Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please - Slavoj Zizek

[L.A.P.]

You guys might like this. Passage from the book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality where Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek basically argue with each other about Hegel and Lacan. EDIT: ramble

Introduction

"The realization of the world as global market, the undivided reign of great financial conglomerates, etc., all this is an indisputable reality and one that conforms, essentially, to Marx's analysis. The question is, where does politics fit in with all this? What kind of politics is really heterogeneous to what capital demand? - that is today's question."

(Alain Badiou)

In a well-known Marx Brothers joke Groucho answers the standard question 'Tea or coffee?' with 'Yes, please!' - a refusal of choice. The basic underlying idea of this essay is that one should answer in the same way the false alternative today's critical theory seems to impose on us: either 'class struggle' (the outdated problematic of class antagonism, commodity production, etc.) or 'postmodernism' (the new world of dispersed multiple identities, of radical contingency, of an irreducible lucid plurality of struggles). Here, at least, we can have our cake and eat it - how?

To begin with, I would like to emphasize my closeness to both my partners in this endeavour: in both Judith Butler's and Ernesto Laclau's work, there is a central notion (or, rather, two aspects of the same central notion) that I fully endorse, finding it extraordinarily productive. In Judith Butler's work, this notion is that of the fundamental reflexivity of human desire, and the notion (concomitant to the first one, although developed later) of 'passionate attachments', of traumatic fixations that are unavoidable and, simultaneously, in admissible - in order to remain operative, they have to be repressed; in Laclau, it is, of course, the notion of antagonism as fundamentally different from the logic of symbolic/structural difference, and the concomitant notion of the hegemonic struggle for filling out the empty place of universality as necessary/impossible. In both cases, we are thus dealing with a term (universality, 'passionate attachment') which is simultaneously impossible and necessary, disavowed and unavoidable. So where is my difference with the two of them? To define it is more difficult than it may appear: any direct attempt to formulate it via a comparison between our respective positions somehow misses the point. I have dealt in more detail with the task of providing the 'cognitive mapping' for tracing these differences in my latest book; so, to avoid repetition, this essay is conceived as a supplement to that book (The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology), focusing on a specific topic: that of universality, historicity, and the Real.

Another introductory remark: it is quite probable that a counter-claim could sometimes be made that in my dialogue with Butler and Laclau I am not actually arguing against their position but against a watered-down popular version which they would also oppose. In such cases I plead guilty in advance, emphasizing two points: first - probably to a much greater degree than I am aware - my dialogue with them relies on shared presuppositions, so that my critical remarks are rather to be perceived as desperate attempts to clarify my own position via its clear delimitation; secondly, my aim - and, as I am sure, the aim of all three of us - is not to score narcissistic points against others, but - to risk an old-fashioned expression - to struggle with the Thing itself which is at stake, namely the (im)possibilities of radical political thought and practive today.

Part I

Let me begin with Laclau's concept of hegemony, which provides an exemplary matrix of the relationship between universality, historical contingency, and the limit of an impossible Real - one should always bear in mind that we are dealing here with a distinct concept whose specificity is often missed (or reduced to some vague proto-Gramscian generality) by those who refer to it. The key feature of the concept of hegemony lies in the contingent connection between intrasocial differences (elements within the social space) and the limit that separates society itself from non-society (chaos, utter decadence, dissolution of all social links) - the limit between the social and its exteriority, the non-social, can articulate itself only in the guise of a difference (by mapping itself onto a difference) between elements of social space. In other words, radical antagonism can be represented only in a distorted way through the particular differences internal to the system. Laclau's point is thus that external differences are always-already also internal and, furthermore, that the link between the two is ultimately contingent, the result of political struggle for hegemony, not inscribed into the very social Being of agents.

