
words.51 It is one of the reasons why an
institution should not be run by intellectuals, most of whom seem incapable of
understanding this simple truth; believing instead that in a conflict between
ideas and people it is the latter who must give in.52
Is Zizek unaware of this? I expect not.
However, he prefers to muck about with words and phrases; for with no
obvious influence in the real world he can play the controversialist, knowing
there will be no consequences to his provocations.53 And thus in a strange way he comes to
resemble Tebbit himself, who also liked to épater le bourgeois, although in his case the target was the liberal
intelligentsia – Zizek if he had lived in Britain then.54
After Badiou: Marcuse. The instrumental use of sex in modern capitalism is
interesting. Adam Curtis, as I
have previously mentioned, did a brilliant series on it.55 However, porn played no part in this
documentary; Curtis correctly identifying its miniscule role in the functioning
of the society; not like the control and stimulation of our emotions through
television adverts and the sensory onslaught of the local high street, which
enormously affects our responses to the urban environment.56 Marcuse was too much of his time, too
influenced by Freud, who saw sex everywhere, to have a real understanding of
its impact on the culture. He was
also a “totalizing” thinker who wanted all social data to submit to capitalist
oppression.57 The enormous size of the system, the
overwhelming force of its hegemonic power, reducing constructive human
initiative to zilch. He was a kind
of modern day Martin Luther, although of course his political values were different.58 In such worldviews we must, either
cheerfully or reluctantly, give ourselves up to God’s will.
Once again we have returned to the core of Zizek’s
thought: it has no room for individual freedom.
His attack on the liberals is more focussed, perhaps
because it is easier: they only look at the “objective conditions”, and do not
look at the reasons why this particular riot started at this specific
time. Here he is correct, and I
agree with him absolutely.
Of course to be true is often to be boring…
The reason was that the
truth was just average
On the iniquity scale,
and nobody wanted to get involved.
The average doesn’t sell lots of books or interest many
interviewers.59 So rather than just criticise both
these political views, which are really little more than large generalizations
with little content, he attacks them aggressively: “they are both worse”, as
Stalin would have said.
Stalin! You’re at a party,
and the people ignore you, and when given the chance to talk the guests find
you dull and predictably conventional.
What do you do? Shout
fire! No. This is too extreme. Instead, with fingertips pulling the dress a fraction from her waist - bared at the back it is made of black velvet with a trim of fine lace squeezed tight up against the chin; large off-white buttons on a route march over her fine figure from her neck to her calves - you dribble a little
champagne down the hostess’ knickers and legs, collecting it in a plastic glass around her ankles. You smile. She smiles. And you ask her to drink the “nectar” you have poured into the
“chalice” you have named for the occasion… Stalin! Here is
the clown pushed into the circus tent to brighten up a tired line of
paragraphs.
It is a shame, for what he writes is sensible: don’t
let calls of racism stop you finding out more about the riots. Although with Zizek nothing is so
simple. He inverts the real nature
of the rioting to create some imagined future where there will be a white
backlash arising out the political class’ self interest and lack of curiosity
in their host nation.
Nevertheless, his remarks are well judged: don’t get trapped in class
war clichés of the poor against the rich.
If anything, and again he is surely right, this was one kind of poor
against another; those with nothing against those who have acquired at least
some small thing – such as the café owner or hairdresser in Hoxton Street. He goes too far, of course, for even
here he is making patterns that probably do not exist: the targets are too
random and diverse to suggest such social targeting: there were many riots,
each with their own prejudices; and only some would have a resentment against a
local business, usually for a very special reason.60
Running out of sensible ideas he quotes Zygmunt Bauman:
[He] characterised the
riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything
else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when
unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also
contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to
consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving
us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we
can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so
much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point
of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact
that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair
masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.
There are very few things in life that do not contain
at least some truth. It could be
said simpler, there could be less jargon, but the analysis seems to be
generally true: for many, though not all, the riots were a form of shopping. Of course, Zizek can’t leave it
at. He wouldn’t be the international
celebrity he is if he did. So,
desperate to give a metaphysical meaning to proceedings, all Stalinists are
priests at heart, he argues that this “extreme shopping” is a kind of social
protest. It is possible. For some this may have been the case; stealing
a pack of condoms a self-conscious finger at the CCTV cameras. But as eye-witness reports have shown
many, when they weren’t in organised gangs, simply followed the pressure of
events; picking up stuff because the weight of the situation was too strong to
resist.61 Riots, let us not forget, creates
rioters. Zizek is not satisfied
with such banality. On the
contrary, he needs the event to have a meaning, which he can extrapolate to the
rest of the society. It’s what we
would expect from an intellectual who is more concerned with general “laws”
than particular cases. And once he
has achieved this, it is an excellent
performance, a Houdini escaping from his own chains, he finds that the riots
were ideological after all – irony has saved the day. For in a society where shopping is the new religion
parodying it becomes a rebellious gesture. How smart this man is!
Though one begins to wonder how many intellectuals were amongst the
rioting crowd… Zizek assuming a self-awareness amongst the kids that must have
been largely non-existent.
Non-ideology is really just another kind of ideology,
it seems. Clearly the conventional
wisdom is wrong.
One laughs at (and secretly admires) his
ingenuity. For here is a person
trapped within the liberal world, and from which he is trying so desperately
hard to escape;62 clambering down the Guardian’s office
building using the rope he made from the pages of Hegel’s Outlines
of the Philosophy of Right. Unfortunately… the braided paper is not
strong enough… it breaks… and… we see him fall…
How can violence not be self-assertive? Can you
really assert yourself only through the pages of Tel Quel and Lingua Franca?
Setting fire to a carpet shop is surely saying something, although the
action doesn’t contain any full stops and semi-colons. It is here that Zizek gives himself
away: protest only means something if it is from “a revolutionary point of
view”; that is, from an ideology he himself dictates into the rioters’
megaphone.63 Frustration, anger, a punch in the
face, is not an act of assertive will unless it also demands the overthrow of
the ruling elite. Only the saved,
in modern parlance the self-conscious vanguard, can commit revolutionary
violence, is his considered position.
Any other sort is not acceptable.
It is useless. And
therefore without value. How tame.64 And how capitalist! Even Bentham may have agreed with our
New Age Stalinist, on this point at least.
Zizek is playing with words. Like a clever PR consultant he has changed their meaning, so
that “bad” becomes “good”, and “mad” is “truly astonishing”. Those that are bored with the world may
find this interesting. And in
truth, I was amused as I read it between mouthfuls of muesli.
It is also another example of the despair of the Left
intelligentsia with the once lauded proletariat - now they can’t even trust
them with a riot.65 Although, and very clearly, such a
caveat reveals the central assumption behind this article: only intellectuals
have the right to define what is and what is not acceptable action. Stalin again!
But let us return to the performance.
Once Houdini has escaped from his ropes and chains he
can shout and dance, and congratulate himself on his own brilliance. He can also write about revolution and
violence and carnival; all the clichés of the contemporary academic Left. However, Zizek is cleverer than his
more moderate cohorts; we wouldn’t read him if he wasn’t. Thus his conclusion: the rioters are
really envious and desperate consumers; although the radical intellectuals have
dressed them up in the jackets of Lenin and the berets of Che Guevara. And thus he removes the heaters from
the hot air balloons of his Left wing audience, who, he implies, want to float away inside a fanciful ideology.66 How he laughs as they tumble…
Who reads Zizek?
Do the Right pay him much attention? For them, I guess, he doesn’t seem
worth bothering about. But for the
Left he offers something, coming out, as he does, of the supposedly progressive
world of post-modern academia, where literary critics quote Gramsci and
Deleuze, and believe their (often arcane) work delegitimizes the ruling
establishment.67 Is this the milieu where his audience
resides? An essentially academic
intelligentsia who get their frissons from small ironies? And who enjoy the excitement of their
own prejudices being attacked, although very lightly, and with endless
qualifying clauses – always the writer must tiptoe around the margins of their
underlying assumptions. “And anyway,
he cannot really mean what he says; he is too clever for that” - the dinner
table conversation wafts in between my sentences as I type this paragraph. Is this his audience? I believe it is. Who knows, they might even be reading
these words…
And thus we have the writings of Zizek, who, if I may
be allowed a little conceit, plays the role of Vincent Price for the Left
liberal intelligentsia when they want to see modern capitalism as a horror
show.
After extracting the maximum of meaning from the riots
he throws them into the trashcan:
[They] should be
situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority
today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide
bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a
vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases,
we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit
admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the
UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute
Meaning provided by religion.
There is something to this idea (albeit one has to be
careful of saying that state violence is impotent – it seriously underestimates
both the power and the success of the West’s military interventions; thus
George W. Bush was able to remove the Taliban from office, while Cameron &
Co did kill Gaddafi);68 although we will have to go much deeper than Zizek to make sense of it.
