Shoplifters of the World Unite
Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots
Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role
in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an
accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been
handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that
a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in
1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear
that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In
September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected
through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown
are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.
We are told again and again that we are living through
a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts.
All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if
we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer
jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves
from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What
should the poor do? What can
they do?
Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the
suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper
unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in
2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with
the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to
violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed
reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK
rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary
subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside
organised social space, who can express their discontent only through
‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract
negativity’.
There is an old story about a worker suspected of
stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in
front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always
empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the
wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the
commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the
Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of
large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was
over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the
commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can
be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a
violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in
the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the
riots presented.
The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto
socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much
worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological
oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with
clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself
a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our
ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a
society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to
enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system
can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even
as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst.
What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is
between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?
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. Perhaps this is one of the main
dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the
whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which
people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson
of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all
civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is
no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The
global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.
The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots,
therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are
inadequate. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no
justification for such vandalism; one should use all necessary means to restore
order; to prevent further explosions of this kind we need not more tolerance
and social help but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility.
What’s wrong with this account is not only that it ignores the desperate social
situation pushing young people towards violent outbursts but, perhaps more
important, that it ignores the way these outbursts echo the hidden premises of
conservative ideology itself. 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.
Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck
to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the
neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their
economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have
to articulate their dissatisfaction. Instead of indulging ourselves in revenge
fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of the
outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor,
racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only
unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication is
that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that
they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that
it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a
subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective
conditions.
We live in cynical times, and it’s easy to imagine a
protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons,
would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologists, citing
diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal
authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he
is doing, then, but is doing it nonetheless.
It is meaningless to ponder which of these two
reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it,
they are both
worse, and that includes the warning given by both sides that the real danger
of these outbursts resides in the predictable racist reaction of the ‘silent
majority’. One of the forms this reaction took was the ‘tribal’ activity of the
local (Turkish, Caribbean, Sikh) communities which quickly organised their own
vigilante units to protect their property. Are the shopkeepers a small
bourgeoisie defending their property against a genuine, if violent, protest
against the system; or are they representatives of the working class, fighting
the forces of social disintegration? Here too one should reject the demand to
take sides. The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged:
those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are
too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively
directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in
rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between
different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between
society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to
lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are
the highest.
Zygmunt Bauman 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.
The riots 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.
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. The
contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the
Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are
now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the
army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony.
The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA
funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents
of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up
a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The
rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who
were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely
to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political
subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will
translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?
The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to
the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display
of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made
clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism.
Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with
the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such
cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the
radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.
But one should also avoid the temptation of the
narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of
uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate
negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when
the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the
manifesto of the Spanish indignados,
issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that
meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves
progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of
us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all
concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we
see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us
helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable
truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing,
employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal
development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting
violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above
human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products.
I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be
the agents of this revolution? The indignados
dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled
by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of
demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet)
claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the
change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests:
they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a
positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt
without revolution.
The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably
owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which
disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece,
the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters
sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate
it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and
so on. 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.
Slavoj Žižek is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities, University of London. His most recent book is Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of
Dialectical Materialism.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite
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