In the history of Marxism, the tension that defines the concept of hegemony is best exemplified by its oscillation between the radical revolutionary logic of equivalence (Us against Them, Progress against Reaction, Freedom against Tyranny, Society against Decadence), which had to have recourse to different contingent groups to realize the universal task of global social transformation (from working class to colonized peasants; see also Sorel's oscillation from Leftist Syndicalism to Fascism), and the 'revisionist' reduction of the progressive agenda to a series of particular social problems to be resolved gradually via compromises. More generally, we are suspended between a pure corporate vision of society as a Body with each part occupying its proper place, and the radical revolutionary vision of antagonism between society and antisocial forces ('the people is split into friends and enemies of the people') - and, as Laclau emphasizes, both these extremes ultimately coincide: a pure corporate vision has to eject forces that oppose its organic notion of the social Body into pure externality (the Jewish plot, etc.), thus reasserting radical antagonism between the social Body and the external force of Decadance; while radical revolutionary practice has to rely on a particular element (class) which embodies universality (from Marxist proletariat to Pol Pot's peasants). The only solution to this deadlock seems to be to accept it as such - to accept that we are condemnedto the unending struggle between particular elements to stand in for the impossible totality:

"If hegemony means the representation, by a particular social sector, of an impossible totality with which it is incommensurable, then it is enough that we make the space of tropological substitutions fully visible, to enable the hegemonic logic to operate freely. If the fullness of society is unachievable, the attempts at reaching it will necessarily fail, although they will be able, in the search for that impossible object, to solve a variety of partial problems."

Here, however, a series of questions arises from my perspective. Does not this solution involve the Kantian logic of the infinite approach to the impossible Fullness as a kind of 'regulative Idea'? Does it not involve the resigned/cynical stance of 'although we know we will fail, we should persist in our search' - of an agent which knows that the global Goal towards which it is striving is impossible, that its ultimate effort will necessarily fail, but which none the less accepts this need for this global Spectre as a necessary lure to give it the energy to engage in solving partial problems? Furthermore (and this is just another aspect of the same problem), is not this alternative - the alternative between achieving 'fullness of society' and solving 'a variety of partial problems' - too limited? Is it not that - here, at least - there is a Third Way, although definetely not in the sense of the Risk Society theorists? What about changing the very fundamental structural principle of society, as happened with the emergence of the 'democratic invention'? The passage from feudal monarchy to capitalist democracy, while it failed to reach the 'impossible fullness of society', certainly did more than just 'solve a variety of partial problems'.

A possible counter-argument would be that the radical break of the 'democratic invention' consists in the very fact that what was previously considered to be an obstacle to the 'normal' functioning of power (the 'empty place' of power, the gap between this place and the one who actually exerts power, the ultimate indeterminacy of power) now becomes its positive condition: what was previously experienced as a threat (the struggle between more subject-agents to fill in the place of power) now becomes the very condition of the legitamite exercise of power. The extraordinary character of 'democratic invention' thus consists in the fact that - to put it in Hegelian terms - the contingency of power , the gap between power qua place and its place-holder, is no longer only 'in itself', but becomes 'for itself', is acknowledged explicitly 'as such', reflected in the very structure of power. What this means is that - to put it in the well-known Derridan terms - the condition of impossibility of the exercise of power becomes its condition of possibility: just as the ultimate failure of communication is what compels us to talk all the time (if we could say what we want to say directly, we would very soon stop talking and shut up forever), so the ultimate uncertainty and precariousness of the exercise of power is the only guarantee that we are dealing with a legitamite democratic power.

The first thing to add here, however, is that we are dealing with a series of breaks: within the history of modernity itself, one should distinguish between the break of the 'first modernity' ('democratic invention': the French Revolution, the introduction of the notion of the sovereignty of the people, of democracy, of human rights...) and the contemporary break of what Beck, Giddens, and others call the 'second modernity' (the thorough reflexivization of society). Furthermore, is not already the 'fist modernity' already characterized by the inherent tension between the 'people's democracy' (People-as-One, General Will) with its potentially 'totalitarian' outcome, and the liberal notion of individual freedom, reducing state to a 'night watchman' of civil society.