According
to Dave Hill the police refer to their riot gear as NATOs. That is, they see themselves as an
armed and occupying force. This
suggests that policing and armed intervention are beginning to merge; as law
and order becomes security against some general threat to the state and the
nation: terrorism, criminal gangs, drug dealers, even petty criminals, now
viewed as the establishment’s “enemies”.69 It is the inevitable outcome of a
process that has been happening for thirty years, where the poor have been
turned into an “underclass”, and the resistance to American and British
imperialism is deemed “terror”.70 The population and the political class
are beginning to separate; so that much of the country is starting to become a
foreign land to our rulers; and which suggests that we are returning to a time before the
nation state where the Crown and the court were to a large extent removed
from the people they ruled.71
This is perhaps a little too contingent for Zizek, too
much of Tuesday morning in Jane’s Deli
in Cromwell Street and Thursday afternoon at Jack’s Music Emporium on Tudor Drive, to squeeze into some tight
metaphysical theory. To
investigate these problems requires considering too many facts, and involves
far too much reality, for a theorist to easily manipulate.72
His views are revealing in another way: by reducing
terrorism to a religious meaning doesn’t Zizek sound just a little like Samuel
Huntington and his “clash of civilisations”?73 Once again he reveals his mainstream
bias, although disguised amongst fancy rhetoric. If we look carefully, following him down Oxford Street
as he heads for John Lewis, we can see the M&S shirt under his Maoist
jacket and Art Nouveau scarf. So conventional! Even his rebellions are
predictable. A typical teenager.
Do I really need to write that Islamic terrorism has
many purposes and causes: from the expulsion of Russians out of Kabul to
revenge for Britain’s invasion of Iraq;74 and whose motivations can be various - from practical politics to ignorance,
absolute cruelty, and cynicism?75 It can also, and here Zizek is correct,
be purely ideological; but we need to establish these quite specific cases not
assume them from the get-go.76
There is a certain kind of intellectual that is a cynic
and fatalist. Often they have a
strong religious streak, although it is weakened through disillusionment and
lack of faith. They so desperately
want life to have a purpose! But
when they look for it, it is not there.
Too rational to be an unselfconscious believer, they are too full of
religion to be a rational sceptic.
Here is a dilemma, which they cannot easily resolve. They have a tendency to piss over
everybody else’s enthusiasms:
But weren’t the Arab uprisings
a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of
self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the
Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a
time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the
army and the Islamists.
Unless you deal in absolutes such a view is
simple-minded nonsense. Sensible
and well-informed commentators77 have always recognised the limitations of the Arab Spring – it has removed the
dictators but kept the regimes in place.
Nevertheless, they have seen its importance, and its potential, both for
now and in the future. The
reverberations of 1848 lasted more than a few days; decades later people where
drawing inspiration from it.
However, if you think a revolution ends when the president resigns,
allowing the good guys and sweet girls to take charge, then it has to be a
failure, almost by definition, just like just every other revolution in
history, where not a single one has yet managed to create a utopia; and most
have produced a reactionary backlash.
It is a game Zizek is playing.
He knows it, of course.
There is an interesting article in the NYRB by Yasmine
El Rashidi, which supports his contention about the army and the
Islamists. It appears that both
have a vested interest in re-configuring the regime so that it includes the
Muslim Brotherhood, thereby sidelining the liberals.78 Was it ever thus? The French? The Russian? The
Iranian revolution? Do we say that because the good angels
didn’t take charge these events didn’t have momentous effects?79 At the very least the Arab Spring shows how febrile these countries are, and
how unpopular are the ruling elites – from Iran across to Morocco. Last year’s
uprisings, unprecedented in their scale in recent memory, suggest that the
regimes may find it harder to govern over the coming years; although this could
go both ways, of course: it could lead to more repression or more
liberalisation; we will have to see.80
Moreover, to assume that because a regime is Islamist,
and ruled by the army, that it will be reactionary is to think too simply;
lazily resting on comfortable liberal assumptions. Think of Turkey today and compare with just over a decade
ago, when the army ran the country.
Think of Erdogan himself.81 Moreover, as numerous writers have made
clear, there are various types of Islam, from the very liberal to the opaquely
intolerant.82 How these forces actually play out in
the coming decades will depend on factors outside this intellectual’s narrow
theories. Life is more interesting
than metaphysics.
But Zizek is not interested in the world, only in his
own opinions about it. Produced in
our best universities his thinking has imbibed their atmosphere; the academy a
place where ideas are meant to rule.
And where Critical Theory has become a sort of totalitarian dictator who
summons reality to his command.
Stalin once again.
1 For John Peel this was the essence of his public
school education: a smattering of knowledge across a wide range of topics. It was also the reason why he didn’t
like it: he felt he didn’t know very much when it was all finished. Such an education isn’t that dissimilar
from our experience of newspapers.
Are we educated only to
read the press?
2 This piece is based on the print version. The internet has been revised. It has a different title, and has three
extra paragraphs at the beginning.
There are also other minor changes.
3 Obviously aware that he is succumbing to the
conventional wisdom he qualifies it just a little, so highlighting his
acuteness: “if the commonplace… holds at all.”
For
a more far realistic assessment, which argues for the ideological extremism of
our political class, see Ross McKibbin’s blog post In
Defence of British Universities.
4 Daniel Bell, famous for his End
of Ideology thesis, should by all
rights be today’s guru. His book,
now mostly forgotten, is actually a fascinating read. For an insightful critique of this work see The
Chomsky Reader.
5 Hot religions are aggressively evangelical (compare 21st century Wahhabism with 16th century Protestantism), while cold
religions, such as 20th century Anglicanism and European liberal
democracy in the post war period, tend towards an easy toleration.
An
excellent account of the conflict between these two types can be found in
William Dalrymple’s Nine
Lives; In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. The regional cults in the sub-continent are under
threat from a number of ideological forces - the national variant of Hinduism,
Deobandism, Communism, Globalization – and contemporary capitalist development
which, by dissolving the hereditary bonds to custom (today a son will as likely
work in computers as become a singer of epic bards or a maker of idols),
destroys the basis of the local religion.
The book, at least to me (I think Dalrymple would disagree), seems like
an elegy for a past that could disappear, and quite quickly.
His
account is reminiscent of the Bardic society of Wales in the 15th century;
wiped out over the following three hundred years by the gradual assimilation of
the hegemonic culture of the English ruling elite. The similarity between the
Welsh bards and the singers and poets Dalrymple describes is striking. At base they are a fusion of art,
ritual and religion, which is intimately connected to the local social
structure, for which it provides knowledge, entertainment and emotional
release. The Welsh bards also gave
their services to the powerful; establishing hereditary links (they were
genealogists) between contemporary leaders and the great Welsh princes like
Llewellyn, and by giving geo-political advice; usually through prophecy. (See
Glanmor Williams, Renewal
and Reformation, Wales 1415-1642).
6 Though he would love to bring it back:
“When
the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere
protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or
a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert
pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a
reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to
reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.” (My emphasis)
7 Or not so brief…
The
impact in some third world countries was immense. For a good example see Jonathan Steele’s The
Ghosts of Afghanistan. Here the effects lasted from at least
the late Sixties to the late Eighties, and were responsible for the civil war
that ultimately devastated the country; and which still continues; now in its
fifth decade.
This
revolutionary socialism was part of a wider movement of modernisation that
affected all parts of the Afghan elite: the established monarchy, the Marxists
and the Islamicists. All wanted to modernise what they regarded as an archaic
social structure. It was
essentially an urban culture trying to impose itself on the rural majority, who
rejected it. The extremism of the
Marxists (which was too much for the Politburo – see Roderic Braithwaite’s Afgantsy) broke the delicate balance between the cities and the
countryside, and catapulted the country into civil war and ultimate
devastation.
The
radical Marxist and Islamic ideologies were of a simple and very blinkered
kind, the preserve of the intelligent but half educated, and which was imposed
onto a population the ideologues neither understood nor cared about. It was a kind of internal colonialism,
and is just what we would expect from a vanguard party.
Of
course, this is precisely why ideologies are so dangerous: they offer a
powerful and simple formula to the energetic and hasty, who lack a subtle
understanding of knowledge and abstraction, and are unaware of their
ambiguities and contingent nature.
Marxism and the Deobandism of the Taliban are religions for busy women
and men, who need some theoretical instrument to bind themselves together as a
group. They are a substitute for
custom - the clan and tribe and traditional religiosity, often based on rituals
and local saints and shrines - that for centuries have socially glued the
populations of thousands of small rural communities to each other. Such ideologies have the advantage that
they are supra-personal, appealing to a national or international audience who
can easily respond to their (relatively simple) abstractions – they have a uniformity
and relatively low common denominator of belief -, which can attract just about
anyone who shares the same ideas, believed to offer the solution to very
concrete social problems. This is
particularly useful for revolutionaries who, not being intellectuals (the
majority), are influenced by charismatic personalities and purposive action; a
mindset confirmed by Fawaz A. Gerges whose research shows that most jihadis
join the movement out of instinct not ideas. (The
Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global)
An
ideology is also a justification to suppress one’s opponents. One uses it to
impose one’s ideas onto the society.
It is a reason for going to war – against communism, Islam, and the
superstitions of the uneducated.
For social reformers ideology isn’t so much a way of finding out about
the world as a means of proving one is right. Ideologues, I find, tend to know all the answers. Another reason why they are so
dangerous – a position is either absolutely right or certainly wrong; the
latter a precarious place to be if the intellectual you disagree with sits in
the presidential palace.
Ideology
is a weapon of action for those who are separated from their traditional
communities - by education, by location, or by flight -; such as the
disaggregated urban population of Kabul (particularly the upper class
intelligentsia and the rural migrants in the poor suburbs) and the refugees in
Pakistan. Living in an alienated environment their daughters and sons look for
a new force, some powerful idea, to replace the interwoven network of
associations that had previously existed in their villages and mountain
fastnesses. They find such a substitute in the precise certainties of The Good
Book – whether Das Kapital or The
Koran –, which conveniently replaces
the flexible ambiguities of custom and practice; those understandings that are
largely unarticulated and learned through experience, and where the role of
village elders, the repositories of the community’s knowledge, are vital. In contrast the words in The Good Book
appear simple and clear, especially to the clever but callow mind.
