In this book Slavoj Žižek, the man publishers once described as "the colossus of Ljubljana," intensifies the more explicit political trajectory of his recent works. This work is part of the WO ES WAR series which Žižek edits. The raison d'etre of the series is to demonstrate "that the explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist tradition denotes a dynamic freedom that enables us to question the very presuppositions of the circuit of Capital."

Such language is a provocative challenge to the "end of history" school of liberal-capitalist thinking and to dumbed-down intellectual and political populism. The statement raises the spectre of a dense, dry text that could easily deter. Yet even when addressing fundamental political problems, Žižek is far from dry and will address his points "by any means necessary" through reference to popular film, opera or herbal tea.

Žižek loves to taunt liberal sensibilities, and in the introduction he recounts the story of an American friend staying in Bucharest after the removal of Ceausescu. The friend complimented the country and the people in a call to his girlfriend. Immediately after the call was finished, the Securitate officer who monitored it rang to thank him for his kind comments. Žižek thrives on such paradox and therefore dedicates the book to the secret policeman in question.

What mass culture can tell us

Žižek's oeuvre is littered with collisions between high theory and mass culture and he thinks nothing of illustrating a discussion of the work of F.W. Schelling with an analysis of Forrest Gump (in The Indivisible Remainder from 1996). Žižek is not concerned with the aesthetic value (or lack of) in such films so much as their significances and symbolisms—the ways in which such products can reveal fundamental ideological or psychological processes.

The underlying lesson of this approach may be that significance (as opposed to aesthetic skill or complexity) is everywhere—it does not start and end in the art-house. Each Žižek text has one extended analysis of a film (in this case Face Off in a section entitled "John Woo as a critic of Levinas" (182) in which he "pulls out all the stops," pushing at the borders of self-parody but always remaining persuasive).

One of the most striking aspects of this book is its pace. In a stunning section entitled "The Myth of Postmodernity" (29-39), Žižek cites amongst others, Cindy Sherman, Spanish film, Casablanca, Kleist's "The Marquise of O," Hegel, Joyce's Ulysses, the film Equus, Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," Luther, James Bond, Nietzsche and Heidegger. The pace at which these eclectic subjects are deployed and analysed is in a way appropriate to the postmodern techno era of reduced attention spans and informational hyper-loading.

The accelerated pace does not imply a dilution of content; the complex works and references cited hardly suggest dumbing-down. If anything, Žižek's ideas can seem more powerful when concentrated almost to the duration of "blipverts." What's striking is how within a single paragraph Žižek cuts to the quick of a concept or a work. The accelerated style works because he has proved more than capable of extended analysis in the past and it is soon apparent that his mini-analyses don't sacrifice quality for quantity.

This techno-age metaphor suggests another image, that of the hyper-fast DJ mixing and cross-fading diverse samples into fast-moving but dense collages. This also highlights the performative nature of his work. Žižek is as much a showman as many DJs and has a repertoire of crowd-pleasing tricks: the swift cross-fade between discussion of a Hollywood blockbuster and German philosophy, or the rewind of a Lacanian motif (or should that be "sample"?). Also present in the mix are a fair number of jokes, for instance his discussion of marketing slogans such as "you get 30% free." Here he remarks, "in such a situation I am always tempted to say: 'OK then, give me only this free 30 per cent'" (43).

"I never knew there was so much in it!"

Žižek's engagement with mass culture does not amount to rehabilitation, or a simplistic postmodernist "so bad it's good" celebration. His approach suggests that the most trivial (pop) cultural artefact can be theoretically inspiring and through analysis can produce insights its creators may have been completely unaware of or opposed to (particularly in the political sense).

Within Žižek's Weltanschauung the personal is definitely political—the psychological mechanisms underpinning interpersonal relations cannot be isolated from those at the root of political or cultural processes, and his discussions of melancholy or desire integrate fully with persuasive analyses ideologies such as anti-Semitism (Žižek claims the anti-Semitic narrative is a means of accounting for the chaotic nature of reality), nationalism or political and academic correctness. This skill at describing the most esoteric and intangible of psychological and symbolic processes is as indispensable to his analyses of politics as to his work on film.

Conformity and resistance in the academy

Žižek mounts an attack on a series of dominant concepts that he argues distort our understanding of totalitarianism and the political field. As in his recent study of Kieślowski (read CER's review) and The Ticklish Subject (1999), there is a broadside against "New Age obscurantists," an "adversary" mentioned in his work increasingly often (here he audaciously claims their thinking is "an immanent outgrowth of modern science itself," 215).