So the point is that, again, we are dealing with the multitude of configurations of the democratic society, and these configurations form a kind of Hegelian 'concrete universality' - that is to say, we are not dealing simply with different subspecies of the genus of Democracy, but with a series of breaks which affect the very universal notion of Democracy: these subspecies (early Lockeian liberal democracy, 'totalitarian' democracy..) in a way explicate ('posit', are generated by) the inherent tension of the very universal notion of political Democracy. Furthermore, this tension is not simply internal/inherent to the notion of Democracy, but is defined by the way Democracy relates to its Other: not only its political Other - non-Democracy in its various guises - but primarily that which the very definition of political democracy tends to exclude as 'non-political' (private life and economy in classical liberalism). While I fully endorse the well-known thesis that the very gesture of drawing a clear line of distinction between the Political and the non-Political , of positing some domains (economy, private intimacy, art..) as 'apolitical', is a political gesture par excellence, I am also tempted to turn it around: what if the political gesture par excellence, at its purest, is precisely the gesture of separating the Political from the non-Political, of excluding some domains from the Political?

I'm still posting the rest of the parts

[L.A.P.]

part II

Let me, then, take a closer look at Laclau's narrative which runs from Marxist essentialism (the proletariat as the universal class whose revolutionary mission is inscribed into its very social being and thus discernible via 'objective' scientific analysis) to the 'postmodern' recognition of the contingent, tropological, metaphoric-metonymic, link between a social agent and its 'task'. Once this contingency is acknowledged , one has to accept that there is no direct, 'natural' correlation between an agent's social position and its task in the political struggle, no norm of development by which to measure exceptions - say, because of the weak political subjectivity of the bourgeoisie in Russia around 1900, the working class had to accomplish the bourgeois-democratic revolution itself... My first observation here is that while this standard postmodern Leftist narrative of the passage from 'essentialist' Marxism, with the proletariat as the unique Historical Subject, the privileging of economic class struggle, and so on, to the postmodern irreducible plurality of struggles undoubtedly describes an actual historical process, its proponents, as a rule, leave out the resignation at its heart - the acceptance of capitalism as 'the only game in town', the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the existing capitalist liberal regime. This point was already made very precisely in Wendy Brown's perspicuous observation that 'the political purchase of contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in part through a certain renaturalization of capitalism'. The crucial question to be asked is thus: "to what extent a critique of capitalism is foreclosed by the current configuration of oppositional politics, and not simply by the 'loss of the socialist alternative' or the ostensible 'triumph of liberalism' in the global order. In contrast with the Marxist critique of a social whole and Marxist vision of total transformation, to what extent do identity politics require a standard internal to existing society against which to pitch their claims, a standard that not only preserves capitalism from critique, but sustain the invisibility and inarticulateness of class - not incidentally, but endemically? Could we have stumbled upon one reason why class is invariably named but rarely theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra, 'race, class, gender, sexuality'?

One can describe in very precise terms this reduction of class to an entity 'named but rarely theorized': one of the great and permanent results of the so-called 'Western Marxism' first formulated by the young Lukacs is that the class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just a phenomenon limited to the particular 'domain' of economy, but the structuring principle that overdetermines the social totality, from politics to art to religion. This global dimension of capitalism is suspended in today's multicultural progressive politics: its 'anti-capitalism' is reduced to the level of how today's capitalism breeds racist/sexist oppression, and so on. Marx claimed that in the series production-distribution-exchange-consumption, the term 'production' is doubly inscribed: it is simultaneously one of the terms in the series and the structuring principle of the entire series, production (as the structuring principle) 'encounters itself in its oppositional determination', as Marx put it, using the precise Hegelian term. And the same goes for the postmodern political series class-gender-race...: in class as one of the terms in the series of particular struggles, class qua structuring principle of the social totality 'encounters itself in its oppositional determination'. In so far as postmodern politics promotes, in effect, a kind of 'politicization of the economy', is not this politicization similar to the way our supermarkets - which fundamentally exclude from their field of visibility the actual production process (the way vegetables and fruit are harvested and packed by immigrant workers, the genetic and other manipulations in their production and display, etc.) - stage within the field of the displayed goods, as a kind of ersatz, the spectacle of a pseudo-production (meals prepared in full view in food courts, fruit juices freshly squeezed before the customers' eyes, etc)? An authentic Leftist should therefore ask the postmodern politicians the new version of the old Freudian question put to the perplexed Jew: 'Why are you saying that one should politicize the economy, when one should in fact politicize the economy?'