“Saleemullah
turned out to be a young, intelligent and well-educated man, who received me
warmly. He was articulate in
debate; but there was no masking the puritanical severity of some of his views.
For
Saleemullah, the theology of the dispute between the Sufis and the orthodox
was quite simple. ‘We don’t like tomb worship,’ he
said. ‘The Quran is quite clear
about this, and the scholars from the
other side choose to ignore what it says.
We must not pray to dead men and ask things from them, even the
saints. In Islam we believe there
is no power but God.” (William
Dalrymple, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. My
emphasis)
Maybe
poorly educated is an incorrect designation. Rather, it is a particular kind of
mentality that believes the words on the page are absolute; that they are
simple facts not contested meanings.
So that the words in The Koran
or Das Kapital are like the words
in a dictionary whose meaning are fixed by the definitions it contains (my Silly
Billy has a typical
example). And it seems that this
is precisely the kind of mentality that modern education, whether in Kabul
University in the 1960s or the madrasas of Pakistan in the 1990s, encourages – at least to those who are
susceptible to its influence. It
is a modern phenomenon, and seems linked to literacy and the education of the
youth: how intoxicating to find new worlds on the page and to realise you know
more than your father, whose knowledge you no longer respect. (This clash of
generations is brilliantly brought out in Orlando Figes’ A
People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924)
Helen
Armstrong in The
Battle for God makes a similar
point: she argues that the literalism of fundamentalism is a modern disease. Thus those so “clear”
words that suggest such “simple” actions to Saleemullah, who wants them to
replace the often unarticulated and vague (though at the same time compulsive)
codes that govern daily life in traditional communities; and which are still
dominant in western society too...
Most
of what we do (outside of those work related tasks that require precision) is
done in a rough and ready way, and is carried out in a reflexive and habitual
manner. It is rarely consciously
articulated; most of our interaction with other people relying on gestures,
facial expressions and simple communicative phrases. When I was young I found
this confusing; for there was so much I didn’t understand, or more correctly –
there was so much I was not sure about. Nearly everything had to
be interpreted, which produced uncertainty: “what does Jackie’s smile
mean? That she likes me? She does! But then how much…?”
For a particular type of mind this is unbearable (and the puritanical
nature of many of these idealogies suggests a link to febrile emotions and
blossoming sexuality). These adolescents
need certainty now! Such a mindset
is highly prevalent among young people who have yet to learn the social signs,
and intellectuals who live in a self-created environment of abstraction that
appears to offer the simple certainties of ideas in contrast to the ambiguities
of lived life.
Of
course, not all intellectuals (and not all adolescents) are addicted to this
need. They must be of a particular
cast of mind which, like Zizek’s, are attracted to ideologies offering the
solution to the problem of the world.
They tend to be disciples rather than creative thinkers, the latter
often puzzled by what they find around them. In this sense, and in this sense alone, these thinkers are
often closer to the ordinary man than the ideologues who praise him. Neither believe life can be reduced to
a simple idea (the one because it doesn’t concern him, the other because she
recognises their complex nature).
For a telling contrast it is useful to compare Zizek with Noam Chomsky,
the latter always sceptical of modern religions, whether of the Left or Right;
and who spends his professional life questioning reality rather than arguing it
away (see the footnote vi in my
Professional Amateurs; a piece about modern academics’ blindness to
the corporeality of David Hume’s thought).
Of
course there are huge differences between “primitive” communities and
industrial societies; differences which decisively affect the common humanity
underlying all cultures (Alan Macfarlane
argues the central purpose of anthropology is to find out what is natural
and what is cultural in the human species). In modern life there is an increasingly successful attempt
to introduce the fixed certainties of the machine and the bureaucracy - the
rule, the template, category - into daily living. In business, efficiency means doing the same thing in the
same way until the next technological improvement reduces an individual’s
freedom in their task; from the previous one foot to the future 11.5
centimetres. Standardisation,
which in industry has been to a large extent achieved, is now rapidly
encroaching on other aspects of life – from clerical jobs to leisure activities
– as the technology becomes faster and more sophisticated; so that what were
once the exaggerated fears of intellectuals eighty years ago are now present
realities. (See an excellent discussion of F.R. Leavis and Scrutiny by Stefan Collini in The TLS, 21/11/2012.)
In
academia, that increasingly illusionary bastion of free thought, “Critical
Theory” is a stunning example of the bureaucratic mind. The uniqueness of each work of art
reduced to a standardised formula, created by a Marx, a Freud and a Derrida;
with Foucault and Lacan waiting to be promoted to the senior administrative
level (for more discussion see The
Triumph of Literary Politics of Over Honest Criticism).
What
is particularly acute (and tragic) about Afghanistan is that these trends, so
apparent in the West, and which seem to be increasing in speed and efficacy,
and which are part of a historical process that is at least four hundred, if
not a thousand, years old (its origins in the law courts of the Universal
Church – see R.W. Southern, Western
Society and the Church in the Middle Ages), have been violently imposed on a country that is not ready for
them. A culture which has
gradually evolved in minute steps, and whose speed of change is now
accelerating, is being forced onto a people who, quite naturally, find it
alienating, and who therefore resist it, creating the civil war to which there
seems no end. Unless the West recognises
that it has to compromise with traditional societies, however unpleasant it
finds their practices, its only solution is to obliterate them; and this does
indeed seem to be what America is currently doing in Afghanistan.
“…they
refurbished the old base. Then to
make it more secure without so many foot patrols, they used armoured bulldozers
to flatten walls and compounds on either side of Pharmacy Road without seeking
permission from local people. One
of the buildings they demolished was a mosque across the road from the
base…“(Jonathan Steele)
Of
course, this is a technical solution to a technical problem – to prevent
soldiers being killed. It also
strangely and suggestively resembles the Taliban, who also have little respect
for the local communities: “the burning of the whole village is not what
Russians did” (an elder to Jonathan Steele).
Rather
than negotiate a solution to the problem of snipers and roadside bombers, and
which involves some risk, the safest solution is to completely destroy a part
of the village. To resolve a very
human problem, how to get the community to stop supporting the Taliban, the
simplest and most efficient answer is found: a machine will remove the
necessary buildings so that it doesn’t matter what the population does. It is an example of the West’s
impersonalism, which generates its inhumanity. And is nicely captured the responses to this incident:
“’Short
term there is a sacrifice of convenience to an extreme degree, and that’s not
something that’s lost on us. But I
think what people understand is that in order to increase security on that
route and in order to prevent the enemy from putting IEDs there, these types of
drastic steps are necessary’” (Captain Matt Peterson)
The
response from the local population? “’Can democracy be brought by cannon? Is that what the meaning of democracy
is in the world? We don’t want
this democracy. We don’t want this
law of the infidel, we want the rule of Islam.” (Both quotes from Ghosts of
Afghanistan.)
This
scene at the village is also a terrible metaphor for our technocratic
mentality, which looks to reduce risks at all costs – for us.
(It
is useful to compare these American actions with the more successful Soviet
officers, who were able to reach compromises and make deals with local elders
(and some of these were extraordinary; such as the mujahideen leader who asked
a local Russian commander for details of a mujahideen raid so they could kill
the raiders in revenge for the death of a relative), thus protecting their
bases from regular attack. Rodric
Braithwaite makes the telling point that many Soviets were close to the Afghans
in background and outlook, and felt sympathy for them. Of course, I expect the Americans and
the Brits, Jonathan Steele says as much in his book, are making similar
deals. However, the general trend,
at least according to Braithwaite, is that the Soviets were more adept at it
than NATO; although this is not to ignore or underplay the devastation of the
Soviet invasion; Colin Thubron noting the carpet-bombing in his Shadow
of the Silk Road. Moreover, the destruction of historical
monuments for utilitarian military ends is not a recent phenomenon, thus the
British destruction of the Musalla at Herat, so as to improve their line of
fire during the Panjdeh incident in 1885. (Robert Byron, The
Road to Oxiana. Thubron confirms Byron’s belief that
the British not the Afghanis were responsible for this action.))
Later
in Steele’s book an Afghan government official is quoted as saying they want
human relations in their country not institutions; a reference to the UN’s call
to reduce corruption, much of which arises from the patronage system of the kin
groups who run their regions. It
again suggests the deep cultural divisions between the two societies, and the
West’s reluctance to recognise the validity of a competing social model. Clinton was very explicit about this:
in a speech he said that “we don’t want global inter-dependence, we want
integration” (Steven Coll, Ghost
Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet
Invasion to September 10th, 2001). Globalization is actually a neo-liberal imperial
ideology, one of the reasons many are prepared to resist it.
It
is also enlightening to compare the Russian response to the Mujahideen,
particularly the sympathetic account in Afgantsy, with Steven Coll’s description of the Reaganite
establishment in Ghost Wars. The latter didn’t care about the Afghan
population at all. There are many
examples on Coll’s book, but perhaps the most egregious is their refusal to
make peace after the Russian withdrawal.
All they wanted to do was “kill Soviets” and remove communists. The whole decade long episode reduced
to a simple Cold War abstraction of good guys against bad guys.
