Philosophy.Com

Zizek on Frank & populism

I have just come across this forum run by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. The blurb rightly says that:

"Australian culture is notable for the lack of intellectual engagement in issues of social and political importance in any prominent way. The MSCP Political Forum is committed to bringing about a change in this state of affairs. This Political Forum is a context for philosophical reflection on contemporary life."

I could not agree more. Except to add that words like civic conversation, citizenship, democracy and the internet need to be added to philosophical reflection on contemporary life.

We surely need this kind of activity, if we are to nurture a philosophical culture in a liberal democracy amongst citizens, desiring to engage with public social and political issues they deem to be of importance to their way of life. A number of texts are listed in the fourm, but I'm not sure how the discussion takes place around them. How are the ideas knocked around? Where does the philosophical dicussion about the relevance of these ideas to Australia happen? Amongst the PhD students and staff.

Is it the usual academic understanding of forum? Or is this being transgressed?

Can weblogs help to keep this political continuing? It is possible, given this and this of the constellation of conversation weblogging, citizens and democracy. A weblog is one online pathway to link the academy to the rest of civil society.

We have an opportunity here to pick up the threads as one of listings (for forum discussion?) is a review of Thomas Frank's, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Slavoj Zizek. We meet Frank here in a post on American populism. Populism is an abidding concern here, given its influence on Australian political life with the One Nation Movement in the 1990s.

Slavoj Zizek is a good person to evaluate Frank's work, as he would go beyond the focus on class analysis favoured amongst those Australian webloggers exploring the ideas of Frank, often in sophisticated ways.

In this review the big intervention by populism into US politics is stated clearly:

"What happens when the economic class opposition (poor farmers, blue-collar workers versus lawyers, bankers, large companies) is transposed/coded into the opposition of honest hard-working Christian true Americans versus the decadent liberals who drink latte and drive foreign cars, advocate abortion and homosexuality, mock patriotic sacrifice and “provincial” simple way of life? The enemy is perceived as the “liberal” who, through federal state interventions (from school-busing to ordering the Darwinian evolution and perverse sexual practices to be taught), wants to undermine the authentic American way of life. The main economic interest is therefore to get rid of the strong state which taxes the hard-working population in order to finance its regulatory interventions – the minimal economic program is thus “less taxes, less regulations”…

The understanding of the limits of populism is sharply focused:

"....the populists are fighting a war that cannot be won. If Republicans were effectively to ban abortion, if they were to prohibit the teaching of evolution, if they were to impose federal regulation on Hollywood and mass culture, this would mean not only their immediate ideological defeat, but also a large-scale economic depression in the US. The outcome is thus a debilitating symbiosis: although the ruling class disagrees with the populist moral agenda, it tolerates their “moral war” as a means to keep the lower classes in check, i.e., to enable them to articulate their fury without disturbing their economic interests. What this means is that CULTURE WAR IS CLASS WAR in a displaced mode. "

The issue is then stated clearly. How is this displacement possible?

Zizek quickly pushed the traditional responses to one side:

"“Stupidity” and “ideological manipulation” are not an answer; that is to say, it is clearly not enough to say that that the primitive lower classes are brainwashed by the ideological apparatuses so that they are not able to identify their true interests. If nothing else, one should recall how, decades ago, the same Kansas was the hotbed of progressive populism in the US – and people certainly did not get more stupid in the last decades… It is also not enough to propose the “Laclau solution”: there is no “natural” link between a given socio-economic position and the ideology attached to it, so that it is meaningless to speak of “deception” and “false consciousness,” as if there is a standard of “appropriate” ideological awareness inscribed into the very “objective” socio-economic situation; every ideological edifice is the outcome of a hegemonic fight to establish/impose a chain of equivalences, a fight whose outcome is thoroughly contingent, not guaranteed by any external reference like “objective socio-economic position.”

Where to then? Zizek makes three moves. The first is to say that the key question is: why is “culture“ emerging as our central life-world category? He says “culture“ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.“

The second move is to reintroduce class as understood by liberals:

".... while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode culture war with an opposed class message: more often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and women’s rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes.” The way to unravel this confusion is to focus on the mediating terms the function of which is to obfuscate the true lines of division. The way “modernization” is used in the recent ideological offensive is exemplary here: first, an abstract opposition is constructed between “modernizers” (those who endorse global capitalism in all its aspects, from economic to cultural) and “traditionalists” (those who resist globalization). Into this category of those-who-resist are then thrown all, from the traditional conservatives and populist Right to the “Old Left” (those who continue to advocate Welfare state, trade unions…).

This approach was very common in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s. Right and Left were dumped into the globaphobic, nationalist, protectionist basket along with the poisionous snakes. The global free market was celebrated along with the inevtiable decline of the nation states--until 9/11 in 2001 came along that is, and the political chatter was all about borders, security, fear, and a strong nation state that scorned international law.

Zizek's third move is to counterpose the concept of 'antagonism' to 'difference'. He notes:

"...the fundamental difference between feminist/anti-racist/anti-sexist etc. struggle and class struggle: in the first case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference (“peaceful” coexistence of sexes, religions, ethnic groups), while the goal of the class struggle is precisely the opposite, i.e., to “aggravate” class difference into class antagonism....In one case, we have a “horizontal” logic of the recognition of different identities, while, in the other case, we have the logic of the struggle with an antagonist. ... it is the populist fundamentalism which retains this logic of antagonism, while the liberal Left follows the logic of recognition of differences, of “defusing” antagonisms into co-existing differences: in their very form, the conservative-populist grass-roots campaigns took over the old Leftist-radical stance of the popular mobilization and struggle against upper-class exploitation."

If that is the diagnosis, then where to from here for lefties? A diagnosis always involves some sort of remedy to help us get well.

Zizek says we lefties should reject the enlightened liberal arrogance and superiority response to populist prejudice; reject the very terms of the culture war whilst supporting the Liberal stance on abortion, against racism and homophobia; and view the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, as the left's ally in the long term struggle against capitalism(?)

That proposal would not be popular in Australia. Right and left may be antagonistic to liberalism, but only the left is broadly antagonistic to capitalism.

Zizek's argument is that conservative populists (eg. Robert Bork) are not angry enough to perceive the link between capitalism and the moral decay they deplore. Ziek says ertainment industry is not forcing depravity on an unwilling American public. The demand for decadence is there. It desired ---as we can see with pornography.

Hence the right will come to see their blindness when it is pointed out by the left?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 11, 2004 11:40 AM | TrackBack