So: in so far as postmodern politics involves a 'theoretical retreat from the problem of domination within capitalism', it is here, in this silent suspension of class analysis, that we are dealing with an exemplary case of the mechanism of ideological displacement: when class antagonism is disavowed, when its key structuring role is suspended, 'other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicized marking'. In other words, this displacement accounts for the somewhat 'excessive' way the discourse of postmodern identity politics insists on the horrors of sexism, racism, and so on - this 'excess' come from the fact that these other '-isms' have to bear the surplus-investment from the class struggle whose extent is not acknowledged.

Of course, the postmodernists' answer would be that I am 'essentializing' class struggle: there is, in today's society, a series of particular political struggles (economic, human rights, ecology, racism, sexism, religious...), and no struggle can claim to be the 'true' one, the key to all the others... Usually, Laclau's development itself (from his first breakthrough work, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, to his standard classic, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy) is presented as the gradual process of getting rid of the 'last remnants of essentialism': in the first book – following the classic Marxist tradition – the economy (the relations of production and economic laws) still serves as a kind of ‘ontological anchorage point’ for the otherwise contingent struggles for hegemony (i.e. in a Gramscian way, the struggle for hegemony is ultimately the struggle between the two great classes for which of them will occupy-hegemonize a series of other ‘historical tasks’ – national liberation, cultural struggles, etc.); it is only in the second book that Laclau definitely renounces the old Marxist problematic of infra- and superstructure, that is, the objective grounding of the ‘superstructural’ hegemonic struggle in the economic ‘infrastructure’ – economy itself is always-already ‘political’, a discursive site (one of the sites) of political struggles, of power and resistance, ‘a field penetrated by pre-ontological undecidability of irrevocable dilemmas and aporias’.

In their Hegemony book, Laclau and Mouffe clearly privilege the political struggle for democracy, - that is to say, they accept Claude Leforts’s thesis that the key moment in modern political history was the ‘democratic invention’ and all other struggles are ultimately the ‘application’ of the principle of democratic invention to other domains: race (why should other races not also be equal?), sex, religion, the economy…. In short, when we are dealing with a series of particular struggles, is there not always one struggle which, although it appears to function as one in the series, effectively provides the horizon of the series as such? Is this not also one of the consequences of the notion of hegemony? So, in so far as we conceive radical plural democracy as ‘the promise that plural democracy, and the struggles for freedom and equality it engenders, should be deepened and extended to all spheres of society’, is it possible simply to extend it to the economy as another new terrain? When Brown emphasizes that ‘if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared “unpolitical” – that is naturalized – in liberal discourse’, it would be too easy to accept the counter-argument that postmodern politics, of course, endorses the need to denaturalize/repoliticize the economy, and that its point is precisely that one should also denaturalize/repoliticize a series of other domains (relations between sexes, language, etc.) left ‘undeconstructed’ by Marx. Postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it ‘repoliticizes’ a series of domains previously considered ‘apolitical’ or ‘private’; the fact remains, however, that it does not in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the ‘political’ within which it operates is grounded in the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy. If we are to play the postmodern game of plurality of political subjectivizations, it is formally necessarythat we do not ask certain questions (about how to subvert capitalism as such, about the constitutive limits of political democracy and/or the democratic state as such…) So, again, apropos of Laclau’s obvious counter-argument that the Political, for him, is not a specific social domain but the very set of contingent decisions that ground the Social, I would answer that the postmodern emergence of new multiple political subjectivities certainly does not reach this radical level of the political act proper.