The
Afghan wars also suggest something else about the nature of the modern West:
the desire to replace the diversity of community action with the conformism of
a liberal individuality that requires we be more or less the same – differences
are allowed providing they do not threaten the core consensus, determined by
the corporate establishment. It is
a highly productive way of living, but subtly, and sometimes uncomfortably,
restricting; as we are expected to submit ourselves to the regulations,
practices and culture of the institutions who employ, feed, and entertain us. Like the Soviets before us we are
bringing progress to Afghanistan.
But like them, do we really know what progress is, and to where it is
leading?
Having
finished this footnote I realise there might be some misunderstanding about my
position. I am not suggesting that a primitive community is better than a
modern civilisation (I am not a Leavisite). I have no desire to make a cultural valuation. Rather it is the transition between the
two that interests me. Any society
undergoes change, some miniscule and over a very long time, others
extraordinarily sudden, and within a few years. The latter can be devastating –
the social equivalent of that US army bulldozer. It is thus surely not a
coincidence that the Marxist leader of Khalq, Hafizullah Amin, was an admirer
of Stalin: both wanted to quickly force, to effectively bully and brutalise, an
essentially medieval country into the 20th century. If we are humane, we would prefer the
social transformation to be as painless as possible; the exact opposite to what
has happened in Afghanistan. In
this regard, Karl Polanyi’s The
Great Transformation is
enormously important, for this question is at the core of this classic book:
how can a society moderate the hardship of societal change and breakdown. His answer? We must slow it down.
8 Although establishment intellectuals would have found
it harder to see such obvious discrepancies. This is beautifully caught in
Afgantsy, where young Russian
idealists were sent out to reform Afghanistan with an ideology that was
collapsing in their home country:
“Yes,
everyone was equally poor, but there was no terrible poverty, and there was a
giant industry, canals, hydroelectric stations. Were it not for our sclerotic leadership, people like
Brezhnev, everything would work out differently. That’s what I thought, that’s what many people my age
thought. When we arrived in
Afghanistan, even before we had had time to look around, we began to do what we
had prepared ourselves to do for the whole of our lives… a power had arisen in
this land which wanted to drag the people from out of their superstition, to
give children the chance to go to school, peasants the possibility to plough
their fields with tractors instead of oxen, women the opportunity to see the
world directly, instead of through the eye slits of the chador…” (Vladimir
Snegirev)
What
is clear from Braithwaite’s account is that although the country was breaking
down, the establishment was unable to think outside the Marxist assumptions
that structured the Soviet culture, thus preventing foundational change to the
way the society was run. However,
such theoretical limitations didn’t preclude flexible and sophisticated
analysis of contemporary events; thus most of the Politburo knew that the
invasion was an error; the reason they delayed making the fateful
decision.
It
is not that ideology blinds us to reality. Rather, it limits our theoretical options, which in turn
places restrictions both on policy and structural and strategic change. Thus the realisation by many in
Afghanistan that the ideas and theories prevalent in the Soviet Union were of
little use in a country that had a completely different economic and social
structure, producing a rural culture impervious to “development” and
“progress”. However, they were
unable to convince their superiors in Moscow to change their strategies. Of course, by the time it reaches the
central bureaucracies there are many levels of officialdom that have a vested
interest in maintaining the prevailing ideological nostrums. They also have the
power and influence to do so.
Steven
Coll’s description of the expansion of the CIA and related Washington
bureaucracies to supply the mujahideen suggests a similar process in
America. A startling story about
the marginalisation of a middle ranking CIA officer in the Islamabad embassy
shows how far vested interests high in the bureaucracy will go to resist
analysis which severely contradicts policy and questions fundamental
assumptions. (See Ghost Wars for
details of the campaign to discredit and sack Edmund McWilliams.)
10 For an interesting account about Romania see Patrick
McGuinness’ review of Burying the Typewriter (TLS,
09/11/2012) Here decline set in the 1980s.
11 This is wonderfully captured by Adam Curtis in his
blog piece on the Soviet Union.
See in particular the section on the Russian counter-culture in the
1980s, and their total disregard for the mainstream consensus, now considered
absurd.
12 Zizek’s interest (obsession?) in Lacan is suggestive
in this regard.
13 See John Gray’s insight into J.G. Ballard, where he
quotes Joseph Conrad’s exhortation to submit to the destruction of one’s
cultural fictions:
“A
man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air
like inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns… No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element
submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water
make the deep, deep sea keep you up…
In the destructive element immerse” (New Statesman 5-11/10/2012)
14 Original thought requires the stimulation of
experienced fact. See Magee’s
biography of Schopenhauer
for an analysis of an intellectual
position that was central to this thinker. This philosopher is famous for his attacks on Zizek’s
favourite – Hegel.
15 Memorably captured in Colin Thubron’s The
Lost Heart of Central Asia when a
young man desperately tries to persuade him to convert to Islam so that he can
escape the horrors of an infidel’s death.
Everything rests on that one decision.
16 The latter, I believe, is Stephen Hawking’s position.
17 According to Steve Connor Zizek has a name for serious
thinkers: “fuzzy-minded moron”. The review is interesting because it confirms
his obsession with binary thinking.
He is a natural ideologue.
(TLS 26/10/2012)
18 Rather than the state it is private credit that
stimulates demand in the economy.
The results are similar, the economy is kept afloat through regular
injections of financial ballast and state intervention, although the mechanisms
for achieving it, and the distribution of wealth, are quite different. See Andrew Gamble’s The Spectre at the Feast.
19 See my Much
Too Nice, which argues that one
of the mistakes of the Left has been its obtuseness to the significant
differences between different styles of capitalism.
For
a fascinating example of how these changes affect the politics and economy in
sub-Sahara Africa see my discussion of Alex de Waal superb essay in Remove
the Tribes and Be
Individuals! Chalmers Johnson in his classic MITI
and the Japanese Miracle
describes the revolutionary changes that the Japanese establishment made to
state capitalism after the Second World War. Such a study is far more revealing than an ideological
shouting match about capitalism and socialism, which often overlooks a rather
obvious fact: the similarities between the Soviet Union and the United States
often outweighed their differences.
To take one obvious example: the forced industrialisation of the 1920s
and 30s used Taylorist production techniques and American engineers. (In what is an old book now Richard
Crossman made this very point, highlighting the similarities between
capitalism, communism and fascism in his Government
and the Governed).
20 This is my reading of Donald Sassoon’s enormous One
Hundred Years of Socialism; a
classic that has to be read if the malaise of the contemporary Left is to be
properly understood.
21 Steve Connor’s review of Zizek latest magnum opus
confirms this (clearly obsessive) intellectual tic (TLS 26/10/2012).
It
is a characteristic he shares with William Casey, former head of the CIA. See
Steven Coll’s description of him in Ghost Wars.
Reading
this book I am unclear as to the author’s view on Casey and the other
Reaganites. The tone is relatively
neutral, but suggests he is generally sympathetic – thus he rarely condemns
their actions. In my opinion, most
of them appear as pathological and criminally ill-informed; full of paranoid
fantasies about the Communist Conspiracy.
They come across as quite nasty people, with little humanity. This is no doubt related to their
ideological fanaticism and bureaucratic methods – they didn’t have to encounter
individual victims, who they simply erased from their consciousness.
Coll
himself seems to suffer from the same predicament as his protagonists: lack of
interest in America’s opponents.
Very little time is spent actually trying to find out the reasons why
the jihadis or the Soviet Union act as they do. This is stunningly brought out
at the end of the book when Coll suggests some policy advice for American
planners, which includes the argument that there should be more secular
education in the Middle East.
Islam is the problem, it seems.
This is extraordinary ignorance!
Think of the non-religious technical education of the 9-11 hijackers. Or even more telling is the origins of
the Muslim Brotherhood: both its founder, Hasan al-Banna, and its main
ideologist, Sayyid Qutb, were educated in a Cairo secular school, possibly an
influence on their later views.
(Gilles Kepel, The
Roots of Radical Islam. Later in the book he notes that in the 1970s many of
the radical Islamists were former Marxists.)
22 In this sense he is part of the liberal elite and
shares its ideology. For an
analysis of Noam Chomsky’s confrontation with this establishment see my Ouch!
Interestingly, in a review
of Paul Hallward’s Damning
the Flood, Zizek quotes Chomsky
from that book:
“It
is only when the threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic
forms can be safely contemplated".
Zizek’s
interpretation of this statement?
“He
thereby pointed at the "passivising" core of parliamentary democracy,
which makes it incompatible with the direct political self-organisation and
self-empowerment of the people.”
Zizek
has creatively misinterpreted Chomsky; whose thought is far more nuanced than
this. While believing in popular action he doesn’t argue that parliamentary
democracy is empty of content, the implication here; only that the powerful use
it in their own interests to disenfranchise the people they supposedly
represent. In this particular case
democracy was suppressed when there seemed a real threat of power being
transferred to Aristide and his movement. Parliamentary democracy reinstated
only when the business class felt safe to hold an election they believed they
could not lose. Chomsky’s argument
is not only very different from Zizek’s summation it actually negates it.
For
an ideologist there can be no such subtlety; it is us and them, all or nothing,
utopia or apocalypse. There can be
a parliament of big business or popular democracy on the streets; rule-bound
bureaucracy or spontaneous action on the public squares...
For
such a mind the free-thinking civil servant is an anomaly that does not
exist. A celebrated thinker who
depends on such simple dichotomies, and who can make such an oversight, tells
us something of the paucity of this kind of thought.