He begins by analysing the language used on the box of an American herbal tea, which describes how the antioxidants it contains are used to tame harmful free radicals. In a masterful stroke he uses this as a metaphor for the way in which the notion of totalitarianism is (ab)used to tame radical thought, acting as a Denkverbot—a mechanism for preventing thought:

"the moment one accepts the notion of 'totalitarianism' one is firmly located within the liberal-democratic horizon." (3)

However, Žižek is not alone in his critique of totalitarianism. Some Anglo-American scholars are also questioning it, if not for ideological reasons then because it is too simplistic a model to describe the realities of the former Eastern bloc (see for example Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, eds Reid and Crowley, Oxford: Berg, 2000)

Criticising isms

Throughout the book, Žižek draws attention to what he sees as the enfeebled state of debate in an academy structured by a series of prohibitions, the violation of which can have dire consequences—he hints at (though he does not provide examples of) papers rejected or jobs refused. Having identified such codes, he goes on to challenge them spectacularly:

"The first thing to do, therefore, is fearlessly to violate these liberal taboos: So what if one is accused of being 'anti-democratic', 'totalitarian'…" (3)

Besides New Agers and liberals, others on his "hitlist" are advocates of feminism, postmodernism and "pseudo-leftist irrationalism" (7). He claims that transgression is now officially encouraged and that "if one wants to identify the hegemonic intellectual trend, one should simply search for the trend that claims to pose an unprecedented threat to the hegemonic power structure" (141).

One of the fascinating aspects of the Žižek phenomenon is that despite (or perhaps because of) all his provocations he has gained a significant following among those that he attacks in his works. If we consider how he gets away with it—infilitrating centres of bourgeois liberalism such as Radio 4's "Start The Week" programme—an interesting possibility arises. As he has said of Laibach, people and ideas coming from "the Balkans"/ex-Yugoslavia are affected by Western stereotypes of Balkan primitivism.

If, as he claims, contemporary academia is bound by unwritten laws, it is possible that his violation of these is only tolerated because of his "Balkan" status. More indulgence may be offered to him as an exotic "outsider" than to an equally iconoclastic Western thinker, particularly if they were to describe themselves as Žižek has as a "Stalinist" (a semi-ironic reference to his theoretical dogmatism).

Totalitarianism examined

In relation to totalitarianism, Žižek covers topics such as the role of the Holocaust in contemporary culture, the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism, Havel, the Stalinist show trials and two favoured examples of his: the GDR and the Yugoslav self-management system.

Revelling as he does in paradox and irony, Žižek's analysis of Stalin's purges is particularly striking. He claims that what the purges actually concealed was "a total incapacity to govern the country through 'normal' authority and executive measures" (119) and that the elevation of the leader to the status of a genius able to pronounce on any and all subjects had a paralysing effect upon the functioning of country subject to such a cult, also hinting at the corrosive effects of leadership cults in any context. Žižek points out the irony of the 1938 "meta-purge" (120) in which Yezhov, head of the NKVD, was actually charged with killing thousands of innocent Bolsheviks (who Žižek claims had in a sense betrayed the revolution by becoming the nomenklatura.)

Žižek also discusses the work of Shostakovitch, challenging simplistic (liberal) notions of dissidence. He takes particular issue with the oxymoronic concept of covert dissidence, as he says, "the very essence of a dissident act is that it is public" (125). As he has argued elsewhere, maintaining a private inner distance or cynicism towards the system actually helps the system and it is those who take an ideology literally that pose a greater threat. He sees Shostakovitch's achievement not in his supposed hidden musical dissidence but in the fact that he articulated his own cowardice and inner conflict in relation to the system and claims that the 8th String Quartet—written when he finally joined the party—is the music of a broken man.

Subsequently he challenges the liberal understanding of dissidence, drawing out an aspect generally overlooked:

"the very space from which [dissidents] themselves criticized and denounced the day-to-day terror and misery was opened and sustained by the Communist breakthrough, by its attempt to escape the logic of Capital... when dissidents like Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of authentic human solidarity, they (unwittingly, for the most part) spoke from the place opened up by Communism itself—this is why they tend to be so disappointed when 'actually existing capitalism' does not meet the high expectations of their anti-Communist struggle. Perhaps Vaclav Klaus, Havel's pragmatic double, was right when he dismissed Havel as a 'socialist'." (130)

At this point some will accuse Žižek of belittling the victims of Stalinist systems, yet he argues that Marxists should not be afraid to acknowledge the irrationalism of the purges and notes that "the Communist regimes, in their positive content, were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery" (130). Such failure was, he claims, judged against the systems' own utopian dreams and for this reason Stalinism even at its worst "exudes an emancipatory potential" (131). Perhaps some residual awareness of this plays a part in the current London trend for clothes decorated with the logos of Cuba or the USSR. However unpalatable to some, Žižek's position compels him to insist on the lost utopian value even of failed revolutionary projects.

From the Balkans to The Matrix

In the closing section, Žižek identifies the present forms of "the spectre of 'totalitarianism': "evil dictators" such as Milošević, New Right populism in the West and "the digital Big Brother," noting that "soon, our daily lives will be registered and controlled to such an extent that the former police state control will look like a childish game: the 'end of privacy'" is in sight (229).