What I am tempted to do here is to apply the lesson of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’ to ‘radical democracy’: Laclau’s notion of hegemony is in fact close to the Hegelian notion of ‘concrete universality’, in which the specific difference overlaps with the difference constitutive of the genus itself; as in Laclau’s hegemony, in which the antagonistic gap between society and its external limit, non-society (the dissolution of social links), is mapped on to an intra-social structural difference. But what about the infamous Hegelian ‘reconciliation’ between Universal and Particular rejected by Laclau on account of the gap that forever separates the empty/impossible Universal from the contingent particular content that hegemonizes it? If we take a closer look at Hegel, we see that – in so far as every particular species of a genus does not ‘fit’ its universal genus – when we finally arrive at a particular species that fully fits its notion, the very universal notion is transformed into another notion. No existing historical shape of state fully fits the notion of State – the necessity of dialectical passage from State (‘objective spirit’, history) into Religion (‘Absolute Spirit’) involves the fact that the only existing state that effectively fits its notion is a religious community – which, precisely, no longer a state. Here we encounter the properly dialectical paradox of ‘concrete universality’ qua historicity: in the relationship between a genus and its subspecies, one of these subspecies will always be the element that negates the very universal feature of the genus. Different nations have different versions of soccer; Americans do not have soccer, because ‘baseball is their soccer’. This is analogous to Hegel’s famous claim that modern people do not pray in the morning, because reading the newspaper is their morning prayer. In the same way, in disintegrating socialism, writers’ and other cultural clubs did act as political parties. Perhaps, in the history of cinema, the best example is the relationship between Western and sci-fi space operas: today, we no longer have ‘substantial’ Westerns, because space operas have taken their place, that is, space operas are today’s Westerns. So, in the classification of Westerns, we would have to supplement the standard subspecies with space opera as today’s non-Western stand-in for the Western. Crucial here is this intersection of different genuses, this partial overlapping of two universals: the Westernand space opera are not simply two different genres, they intersect – that is, in a certain epoch, space opera becomes a subspecies of the Western (or, the Western is ‘sublated’ in the space opera)… In the same way, ‘woman’ becomes one of the subspecies of man, Heideggerian Daseinanalyse one of the subspecies of phenomenology, ‘sublating’ the preceding universality; and – back to a ‘radical democracy’ – in the same way, ‘radical democracy’ that was actually ‘radical’ in the sense of politicizing the sphere of economy would, precisely, no longer be a ‘(political) democracy’. (This, of course, does not mean that the ‘impossible fullness’ of Society would in fact be actualized: it simply means that the limit of the impossible would be transposed on to another level.) And what if the Political itself (the radically contingent struggle for hegemony) is also split/barred in its very notion? What if it can be operative only in so far as it ‘represses’ its radically contingent nature, in so far as it undergoes a minimum of ‘naturalization’? What if the essentialist lure is irreducible: we are never dealing with the Political ‘at the level of its notion’, with political agents who fully endorse their contingency – and the way out of this deadlock via notions like ‘strategic essentialism’ definitely condemned to fail?

My conclusion would thus be to emphasize that the impossibility at work in Laclau’s notion of antagonism is double: not only does ‘radical antagonism’ mean that it is impossible adequately to represent/articulate the fullness of Society – on an even more radical level, it is also impossible adequately to represent/articulate this very antagonism/negativity that prevents Society from achieving its full ontological realization. This means that ideological fantasy is not simply the fantasy of the impossible fullness of Society: not only is Society impossible, this impossibility itself is distortedly represented-positivized within an ideological field – that is the role of ideological fantasy (say, of the Jewish plot). When this very impossibility is represented in a positive element, inherent in the impossibility is changed into an external obstacle. ‘Ideology’ is also the name for the guarantee that the negativity which prevents Society from achieving fullness does actually exist, that it has a positive existence in the guise of the big Other who pulls the strings of social life, like the Jews in the anti-Semitic notion of the ‘Jewish plot’. In short, the basic operation of ideology is not only the dehistoricizing gesture of transforming an empirical obstacle into the eternal condition (women, Blacks…are by nature subordinated, etc.), but also the opposite gesture of transposing the a priori closure/impossibility of a field into an empirical obstacle. Laclau is well aware of this paradox when he denounces as ideological the very notion that after the successful revolution, a non-antagonistic self-transparent society will come about. However, this justified rejection of the fullness of post-revolutionary Society does not justify the conclusion that we have to renounce any project of a global social transformation, and limit ourselves to partial problems to be solved: the jump from a critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ to anti-utopian ‘reformist’ gradualist politics is an illegitimate short circuit.

[VeganEmmaGoldman]

Zizek is a self-proclaimed Stalinist, which is offensive to those of us who oppose statism. I also have a hard time grasping a lot of his ideas.