23 For a demolition job on Alain Badiou see Roger Scruton
in the TLS 29/08/2012.
24 Nicely caught in a recent LRB article on the economics of football.
Jonathan
Zittrain’s book, The
Future of the Internet,
emphasises the academic (although he curiously calls it “amateur”) nature of
the original internet, and which is the reason, surely, for its anarchic
structure. The current trend is
for the corporations to both capture and contain the internet; reducing its
freedom by replacing the current openness by a more limited but secure access
to a range of dedicated services and appliances they themselves supply – Apple
now the market leader in this
strategy.
Although
Zittrain’s book is too ideological (he is another academic that likes simple
binary conflicts, in his case between generative and fixed appliances), and
either ignores or misreads the development history of the internet (its origins
in military research), while also underplaying the inventiveness of artists in
the pre-computer world, it is useful for highlighting just how much of the web
is designed around academic nostrums and practices. It suggests something about
the nature of contemporary freedom: the old fashioned university, even when
funded by the Pentagon, was an intellectually freer place than a modern culture
dominated by the corporation, which wants to restrict knowledge by private
monopoly. The internet a symbol
not so much of a new order (although it is that) as the epitaph for an old
one.
(For
lots more comment on the universities and how they are changing, see my Looking
in the Mirror, Part I and Part
II. David Edgerton’s The
Shock of the Old is a useful
corrective to the somewhat naïve techno-utopianism of Zittrain’s important
book.)
26 In a talk in the Netherlands Norman Finkelstein said
that many Leftists of the 1970s had shifted their concerns by the 1990s; with
many moving into the international law sector; seen as the most useful means of
bringing justice – by trying to enforce the details of international
legislation. Here, ideology has
been replaced by an instrumental functionalism that is nevertheless guided by a
sense of social justice.
27 He has also overlooked Islam. This is brilliantly caught in Colin
Thubron’s The Lost Heart of Central Asia; written just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book, full of visits to ruined
cities which ends on a burial mound of “some Scythian or Turkic chief”, charts
the demise of Communism and its replacement by confusion, and by religion and
nationalism. One ideology has
gone, and tradition is reasserting itself, though filtered through the remnants
of Communism (Thubron is adept at showing what people regard as ancient myths
are actually Soviet indoctrination), Turkic nationalism, and the new religious
fundamentalisms. However, there is
a clear distinction between the local Islam, fused with custom and older
religious practices, and its foreign variants, which are scriptural and
intolerant. Most of its population
wary or openly hostile to what is regarded as the alien evangelicalism of
Wahhabism and Deobandism, which are an essentially modernising religions, and
not that dissimilar from a communism they wish to repudiate.
For
confirmation of these views see Steven Coll’s The War of Ghosts, where he writes that Maulana Abu Ala Maududi set up
the Jamaat-e-Islami on Leninist lines, and Jonathan Steele’s The Ghosts of
Afghanistan, where the Taliban are
described as a “Vanguardist brotherhood”. Ahmed Rashid’s description of Radical
Islam could in most respects also be applied to the Western Leftist groups of
the sixties and seventies:
“They
rejected nationalism, ethnicity, tribal segmentation and feudal class
structures in favour of a new Muslim internationalism…. To achieve this, parties like the
Pakistani Jamaat and Hikmetyar’s Hizb-e-Islami set up highly centralized modern
parties organized along communist lines with a cell system, extreme secrecy,
political indoctrination and military training.
“The
greatest weakness of the Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] model of political Islam
is its dependence on a single charismatic leader… The obsession of radical
Islam is not the creation of institutions, but the character and purity of its
leader, his virtues and qualifications and whether his personality can emulate
the personality of the Prophet Mohammed…” (Taliban. Compare
with the personality cults around figures like Lenin and Trotsky in the Marxist
fringes of British politics in the 1970s; although Rashid’s last paragraph
suggests the influence of the Middle East’s traditional culture on this 20th century religion).
The
Taliban are particularly modern in wishing to reject modern society wholesale
(think of all those hippies who went East, including to Afghanistan, during the
sixties and seventies; and whose mindset is captured in a classic film of the
period: Performance, where the earthly paradise, or so the movie’s
bohemians believe, is to be found in Persia). Their one difference with the New Left is their hostility to
the traditional customs and practices of Afghan society, which they believe are
un-Islamic. Here we see the
influence of the older communist model.
28 A good account can be found in Thomas Frank’s The
Wrecking Crew; where he shows how
much the New Right models itself on the New Left on the 1960s. Lenin is a big influence in these
circles.
The
Communist Party seems to have been the model for all radical parties in the 20th century,
irrespective of politics or religion.
This influence is perhaps worth a book in itself.
For
a good analysis of cultural hegemony see Corey Robin’s Achieving
Disunity in the LRB; where he argues that when an ideology approaches a
monopoly of the thinking classes it influences all sides of the ideological
debate. Surely the situation with the New Right today.
29 For the reference see footnote xii in my Dropout
Boogie. Interestingly, the rating
system for academics is the basis of Google’s success – see Daniel Soar’s piece
in the LRB.
30 Ernest Gellner has insightful comment on the
institutional need for subjectivity in his Postmodernism,
Reason and Religion. It allows for the exponential and
hassle free growth of knowledge inside the modern university.
31 In today’s West Adam Smith fulfils this function. His ideas often diametrically opposed
to the constructions ideologues and politicians put on them. See Noam Chomsky for an illuminating discussion
on the misreading of Smith’s “invisible hand”. Amartya Sen reaches similar conclusions in his The
Argumentative Indian.
32 Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing
Consent is a good place to start
for the reasoning and evidence behind this assertion. The latter’s Necessary
Illusions gives a number of case
studies that conclusively prove the ideological nature of particularly
the American corporate media.
The
role of a mainstream intellectual is to buttress the prevailing establishment
culture, which is both a simple and natural exercise, involving the mostly
unconscious assimilation of its foundational assumptions, acquired by simply
being part of the cultural milieu – thus a mainstream newspaper will create
mainstream journalists. It is
actually harder to resist its influence; the reason there are so few radical
critics in the corporate press.
For a case study about a specific academic see my Looking
in the Mirror Part II.
33 See the interviews in The
Guardian and The
Telegraph. In a more serious journal like the TLS
the verdict is more critical, noting
the errors, the curious reasoning, and the lack of intellectual depth; although
at the same time acknowledging that his exposition is comprehensible; the
reason for his success.
“Although
he can prove perplexing and exasperating to the reader, it is not usually
because of any particular obscurity in his manner of explication. It may sometimes be a bit mysterious
why he thinks what he does, or why he thinks that the things he thinks might
join up in the way he supposes they do, but the elements of that thought are
usually plain enough and frequently reiterated.” (Steve Connor, TLS 26/10/2012)
34 Compare with the mainstream commentators who also
wanted the riots to express a wider meaning. For a criticism of this view see my Poor
Hackney. Zizek is cleverer than most, thus he
recognises that meanings must be internal to the event; so that when he looks
at the London riots he finds none, and acknowledges it. But then in typical showman style he
magics a unicorn onto an empty stage: the non-existence of meaning is
meaning! They symbolise something
after all! This is his special
quality.
35 They are thus very different from the Occupy
Movement. See my argument
with Michael Albert on this distinction; and also David Runciman in
the LRB, who makes the good point that it is a mistake to conflate
the mindset of the occupying activists with the majority in the wider society –
these are very different people.
While this latter piece is usefully sceptical it goes too far; Runciman
seeming to argue against the book he is reviewing rather than thinking for
himself.
What
is clear from this article is that the activists have a clear sense of the
injustice of the present system, though without a worked our programme or
coherent ideology, and which has at least communicated itself to the political
class. How much that has filtered
down to the rest of the society is difficult to establish. When I talked to some “ordinary” people
they had no idea what Occupy was about (and I don’t think this is
unusual). However, when I talked
about inequality, the financialisation of the economy, the 2007 crash, and the
squeeze on the public sector, and linked it to the concerns of Occupy, they
very quickly saw the connection.
They share the same worries, but do not articulate in such general
terms. Their opinions tending to
be more particular and personal, concerned with their own jobs, heath and old
age pensions.
Dealing
with this mental narrowness may be the hardest task for activists and progressive
thinkers. As a minimum they must
create a language that encompasses general trends with the specific, and often
selfish, concerns of non-engaged people with minimal intellectual or political
interests.
36 See Ian Gilmour for an intelligent discussion of this
question in his Riots,
Rising and Revolution. See also Colin Leys’ discussion of the Brixton riots
in Politics
of Britain.
37 Suggestive is the TLS’s review of Harriet Sergeant’s book on teenage gangs, Among the Hoods. Many of
their members suffered mashed up childhoods, and consequently exist on the
margins of society; disregarding most of its rules. My guess is it is these kinds of teenagers and young adults
that were responsible for much of the looting (although as eye-witness
testimony shows a wide range of people were involved; many prompted by the
occasion. See my Poor
Hackney).
38 Of course, an uprising that develops into a widespread
revolt, which seeks to overthrow the ruling elite, is a different matter
again. For a brilliant history of
an uprising that became a national liberation movement read R.R. Davies’ The
Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr.
The
15th and 16th centuries are a fruitful source for looking
at riots and rebellions, which were usually reactive responses to crown
impositions; that ranged from increased taxation to religious transformation. They were effectively defensive, a
reflexive gesture to maintain present income and employment and safeguard
existing customs which were perceived to be under threat.
