Can pure immanence break bricks (2)? Ernesto Laclau fights Slavoj Zizek

(...continued from HERE)




Having traversed Laclau's critique of Hardt and Negri, I now turn to Laclau's beef with Zizek. Here I have been on record as a sympathiser of both, but on balance I think I'd fall on Laclau's side, if only because the latter has actually produced a viable analytic + alternative for progressives. Zizek is extremely insightful about a great many things, but I've grown tired of reading/waiting for him to outline (systematically) a project or even an analytic frame beyond the usual bricolage of anecdotes and criticisms of others. Yet as Roland Boer has recently intimated, perhaps it's because at heart Zizek remains an idealist (in the strictest Hegelian sense), and as such is torn between multiple demands (Hegel/Marx/Lacan /German Idealism/etc) and unable to cohere anything programmatic. As Laclau (2005) notes, this means that Zizek's analysis inevitably comes across as entirely eclectic.

Laclau points to one such tension in Zizek's work: the incompatible ontologies of psychoanalysis and the Freudian discovery of the unconscious on the one hand, and on the other to the predominantly Hegelian philosophy of history (with some Marxism). Laclau is brutal in his summation of Zizek's style: "His favourite method is to try to establish superficial homologies." (235)

For Laclau, "the coherence of capitalism as a social formation cannot be derived from the mere logical analysis of the contradictions implicit in the commodity form, for the social effectivity of capitalism depends on its relation to a heterogeneous outside that it can control through unstable power relations, but which cannot be derived from its own endogenous logic." In other words, what Laclau is claiming is that capitalist domination does not arrive in a self-determined and readymade form straight from the commodity form, but rather as the result of a hegemonic construction, "so that its centrality derives, like anything else in society, from an overdetermination of heterogeneous elements." (236) So 'capitalism' can come in many and various forms depending on the contextual hegemonic formation: from US-style cowboy capitalism to Chinese state capitalism to Indonesian crony capitalism to Saudi petro-feudal-fundamentalist-capitalism.

Here, Laclau persists with the notion of a war of position in the Gramscian sense, i.e. any dominant societal form is a result of a conjunctural articulation of different elements under a leading element that stands as the terrain on which the rest operate (e.g. US Neoliberal Capitalism as leading element enables Nationalism + Religious fundamentalism + Libertarianism + Ersatz postmodernism, etc. while not being reducible to any and in many instances, each is utterly incommensurable with the others). Laclau rejects Zizek's assumption that capitalist domination could be derived from the analysis of its mere form for "if we were confronted with a homogeneous, self-developing logic [then] any kind of resistance would be utterly useless, at least until that logic developed its own internal contradictions" (236) Put crudely, if capitalist domination was so complete as to not require political articulations and hegemonic contestation, then we'll just have to wait for the next big internal problem within capitalist production - i.e. economic crisis - before any change can happen. And for Laclau, even when such a crisis does occur, there is no guarantee that a communist revolution will take place. (Fascism, for example, does seem to occur at least as often)

So for Laclau, it is here that we reach the crux of the inconsistencies in Zizek's approach:

"On the one hand, he is committed to a theory of the full revolutionary act that would operate in its own name, without being invested in any object outside itself. On the other hand, the capitalist system, as the dominating, underlying mechanism, is the reality with which the emancipatory act has to break. The conclusion from both premises is that there is no valid emancipatory struggle except one that is fully and directly anticapitalist. In [Zizek's] words: 'I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle.'"

The problem, according to Laclau, is this: Zizek gives no indication of what an anti-capitalist struggle might be! For given that Zizek quickly dismisses multicultural, anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles as not being directly anti-capitalist, AND dimisses the traditional aims of the Left such as the demands for higher wages, for industrial democracy, for control of the labour process, for a progressive distribution of income, etc, what does Zizek hope for?

Laclau's barbed response to this question is given in the sub-title of this section... 'Zizek: waiting for the Martians'

(to be continued...)