I read that back in the old Warsaw Pact days, Zizek was actually a Fascist. He led some ethnic determinist anti-communist group that did many brutal killings, now Zizek is one of the most talked about Marxist thinkers, yet his writings (with vague exceptions) add little to nothing to Marxism. :blink: Can you confirm or debunk of this?

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Zizek is a self-proclaimed Stalinist, which is offensive to those of us who oppose statism. I also have a hard time grasping a lot of his ideas.

I read that back in the old Warsaw Pact days, Zizek was actually a Fascist. He led some ethnic determinist anti-communist group that did many brutal killings, now Zizek is one of the most talked about Marxist thinkers, yet his writings (with vague exceptions) add little to nothing to Marxism. :blink: Can you confirm or debunk of this?
Zizek was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until 1988 when he left in protest after a group of journalists were sentanced to prison for writing articles critical of the armed forces. After, he ran as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate for the Presidency when the Titoist regime collapsed and capitalist elections took place but eventually cut ties and now defends communism. His philosophy combines the psychoanalysis of Lacan and Freud with Marxism and Hegelian dialectics although he is well read and often drops quotes from the likes of Derrida amongst others. He is a bit of a showboater and enjoys, in my opinion, being absurd in what he sees as an absurd world.

Thanks for posting this by the way, xx1994xx.

[hetz]

I read that back in the old Warsaw Pact days, Zizek was actually a Fascist. He led some ethnic determinist anti-communist group that did many brutal killings
Where did you read that nonsense?


Zizek is a self-proclaimed Stalinist, which is offensive to those of us who oppose statism.
He's also a proclaimed anti-Stalinist.


yet his writings (with vague exceptions) add little to nothing to Marxism.
You sure are right about that.

[L.A.P.]

part III

Like Laclau's notion of universality as impossible/necessary, Butler's elaboration of universality is much more refined than the standard historicist denouncing of each universality as 'false', that is, secretly privileging some particular content, while repressing or excluding another. She is well aware that universality is unavoidable, and her point is that - while, of course, each determinate historical figure of universality involves a set of inclusions/exclusions - universality simultaneously opens up and sustains the space for questioning these inclusions/exclusions, for 'renegotiating' the limits of inclusions/exclusions as part of the ongoing ideologico-political struggle for hegemony. The predominant notion of 'universal human rights', for instance, precludes - or, at least, reduces to a second status - a set of sexual practices and orientations; and it would be too simplistic to accept the liberal game of simply insisting that one should redefine and broaden our notion of human rights to include also these 'aberrant' practices - what standard liberal humanism underestimates is the extent to which such exclusions are constitutive of the 'neutral' universality of human rights, so that their actual inclusions in 'human rights' would radically rearticulate, even undermine, our notion of what 'humanity' in 'human rights' means. None the less, the inclusions/exclusions involved in the hegemonic notion of universal human rights are not fixed and simply consubstantial with this universality but the stake of the continuous ideologico-political struggle, something that can be renegotiated and redefined, and the reference to universality can serve precisely as a tool that stimulates such questioning and renegotiation ('If you assert universal human rights, why are we [gays, Blacks...] not also part of it?

So when we criticize the hidden bias and exclusion of universality, we should never forget that we are already doing so within the terrain opened up by universality: the proper critique of 'false universality' does not call it into question from the standpoint of pre-universal particularism, it mobilizes the tension inherent to universality itself, the tension between the open negativity, the disruptive power, of what Kierkegaard would have called 'universality-in-becoming', and the fixed form of established universality. Or - if I may interpret Butler in Hegelian terms - we have, on the one hand, the 'dead', 'abstract' universality of an ideological notion with fixed inclusions/exclusions and, on the other, 'living', 'concrete' universality as the permanent process of the questioning and renegotiating of its own 'official' content. Universality becomes 'actual' precisely and only by rendering thematic the exclusions on which it is grounded, by continuously questioning, renegotiating, displacing them, that is, by assuming the gap between its own form and content, by conceiving itself as unaccomplished in its very notion. This is what Butler's notion of the politically salient use of 'performative contradiction' is driving at: if the ruling ideology performatively 'cheats' by undermining - in its actual discursive practice and the set of exclusions on which this practice relies - its own officially asserted universality, progressive politics should precisely openly practice performative contradiction, asserting on behalf of the given universality the very content this universality (in its hegemonic form) excludes.