Rebellions,
which may arise from similar causes, but whose purpose is to overthrow the
king, tended to be led by disaffected members of the aristocracy who sought
power for themselves. When the Reformation occurred an ideological element
entered into these dynastic squabbles, which made them more effective and thus
increased their force and capacity; perhaps best seen in 16th century France, when whole regions where bound together not only by kin and
semi-feudal ties but by religion too. Here England was lucky. Its major dynastic disputes occurred in
the century before the religious wars, and were thus, except for a few years in
the middle of the century, reasonably contained and short-lived (see J.R.
Lander’s Government
and Community, which exposes some
myths about the Wars of the Roses). The revolt of Owain Glyndwr is an exception
because it did have an ideology: Welsh nationalism.
If
my reading is correct, it suggests that rebellion and revolution are essentially
actions of the elite; where sometimes, like in the English Civil War or the
French Revolution, the establishment loses complete control, bringing down the
whole system with them; and thus creating an opportunity for the anarchic
population to act.
What
is interesting about the 15th and 16th centuries is that
for all the rebellions and attempted coups the aristocracy was never weakened
quite enough for the radical populace to replace them; even during the mid 15th century when the British Crown was at its weakest and civil war and banditry
were at their height. The peasants
and artisans lacking the necessary organisation and ideology – they were too
scattered and too local, too suffused with customary loyalties – to take power
and rule for themselves. This
could only happen later, when the Crown became more centralised, and the
institutions of state more dominant, thus removing all those bulwarks of
aristocratic control – the Northern Barons, the Marcher Lords, the court and
independent Earls – which had previously protected the establishment from its
subjects. (See G.R. Elton in Reformation
Europe who effectively argues
that the Marxist idea of a rising bourgeoisie ignores the main development of the
period: the increasing power and reach of a centralising state).
Before
the creation of the nation state these aristocratic groups had their own
discrete power; and a single uprising by sections of the populace could not
hope to remove them all. And to
have been successful such an uprising would have required a unifying ideology
that could bind a disparate nation together – precisely what happened in the
Reformation, which sustained civil wars by creating common friends and enemies
outside traditional kinship and “bastard feudal” obligations.
(Norman
Cohn’s Pursuit
of the Millennium would appear to
undermine this thesis; his book is about how common men and women were bound
again by a revolutionary religion.
However, the movements he describes, often galvanised by itinerant
radicals, were apocalyptic – they didn’t want to usurp authority so much as to
escape from it. Of course, as he
explicitly recognises, significant elements of this tradition form part of
modern radical movements; especially prevalent with the Radical Right at the
end of the 19th century; who believed in capturing the state,
usually by some coup or conspiracy.
His Warrant
for Genocide is concerned with
this modern, particularly Fascist, phenomenon. Interestingly, this kind of apocalyptic ideology is
replicated in many of the radical jihadi groups – thus under the influence of Qutb
one branch of Egyptian Islamists sort to infiltrate the army and stage a coup
d’état, and thus instigate a
religious reformation from above.)
(For
the national character of particularly Luther’s influence see Owen Chadwick’s Reformation. For
“bastard feudalism see G.R. Elton’s England
Under the Tudors. For Egypt see
Gilles Kepel’s The Roots of Radical Islam. For an extreme example of a revolutionary religion in the modern period
whose sole task was a military coup d’état see Fawaz A. Gerges’ discussion of the nationalist
jihadis, and particularly Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Tanzim al-Jihad, in his The
Far Enemy.)
And
one could go further, and speculate even more… England was lucky because it was
reasonably centralised before the Reformation, and was thus unified enough to
stop an internal religious war; unlike France, which was still assimilating its
territories during the 16th century. Of course there were a number of rebellions throughout the
Tudor dynasty, but they were contained relatively easily (See D.M. Loades, Politics
and the Nation: England 1450-1660,
for a particularly good overview of the period.) A centralised state, and then a massive injection of capital
in the landed market through the dissolution of the monasteries, the basis for
England’s later commercial success.
39 Andrew Gamble calls it “recreational rioting” in his review of Chavs in the TLS.
40 Aldous Huxley once made the telling point that the
worse thing imaginable for a businessman is a person who sits in a room and
thinks; for he requires nothing in order to do this activity. It is a wonderful comment on modern
life: capitalism, in order to survive, requires us to forgo the very thing that
makes us uniquely human – disinterested thought.
41 An enlightening discussion can be found in Michael
Ignatieff’s comparison of the pre-capitalist and capitalist models of Rousseau
and Adam Smith in his insightful The
Needs of Strangers. Rousseau, he
argues, clearly understood the dangers of unleashing capitalist desires – they
are infinite and inherently destructive of community life.
42 For a much more sophisticated analysis of Beast
and Man see Mary’s Midgley
eponymously titled book. One of
the points she makes in this classic work is that we degrade animals by
describing human’s worst actions as beastly. They are usually far more restrained in their desires than
us.
43 The design?
An enormous face bent over a large tome, The
Philosophy of History (of
course), with bags under the eyes like panniers stretched down to the illegible
pages. There is a barricade of
books between his desk and the window, and a skyscraper of paper behind his
chair; leaning at an acute angle it is going to fall and brain him at any
minute. The caption: Revolutionary Situation!
44 Surely the essence of behaviourism. See my analysis in Tantrum (footnote viii)
There
are very many caveats to this simple generalisation. Ibn Khaldun blamed the loss of a cohesive spirit (he called
it asabiyah) for a civilisation’s
collapse. Believed to be both
over-refined and too sensual in its pleasures the city was therefore too
communally weak and individualistic to adequately resist the raiding tribes who
shared a common solidarity. (Muqaddimah:
An Introduction to History)
Khaldun’s
theory, of an ideologically cohesive tribe in the desert that suddenly acquires
the strength and momentum to destroy and purify an ailing urban civilisation,
although mostly applied to North Africa (see the essays in Ernest Gellner’s Muslim
Society) is a useful theoretical
model for understanding Afghanistan, since at the least the early 1970s; where
there has been a clear cultural division between particularly Kabul and the
rural areas. One could easily
imagine the Taliban drawing close parallels with the Prophet Mohammed’s life,
the prototype for Khaldun’s analysis, as they appeared to re-enact it.
Fawaz
Gerges also uses the term asabiyah
to describe the psychological bonds that united the individual jihadi
sects. Although clearly modern,
ideology has replaced kinship as the bond of solidarity, these groups are
reminiscent of the early Khaldun model – small tribes coming out of the desert
to cleanse a corrupt civilisation.
Their central concern, until bin Laden persuaded Zawahiri to target
America, the lack of piety of both the leaders and the population of the Muslim
countries. That is, they were
seeking a reformation of their own societies from above – by political action
or military coup. They are
contemporary John Calvins with guns (Gerges notes that the Jihadis generally,
and bin Laden in particular, by imposing their interpretation on the Koran and
the Sunna, and thus interposing themselves between God and man, were actually
creating a church; and so turning Islam into a form of Christianity).
William
Dalrymple’s account of the fading Mughal world of India would suggest a huge
qualification to my argument, as this was a society that revelled in
sensuality. However, these desires
were accommodated within a highly stratified social world, buttressed by a
plethora of rituals, and whose foundation was a strong religiosity. Sex, for example, did not undermine
religion, but could be easily assimilated to it. Dalrymple brings this out particularly starkly with his
description of the Shia festival of Maula Ali, where religious intoxication and
sexual excess was often fused during the celebrations.
Reading
The
White Mughals one gets a sense of
a syncretic culture which allowed the different aspects of the individual
personality to happily coexist (religion and violence - the Muharram festival
in Hyderabad -, sex and high art, intelligence and cupidity etc). Moreover, what we regard as “base” or
“animal” was not necessarily seen as such in the court of Nawab Mir Nizam Ali
Khan. Desire, for example, could also be raised up to the level of the human
through the use of perfumes and other sensual aides so as to make an art of the
sexual act.
And
thus the Nizam’s court could accept James Achilles Kirkpatrick because he had
made himself into a finely crafted courtier. The refined and intelligent aristocrat, formed by the full
wealth of human culture, was
surely the apogee of this society; and this co-existed with a full sensual
life.
Dalrymple’s
rich book charts the moment when the British were beginning to dominate India,
and to denigrate the sensual side of the indigenous culture (although
hypocritically partaking of it – see the comments on the governor general of
the East India Company, Richard Wellesley). This change in attitude part of a wider transformation in
values that was tending towards a moral Puritanism which reached its apogee in
the 1840s (see Harold Perkin’s The
Origins of Modern English
Society:1780-1880, and also
George Eliot’s Adam
Bede for a case study that notes
its later spiritual degradation); and to which the later twentieth century
seems to have reacted (in the extreme).
45 Theodore Fontane’s novels are brilliant studies of
this culture. See in particular
his Effi
Briest and No
Way Back.
46 In an interesting talk on language and
cognition Noam Chomsky notes that the idea of a language faculty, something
is both uniquely human and intellectually obvious, is denied by a majority of
academics in the specialised fields pertaining to the brain sciences. A dogma exists that says language is
simply a by-product of other cognitive systems. It is a suggestive comment, which implies, at least this is
my reading, that one of the foundation myths of modernity is that man can be
reduced to an animal, a synecdoche for nature.