Žižek gives a detailed commentary on ex-Yugoslavia. He identifies two "prejudices" that shaped the views of the Western left: that Yugoslav self-management really worked and that small nations like Slovenia and Croatia naturally regress to a proto-Fascist state if left unsupervised.

He goes on to make a key statement, worth quoting in full:

"The ultimate irony of such a nostalgic Leftist longing for the lost Yugoslavia is that it ends up identifying as the successor of Yugoslavia the very force that killed it: the Serbia of Milošević. In the post-Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s, what could be said to embody the positive legacy of Titoist Yugoslavia—its much-praised multiculturalist tolerance—was ('Muslim') Bosnia: the Serb aggression against Bosnia was (also) the aggression of Milošević, the first true post-Titoist (the first Yugoslav politician who really acted as if Tito was dead, as a perceptive Serb social scientist put it more than a decade ago), against those who clung desperately to the Titoist legacy of ethnic 'brotherhood and unity'." (232)

Žižek notes that the supreme commander of the "Muslim" army was an ethnic Serb and that all through the 1990s, "Muslim" Bosnia was the last part of ex-Yugoslavia where Tito's portraits were still hung in government offices. He claims that "to reduce the Bosnian conflict to civil war between different 'ethnic groups' in Bosnia, is not a neutral gesture, but a gesture that adopts in advance the standpoint of one of the sides in the conflict (Serbia)" (232).

He also notes the way in which the death of Tuđman and the (predicted) removal of Milošević cleared the way for their respective states to be accepted as democratic and pro-Western without undergoing any thorough self-examination or removal of the corrupt nationalist elites. Indeed, with the fall and extradition of Milošević (after this book was written) elements of his regime have been able to deflect much of the blame on to him in a way which enables the West to hail a victory for democracy and a problem "solved."

Žižek's verdict on the Western interventions (characterised by procrastination followed by over-reaction) is damning, and he claims that as a result Yugoslavia, Albania, Macedonia and Bosnia are all in effect "under the direct rule of political banditry" (234).

Finally, he condemns as "racist" the frequently heard Western truism about age-old hatreds and endemic intolerance (rather than very contemporary power struggles) being at the root of the wars.

He argues that in practice the New Right actually helps legitimise the market-subservient political compromises of parties such as New Labour and that "New Right populism is the 'return of the repressed,' the necessary supplement, of global capitalist multiculturalist tolerance" (244). The threat serves to restore the illusion of genuine choice within the electoral process displacing what he claims remains "the true focus of the political struggle (which is, of course, the stifling of any Leftist radical alternative)" (241). Effectively this spectre is a useful one for scaring the radical left, creating a point onto which oppositional energy can be focussed in a way that leaves the actual hegemonic forces a freer hand to govern.

Žižek examines Jörg Haider's provocative comparison of his politics with those of New Labour and claims that such populism (which appeals most to "working class" sections of the electorate) is "the price the Left is paying for its renunciation of any radical political project, for accepting market capitalism as 'the only game in town'" (246). He concludes that such "realism" is the "worst ideology."

This excoriation of political realism seems to leave him open to criticism in the light of his pragmatic (and controversial) support for the Liberal Democratic party in Slovenia. However, he has argued that the LDS played a central role in Slovenia's avoidance of the authoritarian route taken by other ex-Yugoslav republics. He is aware of the apparent contradiction between his international(ist) and domestic discourses but has insisted on the necessity of his LDS alignment (see Geert Lovink's interview with Žižek in InterCommunication No. 14, 1995.)

Reality TV

The final spectre is the digital Big Brother and this section is both tantalisingly brief and, ultimately, surprisingly optimistic. Žižek examines the TV Big Brother phenomeon arguing that it indicates that in the present context people can be more anxious when they believe they are not being observed, and that even members of the general public now need the camera as a guarantee of their existence. He goes on to use the film The Matrix as symbolic of our lives, which really are regulated by invisible networks but cautions against millenarian fantasies of technological collapse and pre-digital utopias. Some form of "matrix" (either psychological or now digital) is always necessary to protect us against what he calls (borrowing from the film) "the desert of the real" (254).

He concludes with "a modest Marxist point," an attempt to find a means of constructive engagement with the digitalisation of society, challenging once again some of the dominant liberal thinking on the subject:

"the proper answer to this threat is not retreat into islands of privacy, but an even stronger socialization of cyberspace. One should summon up the visionary strength to discern the emancipatory potential of cyberspace in what we (mis)perceive today as its 'totalitarian' threat." (256)

What Žižek leaves us with is an emphatically constructive challenge. To avoid the simplistic rhetorical seductions of automatically branding processes with a radical potential as "totalitarian" and to seek new modes of collective engagement with the digital life-world. The fleshing-out of this question is left either for his next book or perhaps to the readers themselves, but the spirit of optimism he manifests here is if nothing else a welcome antidote to political passivity and pessimism.

Alexei Monroe, 2 November 2001

Moving on:

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