Here I should just like to emphasize two further points:

* the exclusionary logic is always redoubled in itself: not only is the subordinated Other (homosexuals, non-white races...) excluded/repressed, but hegemonic universality itself also relies on a disavowed 'obscene' particular content of its own (say, the exercise of power that legitamizes itself as legal, tolerant, Christian... relies on a set of publicly disavowed obscene rituals of violent humiliation of the subordinated). More generally, we are dealing her with what one is tempted to call the ideological practice of disidentification. That is to say, one should turn around the standard notion of ideology as providing a firm identification to its subjects, constraining them to their 'social roles': what if, on a different - but no less irrevocable and structurally necessary - level, ideology is effective precisely by constructing a space of false identification, of false distance towards the actual co-ordinates of those subjects' social existence? Is not this logic of disidentification discernible from the most elementary case of 'I am not only an American (husband, worker, Democrat, gay...), but, beneath all these roles and masks, a human being, a complex unique personality' (where the very distance towards the symbolic feature that determines my social place guarantees the efficiency of this determination), up to the more complex case of cyberspace playing with one's multiple identities? The mystification operative in the peverse 'just playing' of cyberspace is therefore double: not only are the games we are playing in it more serious than we tend to assume (is it not that, in the guise of a fiction, of 'it's just a game', a subject can articulate and stage features of his symbolic identity - sadistic, 'perverse', and so on - which he would never be able to admit in his 'real' intersubjective contacts?), but the opposite also holds, that is, the much-celebrated playing with multiple, shifting personas (freely constructed identities) tends to obfuscate (and thus falsely liberate us from) the constraints of social space in which our existence is trapped. Let me evoke another example: why did Christa Wolf's The Quest of Christa T. exert such a tremendous impact on the GDR public in the 1960s? Because it is precisely a novel about the failure - or, at least, the vacillation - of ideological interpellation, about the failure of fully recognizing oneself in one's socio-ideological identity:

"When her name was called: 'Christa T.!' - she stoop up and went and did what was expected of her, was there anyone to whom she could say that hearing her name called gave her much to think about: Is it really me who's meant? Or is it only my name that's being used? Counted in with other names, industriously added up in front of the equal sign? And might I just as well have been absent, would anyone have noticed?"

Is not this gesture of 'Am I that name?', this probing into one's symbolic indentification so well expressed by Johannes R. Bechert's quote which Wolf put at the very beginning of the novel: 'This coming-to-oneself - what is it?', hysterical provocation at its purest? And my point is that such a self-probing attitude, far from effectively threatening the predominant ideological regime, is what ultimately makes it 'livable' - this is why her West German detractors were in a way paradoxically right when, after the fall of the Wall, they claimed that Christa Wolf, by expressing the subjective complexities, inner doubts and oscillations of the GDR subject, actually provided a realistic literary equivalent of the ideal GDR subject, and was as such much more successful in her task of securing political conformity than the open naive propagandist fiction depicting ideal subjects sacrificing themselves for the Communist Cause.

* The theoretical task is not only to unmask the particular content of inclusions/exclusions involved in the game, but to account for the enigmatic emergence of the space of universality itself. Furthermore - and more precisely - the real task is to explore the fundamental shifts in the very logic of the way universality works in the socio-symbolic space: premodern, modern, and today's 'postmodern' notion and ideological practice of universality do not, for example, differ only with regard to the particular contents that are included/excluded in universal notion - somehow, on a more radical level, the very underlying notion of universality functions in a different ways in each of these epochs. 'Universality' as such does not mean the same thing since the establishment of bourgeois market society in which individuals participate in the social order not on behalf of their particular place within the global social edifice but immediately, as 'abstract' human beings.