47 For an excellent analysis of the cultural roots of
Thatcher’s counter-revolution see Andrew Gamble’s The
Free Economy and the Strong State. His argument is that initially the
economics were less important than the visceral hate of the liberal social
reforms of the 1960s; Monetarism a seemingly scientifically neutral theory that
could justify the anti-liberal prejudices of the politicians and
ideologues. Later, and especially
after the collapse in the Keynesian consensus in the mid Seventies, it was the
economy that tended to dominate the discourse; so that by the time of Blair and
Cameron the social changes of the Sixties had been accepted and more or less
assimilated into the wider society.
This has resulted in both a more centralised and authoritarian state and
a more permissive morality. The complete reverse of what Thatcher
and her advisors had originally intended; although this needs one
qualification: the state is weak in the economy; a core goal of the New
Right. (See Gamble’s Spectre at
the Feast for analysis.)
In
America this prejudice against the sixties has been used, at least consciously
since Richard Nixon, as a cultural war to attack the liberals whilst masking
the corporate establishment’s re-structuring of society in favour of the
rich. (See Thomas Frank’s What
Happened to America?)
48 Dalrymple’s Nine Lives brings this out superbly.
49 This is wonderfully captured in the opening pages of
Roderic Braithwaite’s Afgantsy,
where he recounts the local uprising against Herat, which was a defence of the
local culture against the modernising communist regime.
50 Clinton is quoted in Ghost Wars as saying that he doesn’t want global
inter-dependence but global integration, which in practice means integrating
the world into American capitalism.
This can only be achieved if other societies adapt themselves to the
American economic and political pattern, which will inevitably transform social
relationships, which to a large degree depend on the rituals of work. For a bizarre description of some of
these effects in an earlier imperialism see Robert Byron’s accounts of Iran in
the 1930s, when the Shah was obsessed with modernising the country under
British influence. (The Road to
Oxiana)
Interestingly,
the Jihadist movement shares a similar view of the Muslim community. Although unlike the liberal
intelligentsia in the West their’s is (at least initially) a defensive ideology
designed to purify their own societies of its accumulated traditions, which
include both local and western elements.
(See the books by Fawaz A. Gerges and Gilles Kepel, which confirm Ernest
Gellner’s insights on the modernising tendency of Muslim fundamentalism – it
returns to the past in order to reinvigorate itself in the present.)
There
are so many strands in modern Islam that one has to be careful of conflating
them into a single entity.
However, there does seem a major attempt at reformation, which is played
out across a number of movements: from the violent jihadis to the Muslim Brotherhood
to the establishment clerics – thus Saudi Arabia’s evangelism in the Middle
East. Gilles Kepel notes, in his The
Roots of Radical Islam, that in Egypt
most of the Muslim Brotherhood’s support comes from the middle classes, which
is again highly suggestive of a reformation linked to societal change during a
time of ideological transition: in 16th century Europe when the
Catholic monopoly ended, and in the 20th century Middle East when
Islam’s monopoly was seriously threatened by secular nationalism. The dominating figure of Nasser a
catalyst for the whole jihadi movement, whose origins are in Egypt.
51 This highlights the danger of language-based theories
of social action, which aim to have real world effects: for example, the
penalties against hate speech.
(For
some of the curious aspects of language use see my The
Gipsy’s Baby.)
52 The early history of Protestantism is
instructive. See in particular
Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation:
Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700
on the moral coercion of individual churches, and G.R. Elton on the intolerance
of Calvin’s Geneva in his Reformation
Europe.
Both
Jonathan Steele and Rodric Braithwaite capture something of the frustrations of
the Marxist leaders with the recalcitrant population of rural Afghanistan, who
so bizarrely reject such good and simple ideas as freedom and democracy; and
who are so medieval in their attachment to the chador – interestingly a test
case of progress for both the Americans and Soviets.
For
an extraordinary example of an intellectual creating a totalitarian situation
see the Felix Guattari quote in my Dropout
Boogie.
53 Unlike in Holland, where the intellectual provocateur,
Theo Van Gogh, was murdered by a man who didn’t understand the rules – he
didn’t realise that words are not meant to be taken seriously. In an extraordinary book Ian Buruma
captures the moment when the Dutch intelligentsia begins to realise that a community
exists in the Netherlands that doesn’t accept that their provocations are
merely intellectual games, but who, on the contrary, believe that words have
very definite meanings and are linked, glued even, to real life actions and
behaviours. (Murder
in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam and the Limits of Tolerance)
54 Although this may be one reason for Zizek’s rhetorical
strategies: he can thus protect his essential liberalism (the value system that
underpins his radical views) from such simple-minded attacks.
55 The
Century of the Self. Crucially it
is linked to advertising.
Something that is so often missed by these fashionable thinkers – they
mistake a media studio for the real streets and houses outside.
56 Nicely captured in Christopher Meyer’s political
memoir DC
Confidential. When ambassador in Germany he didn’t
like the quiet Sundays, where the shops were closed and the local population
went out and had afternoon tea instead.
This seemed very attractive to me.
He, however, would prefer spending all his free time in Selfridges, Zara
and Stead & Simpson… Like any
well brought up member of society he carries its prejudices around with him;
wears them like a pair of comfortable knickers.
57 Cleverly brought out by Adam Curtis in his post on the
student
radicals of the sixties.
Marcuse was very good at criticising society, but he could offer little
in the way of constructive counter-measures.
59 Though we have to make some careful distinctions. Much of our cultural produce is average; the reason why it is popular, appealing to
the majority’s lack of interest and curiosity in specific subjects. However, these cultural products are
not sold in this way. Instead we
are told how exceptional and unique everything is. One could argue it is the same with Zizek – the content of
his thought is mainstream, but its rhetoric is radical and eccentric.
60 Alexander Cockburn encapsulated this in a Counterpunch
article, where he imaginatively
reconstructed what he intuited would be a disaffected employee’s reaction when
given the opportunity for revenge.
61 See my Poor
Hackney for a reference to one
particularly striking eye-witness account; which shows both the contingent
nature of events, if the car had been able to drive down the road the woman
wouldn’t have stopped and picked up the DVDs, and her moral restraint – her
friend told her not to take them all.
62 A common problem with ideologists. In some brilliant
pages of Gilles Kepel’s The Roots of Radical Islam he shows how the ideologues of Jama’at Islamiyya
accepted the same assumptions as the other political movements of 20th century Egypt: Marxist, liberal, Ba’athist or Nasser’s anti-imperialism.
For
an attempt to explain why ideologues tend to share the same assumptions see my Dropout
Boogie.
63 Though see Roger Scruton, who correctly identifies the
French intelligentsia’s obsession with revolution as a form of religion, and
which has been proselytised to the rest of the continent. He also makes the absolutely critical
point that there is more than one type of revolution – for example, the Glorious
Revolution in 1688 was an establishment attempt to preserve the system not
overthrow it. (TLS 29/08/2012)
Steven
Connor’s review of Less Than Nothing
is enlightening. It suggests, at least to me, that for Zizek, trapped within
his overly rational mind, revolution is a means of psychic escape. Unable to mediate the complex nuances
of careful thought and evolutionary reform he wants change now! His inability to properly grasp causal
mechanisms creating the apocalyptic need for a fresh start.
It
is a trait which Norman Cohen identified in the radical preachers of the middle
ages, and which Kepel describes in the fundamentalist movements of the 1970s:
“…the
liberation of all that is inherited or conventional, like customs and
traditions.” (The Roots of
Radical Islam)
What
all these ideologues seem to share is a fixed view of ideas and societies: they
do no believe that concepts or social organisations can change from within
themselves, but on the contrary must remain forever the same. The solution is therefore simple: get
rid of them. And yet when we look
at intellectual history we realise just how fluid the nature and meaning of
ideas are – context is often
everything. In this sense ideas
are more like living things than inorganic entities.
Timothy
Hilton captures something of Zizek's quality with his critical insights into William
Morris:
“…a
clue to a particular failing in Morris, his totally static sense of
history. Despite all his personal
energies, despite his conversion to political position based on a socialist
dialectic of history, there is never in Morris’s art, whether in his poetry or
in his handiwork, any sense of energy, of movement or progression. This is what makes him, in comparison
to Ruskin, such a bloodless utopian, and is surely the reason why Morris’s art
is so repetitive and so boring.” (The
Pre-Raphaelites)
64 And how strangely short-sighted. Revolutions can often start from the
most inconspicuous of actions, many of which are nothing more than a defence of
existing rights; and which surely represent the true nature of most popular
rebellions – they are essentially conservative actions to maintain the status
quo.
65 Although Zizek is surely correct, once you remove the
ideological flavouring and intellectual game play. In this it is useful to compare him with Michael Albert who
really does believe that the riots were a form of political action.
66 For a perfect example see Michael Albert’s response to
the riots; referred to in footnote 34.
67 See the quote by David Hawes, together with my commentary, in Can
I Have A Flake, and Chocolate Sauce with That?
See
also Adam Shatz’s review of a
Derrida biography in the LRB. This review suggests one of the
attractions of this extraordinarily influential thinker: you can both
fictionalize the intellectual philosophical cannon and condemn it with a
fiction of your own. It is the
technique of Deleuze and Guattari; one which Zizek has perfected (see my Dropout
Boogie for D&G, and Steve
Connor’s review in the TLS
26/10/2012).
68 Notice too how Zizek slides into conventional wisdom
by equating terrorism and state violence when in fact they are incommensurate.
“St
Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. ‘How dare you molest the sea?’ asked Alexander. ‘How dare you molest the whole world?’
the pirate replied. “Because I do
it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great
navy, are called an emperor.
