Zizekery on 68
June 18, 2008
Audio accompaniment from the Airplane
The true lesson to be learnt from May 68, by Slavoj Zizek
LE MONDE | 02.06.08
One of the most famous graffitos appearing on the walls of Paris in May 68 said: “Structures do not march in the street!” — in other words: one could not explain the great demonstrations of students and workers of 1968 according to the terms of structuralism, as phenomena determined by the structural changes in society.
However the response of Jacques Lacan was to affirm that this was precisely what was happening in 1968: the structures well and truly took to the streets. The explosive events on show were at the end of the day the result of a structural disequilibrium — the passage of one form of domination to another, which Lacan defined as the passage of the speech of the master [of thought] to that of the university.
Such a sceptical view is not without foundation. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello underlined in their book Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme (Gallimard, 1999), a new form of capitalism emerged little by little from the years of the 1970s: it developed a form of organization in networks based on the initiative of employees and their independence from the workplace. By doing this, capitalism diverted the anticapitalist self-management rhetoric of the extreme left to make a capitalist slogan out of it: socialism itself is lived as rejected as conservative, hierarchical and administrative [???? — le socialisme se vit rejeté comme conservateur, hiérarchique et administratif]. The true revolution was that of digital capitalism…
What survived of the sexual release of the years 1960 is that tolerant hedonism, which today is so well integrated into our hegemonic ideology: today, sexual pleasure is not only authorized, it is almost obligatory — those who does not enjoy themselves feel guilty. This search for radical forms of pleasure rose up at a precise political moment: that where “the spirit of 68″ exhausted its political potential/potency. At this critical moment (the middle of the 1970s), the only option which remained was a brutal and direct push towards the [psychoanalytic] real, which appeared in three principal forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual pleasure; the turn towards inner experience (oriental mysticism); and finally leftist political terrorism (Red Army Faction in Germany and Red Brigades in Italy, etc).
The consequences of this withdrawal are still felt today. What was striking in the riots in the French suburbs of autumn 2005, where one saw thousands of cars burn in a vast eruption of violence, is the total absence of any positive utopian perspective among the rioters. If the threadbare stereotype, according to which we live in post-ideological times, has a meaning, it is located there. It speaks volumes to us about our actual situation: in what kind of world are we living, where the only possible alternative to the powerful democratic consensus is the explosion of violence which is (auto-) destructive?
Let us remember the challenge addressed by Lacan to the anti-authoritarian students: “As for being revolutionaries, you are hysterics who ask for a new master. You will get one.” And we have one, indeed — in the shape of the postmodern “permissive” master whose domination is all the more stronger as it is less apparent. So if many positive changes have accompanied this transition, one must however raise the basic question: has not all this intoxication of freedom been merely the means of substituting a new form of domination for the old? If we consider our actual situation with regard to the year 1968, we must not forget the true heritage of this time: the heart of May 68 was the rejection of the liberal-capitalist system, and something not addressed (a Lacanian letter, perhaps?) to the system as a whole, not a critique of it as an ensemble [ le coeur de Mai 68 était le rejet du système libéral-capitaliste, un non adressé au système dans son ensemble].
{Digression: Why does a letter always arrive at its destination?
Why indeed? Why could it not — sometimes, at least — also fail it reach it?
Slavoj Zizek, in another context — http://www.lacan.com/frameII1.htm}
It is easy to make fun of the concept of the End of History developed by Fukuyama, but, today, the majority of people are fukuyamists: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the at-last discovered formula for the best possible form of society, and all that we can do is to make even more just, more tolerant, etc.
This is why, once again, the only true question today is: must we act within this generalised acceptance of the system, or is it true that the actuality of global capitalism produces in itself contradictions sufficiently powerful to prevent its perpetual reproduction?
These contradictions number at least four: the menace of an ecological catastrophe; the maladjustment of the notion of private property applied to the so-called “intellectual property” ; the socio-ethical implications of the new technical-scientific developments (particularly in biogenetics); finally, and this is not the least important, the appearance of new forms of apartheid, of new walls and shantytowns. September 11 rang out the death knell of the Clintonesque happy years and symbolises the epoch which is opening itself, in which new walls emerge everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, or at the frontier between Mexico and the United States.
The first three of these contradictions relate to the areas that Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call the “communs”, the shared substance of our social being whose privatisation is an violent act which one must resist, if necessary, by violent means.
{Digression 2: The Inclosure Acts were a series of UK laws enacted between 1750 and 1860 which enclosed open fields and common lands — the rights people once held to graze animals on these areas were denied.}
Among them, one picks out the “communs” of the environment [nature extérieure], threatened by pollution and exploitation; the “communs” of inner being [nature intérieure]; and the “communs” of culture, the immediately socialised forms of “knowledge” capital, in the first rank of which is language, our principal tool of communication and education, but also shared infrastructures of public transport, electricity, the postal service, etc.
If one allows Bill Gates to gain for himself a position of monopoly, we would find ourselves in the absurd situation where one individual would literally own the software texture of our principal communication network. Little by little we become aware of these potential destroyers, capable of going to the point of the auto-destruction of humanity itself, who would be unleashed if one let the logic of capitalism seize these “communs”.
Does not this need to establish an organisation [a way to organise] and a global-politics engagement capable of neutralising and channeling the mechanisms of the market bring us back to adopting a communist perspective? The reference to “communs” consequently justifies the resurrection of the concept of Communism: it permits us to consider the progressive privatisation of the “communs” as a process of proletarianisation of those who are thus excluded from their own substance.
But only the contradiction between included and excluded is truly capable of justifying use of the term of communism. Across various kinds of shantytowns, we observe throughout the world the rapid growth of populations escaping all state control, living under conditions of semi-illegality, and who lack in a way that cries out the minimal forms of self-organisation.
Although it is true this population is made up of marginalised workers, redundant state employees and former peasants, they do not thereby constitute a useless surplus [reserve army of labour?]: they are in many respects integrated into the global economy, since many of them work like salaried staff in the black economy or as individual entrepreneurs, deprived of any kind of adequate medical or social cover.
It is not a question of an unhappy accident, but an inevitable result of the inherent logic of global capitalism. An inhabitant of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or a shantytown in Shanghai is no different to an individual who lives in a Paris banlieue or a ghetto of Chicago.
The essential task of the 21st century will be to politicise – by organising them and by disciplining them — the “masses déstructurées” of shantytowns. If we ignore this problem of the excluded, all other contradictions will lose their subversive relevance. Ecology will limit itself to a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property to an issue of complex legislation, and biogenetics to a question of ethics.
In short, without the contradiction between included and excluded, we could very well find ourselves in a world where Bill Gates would profit from an image of being a great humanitarian worker fighting against poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch from that of being a champion of the environment able to mobilise hundreds of millions of individuals thanks to his media empire.
What threatens us, is to see ourselves reduced to abstracted and empty Cartesian subjects, deprived of all substantive content, dispossessed of our [psychoanalytic] symbolic substance, constrained to undergo the manipulation of our genetic base and to vegetate in a barren and uninhabitable environment. This triple threat with regard of our entire being makes of us all, in a sort of way, potential proletarians, and the only way for us to oppose it is to act in a preventive way.
The true Utopia is to believe that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly realistic is to imagine that which, with regard to the system’s parameters, cannot appear other than impossible.
Traduit de l’anglais par Gilles Berton.
Slavoj Zizek est philosophe.
Translated from French by John Flower.