Let me return to the notionof universal human rights. The Marxist symptomal reading can convincingly demonstrate the particular content that gives the specific bourgeois ideological spin to the notion of human rights: 'the universal human rights are in effect the right of white male property owner to exchange freely on the market, exploit workers and women, and exert political domination....' This identification of the particular content that hegemonizes the universal form is, however, only half the story; its other, crucial half consists in asking a much more difficult supplementary question about the emergence of the very form of universality: how, in what specific historical conditions, does abstract universality itself become a 'fact of (social) life'? In what conditions do individuals experience themselves as subjects of universal human rights? That is the point of Marx's analysis of 'commodity fetishism': in a society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals themselves, in their daily lives, relate to themselves, as well as to objects they encounter, as to contingent embodiments of abstract-universal notions. What I am, my concrete social or cultural background, is experienced as contingent, since what ultimately defines me is the 'abstract' universal capacity, indifferent towards the multitude of particular objects that may - but never fully do - satisfy it. Or take the already mentioned example of 'profession': the modern notion of profession implies that I experience myself as an individual who is not directly 'born into' his social role - what I will become depends on the interplay between contingent social circumstances and free choice; in this sense, today's individual has the profession of electrician or professor or waiter, while it is meaningless to claim that a medieval serf was a peasant by profession. The crucial point here is, again, that in certain specific social conditions (of commodity exchange and a global market economy), 'abstraction' becomes a direct feature of actual social life, the way concrete individuals behave and relate to their fate and to their social surroundings. Here Marx shares Hegel's insight into how universality becomes 'for itself' only in so far as individuals no longer fully identify the kernel of their being with their particular social situation, only in so far as they experience themselves as forever 'out of joint' with regard to this situation: the concrete , effective existence of the universality is the individual without a proper place in the global edifice - in a given social structure, Universality becomes 'for itself' only in those individuals who lack a proper place in it. The mode of appearance of an abstract universality, its entering into actual existence, is thus an extremely violent move of disrupting the preceding organic balance.

My claim is thus that when Butler speaks of the unending political process of renegotiating the inclusions/exclusions of the predominant ideological universal notions, or when Laclau proposes his model of the unending struggle for hegemony, the 'universal' status of this very model is problematic: are they providing the formal co-ordinates of every ideologico-political process, or are they simply elaborating the notional structure of today's ('postmodern') specific political practice which is emerging after the retreat of the classical Left? They (more often than not, in their explicit formulations) appear to do the first (for Laclau, say, the logic of hegemony is somewhat unambiguously articulated as a kind of Heideggerian existential structure of social life), although one can also argue that they are merely theorizing a very specific historical moment of the 'postmodern' Left... In other words, the problem for me is how to historicize historicism itself. The passage from 'essentialist' Marxism to postmodern contingent politics (in Laclau), or the passage from sexual essentialism to contingent gender-formation (in Butler), or - a further example - the passage from metaphysician to ironist in Richard Rorty, is not a simple epistemological progress but part of the global change in the very nature of capitalist society. It is not that before, people were 'stupid essentialists' and believed in naturalized sexuality, while now they know that genders are performatively enacted; one needs a kind of metanarrative that explains this very passage from essentialism to the awareness of contingency: the Heideggerian notion of the epochs of Being, or the Foucauldian notion of the shift in the predominant episteme, or the standard sociological notion of modernization, or a more Marxist account in which this passage follows the dynamic of capitalism.

[Yuppie Grinder]

The po-mo idea of reframing radical politics along identity politics and rejecting any idea of restructuring society economically or politically wouldn't be as infuriating if they didn't present in a way so condescending to Marxists. I doubt any of them would describe their politics the way I have here, but that's basically what they do. They reject the idea of any "metahistorical" projects succeeding because history has ended. Again, they wouldn't describe things that way, they'd mask it with obscurant language, but that's basically their thing.
Zizek is correct when he writes that bourgeois society can meet all the reform demands of identity politics while maintaining patriarchy and white supremacism.

[thethinveil]

This is a great book I highly recommend it. It provides definite answers for how to grapple with post-structuralism and post-modernism for marxists. Whether it exists as a distinct period of capitalism or if it is an ultimate episteme of sorts. And what it means for revolutionary subjects and projects. This book should mainly be read by non-marxists in the cultural studies arena.