“The
pirate’s answer was ‘elegant and excellent,’ St. Augustine relates. It also captures with some accuracy the
current relations between the United States and various minor actors on the
stage of international terrorism, such as Libya and factions of the PLO.” (Noam
Chomsky, Pirates
and Emperors)
Moreover,
also note how Zizek links terrorism with religion, which suggests that only
Islamic terror is in his line of sight.
But just taking this example shows the limitations of his formulation:
the mujahideen where actively encouraged to terrorise the Russians in
Afghanistan, and were done so for instrumental reasons by Pakistan, America and
Saudi Arabia.
Looking
more broadly at Islamic terror we find that the jihadis are simply not
disaffected mullahs or mystics. As
both Kepel and Gerges show, their theoreticians are sophisticated though
typically limited ideologues and polemicists. Their religious ideas part of an attempt at top down
revolution and cultural reformation, which in effect means imposing an
idealisation onto the host population.
Their violence is a political action designed to overthrow autocratic
regimes; and which later, starting with the tiny sect Al Qaeda, transmogrified
into international terror operations that were not reflexive acts, as Zizek
would have it, but based on a belief that big terrorist hits would weaken
America’s spirit and so remove its power from the Middle East, thus allowing
the jihadis to destroy the existing dictators, believed to be little more than
paper puppets of Washington. Just
like the early socialists and Arab nationalists the jihadis want to change
their societies; they even employ the same means, thus the attempt to copy the
officer coups of the secular fifties and sixties. The one difference is their ideology; although if we look
carefully we see how much has been influenced by a West they otherwise despise.
The
conclusion should thus be obvious: the jihadi movement is a revolutionary force
which has its own vanguard parties, and if Zizek was consistent (and not full
of liberal prejudice) he should support it.
“From
a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence
as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive.”
Doesn’t
jihadi violence fulfil this criteria, and absolutely? If Zizek was truly consistent, and thus a proper extremist,
he would have supported jihadist groups such as Al-Jama’a al-Islamiya (at least
until its decision, in line with the jihadi movement in general, to make an
accommodation with Egyptian society, when it renounced violence for political
action after 2001). The fact that
he would rather quote Stalin, tells us something about the content of his
radicalism.
69 Even into the 1990s there was a sharp divide in the
U.S. between security and law enforcement, to a point where the FBI would not
release details to the CIA in case it infringed the judicial process. See Steven Coll’s The Ghost Wars, which charts the gradual erosion of this position as
the White House began to respond to the terrorist spectaculars later in that
decade.
This
book is particularly good at delineating the American bureaucracies concerned
with national security (it concentrates on the CIA), and shows how from the
1980s their culture gradually became more illiberal, after the thaw in the
1970s. Thus even in the 1990s
there was a still veto on assassination, which now seems to have
disappeared. It also highlights
just how much the policies and attitudes prevalent in the American presidency
over the last decade originated with the Reaganites in the 1980s – rendition,
for example, was not a G.W. Bush innovation.
70 It was Ronald Reagan that initiated the first war on
terror. Then it was secular
nationalists that were the problem, people like Yasser Arafat and Abu Nidal,
not religious extremists such as Osama bin Laden, a then friend of the CIA. Given that it is more or less the same
group of individuals within the Republican administration who initiated both
wars on terror, and given the different ideologies of their victims, it should
warn us of over-generalizing about irrational or religious violence. Terrorism usually has some identifiable
economic, political or social cause; although it also develops its own
operational and ideological momentum.
The Republican Ron Paul seems to know this better than Zizek, which
shows just how mainstream he can be.
71 See David Marquand’s The
New Reckoning: Capitalism, States and Citizens. One
chapter argues that we are reverting to the Middle Ages; a time when the
economy, law, culture, politics and language existed in overlapping jurisdictions. Nationalism, which Ernest Gellner
argues was a modernizing force, tended to fuse all these social phenomena
within a single geographical boundary: the nation state (Nations
and Nationalism). Nations now appear to be declining, at
least as a contract between the rulers and its population (Richard Sennett, The
Culture of the New Capitalism, who
uses the metaphor of the army for the classic European state).
Clearly
there are differences between 2009 and 1473. In previous centuries there were immensely strong regional
powers, crystallised around the aristocracy that both structured and led these
local societies. These have to a
large extent disappeared. Their
most obvious replacement, the local authority, has come under sustained attack
in the last thirty years, as power has either been concentrated within the
central government or been given up to large corporations; the new Earls and
Barons of the modern world, and who, and this is a fundamental reversal, are
now stronger than the state bureaucracy.
(See Luke
Mitchell’s review of Steven Coll’s book on ExxonMobil which captures
something of these changes.)
72 The most perceptive and detailed analysis of terrorism
can be found in the copious pages of Noam Chomsky’s books. Tellingly, the majority of this work is
concerned with Western State terrorism, which hardly gets a mention in the
mainstream literature.
73 In a revealing passage of Steven Coll’s The Ghost
Wars we read of William Casey’s
religious fervour to destroy the godless communists, and his belief that Islam
and Catholicism were on the same side.
This shows the contingent nature of the secular evangelicalism we see
amongst establishment figures today. It also demolishes the idea that there is
a battle of cultural absolutes between the enlightened West and the
irrationally religious other.
For
a quiet demolition of Samuel Huntingdon’s clash of civilisations thesis see
Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian. William Dalrymple’s White
Mughals is an explicit rejection of
this theory (at least for the British Empire), showing that the binary
opposition of cultures arose out of two particular historical processes: the
increasing power of Britain in India and the growing influence of Christian
evangelicalism within the home country.
74 According to Steven Coll, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef,
responsible for the first World Trade Centre bomb, committed the act because of
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
There was no religious motive at all. Although Jason Burke describes him as being fanatically
anti-American, he nevertheless ends up with a similar conclusion:
“[H]is
language was far closer to that of the left-wing terrorists of the 1970s than
that of the followers of modern militant Salafi Islam.” (Al-Qaeda)
In
Egypt the terror was in response to previous government repression – from
Nasser through to Sadat. For a
description of the practical thinking of Islamist radicals in using their
ideology to solve social problems in a poor country see Kepel’s The Roots of
Radical Islam. One example of many: because of its
poverty, Egyptian men and women tend not to get married until their late
twenties; the men usually working in the Middle East to acquire the money to
buy a house. Jama’at islamiyya therefore advocated early marriage to deal with
sexual frustration, a major problem in this country.
75 Thus William Casey advocating terrorist attacks in the
central Asian republics of the USSR, which were carried out by the mujahideen
(See Ghost Wars).
76 One possible argument is that the longer a conflict
continues the more ideological it becomes; the ideology replacing the original
reasons for war, which have disappeared with time (though even here we must
make distinctions between different players in the governmental scene). Thus from early on it was clear to many
Russians that they weren’t going to modernise the country, and that their
intervention was not much more than a holding operation until the Afghan
government was made strong enough to survive.
By 1985 they knew that stability could only come through some
power-sharing arrangement with at least the more conservative (that is,
moderate) of the mujahideen. Yet
despite these realities the modernising rhetoric continued unabated, though as
each year passed it became more unrealistic, until by the end it was
fantastical.
77 Noam Chomsky being the most obvious.
78 For more up to the minute analysis that confirms this
trend see the
recent posts on Egypt by Juan Cole.
Note that the protests from what Cole calls the Egyptian New Left again
refute Zizek’s pessimistic analysis.
Revolutions, as he should know, don’t just die on a day. They are both the effect of
institutional instability and the further cause of it.
79 There is always one: Simon Schama! See his conclusion to Citizens, where he effectively argues the French revolution
was historically irrelevant.
80 Braithwaite’s account of reform and “revolution” in
Afghanistan in the 1970s is a salutary reminder of the unpredictability of
social change; especially in societies where the state has incommensurate
power, and where it seeks to impose its own ideology on a country whose
traditions and cultures resist it.
82 Dalrymple’s Nine Lives is an excellent counter to Zizek’s simplistic
views. For an account of Islam
that was written in more progressive times, and which invisaged the religion
gradually evolving into a more modern, self-questioning idiom, see Alfred
Guillaume’s Islam. Much of
what is regarded as reactionary and intolerant in Islam is not a result of the
religion but part of a wider trend of reaction that has taken place
around the globe; and which, contra Zizek, seems far more ideological than the
period proceeding it; although this could be an illusion based on my own
liberal biases.
This
is a religious age, where all of us are expected to have some strong
faith. What Zizek calls
non-ideological is actually a sign of just how hegemonic the western liberal
culture is – he cannot think outside of it. Thus his inability to recognise the ideological dominance of
the New Right, and the aggressively “hot” ideology of the jihadis; which is
thoroughly modern in both its ideas and operations: vanguard groups that are
anti-capitalist, and who wish to capture the state so as to install a more
equalitarian (Islam the most communist of the monotheisms) and less commercial
society.
Thank you for a thoughtful and thought-provoking article, although at the risk of appearing churlish I have to point out that, navigationally, your footnotes are messed up.
ReplyDeleteBest wishes from a La Monte Young enthusiast
Thank you.
DeleteThis is due to my ignorance: I don't know how to insert references that switch between the main text and the footnotes.
Because of the length of the footnotes, some are articles in their own right, I assumed they would be read in one piece at the end of the essay. Thus a compromise would be achieved between my slack technical skills and my long footnotes, allowing the reader to concentrate both on the arguments in the body of the work, and all that discursive stuff in lower case...