Demanding the Impossible

by Slavoj Zizek

  Again, here, we should not follow the path of Japan or China. Their models are pretty much the same: to combine traditional wisdom with modernity. I think we need more. The soft fascist solution, which for me is the Chinese solution, simply will not work. My hope is that we will find a new model, not just to retain capitalism and have control through some harmonious corporate means, but to confront the deadlock of modernity in a more intelligent way.

  14

  The Subversive Use of Theory

  Under the so-called Bologna Process, the link between the humanities and theoretical thinking has been questioned, and the colonization of the logic of the market and of capitalist values over the educational field is now crucial. How do you see your educational commitment?

  SŽ: This may surprise you: I don’t have students. I work all the time as a researcher. This is why I’m eternally grateful to communist oppression. When I finished my studies in the early 1970s, it was during the final moments of hardline communism. So they didn’t allow me to teach. I was unemployed for five years, then I got a job at a small research institute. I’m still there. Because it is perfect. I don’t have any obligations. Well, I teach here and there a little bit, but I hate students more and more. I like universities without students, seriously.

  Well, this is – as I would put it – a difficult question. Because it’s too easy to say, “Don’t think about your career and do whatever you want to do.” But, my God, the majority of people have to survive. I think what we should offer them is a way to have some kind of career. Still, the problem for me is how to combine a career with a purpose in life. I mean, you can be a researcher or scientist or whatever, but how can you do something good there?

  What I want to tell you is that I don’t want a society where we are divided into a majority, who are just stupid workers looking for career, and then a minority, who play the morally elevated role. I don’t know how it is in your country, but here in Slovenia, Germany, France, or England, what is happening now with education – the so-called Bologna reform of higher education – is just horrible.

  What they really want is simply the “private use of reason,” as I call it, following Kant, so that universities basically produce experts who will solve problems – problems, defined by society, of state and corporate business. But, for me, this is not thinking. What is “true” thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: “Is this really a problem?” “Is this the right way to formulate the problem?” “How did we arrive at this?” This is the ability we need in thinking.

  Let’s look at the problem with the ideas of those in power. You have, for example, a car-burning incident in the suburbs of Paris. So you call up a psychologist and a sociologist who will tell you, according to their analysis, what to do and how to contain it. No! Thinking is much more than that. It is about asking fundamental questions. And this is disappearing. They really want to make universities into schools for experts. It’s actually already happening – they’ve even said it openly – and I’m horrified.

  A couple of months ago, the [then] Minister of State for Universities and Science in the UK, David Willetts, openly said that, from then on, “the arts, humanities and social sciences” taught in universities should have nothing to do with the state, meaning that it should be a matter between the university and the individual – the citizen – as an agent of the market. It is a total commercialization of higher education. I think this is pretty much a catastrophe. Because just as in more confused times, like today, we don’t just need experts. We also need people who will think more radically to arrive at the real root of problems.

  So the first thing to fight for, I think, is simply to make people, the experts in certain domains, be aware of not just accepting that there are problems, but of thinking more deeply. It is an attempt to make them see more. I think it can be done. I believe this may be the main task for today: to prevent the narrow production of experts. This tendency, as I see it, is just horrible. We need, more than ever, those who, in a general way of thinking, see the problems from a global perspective and even from a philosophical perspective.

  Let’s look at another example from ecology. When the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico unfortunately happened in the summer of 2010, people quickly needed experts to deal with the animals and other sea creatures. No, that’s not what we need. Indeed, what should be raised here is a much more fundamental question about such problems, problems for all of us which potentially shatter our commons: “What are the risks if we have to keep the oil drill?” “What kind of industry can replace it?”

  Therefore, we should not have only these two extremes: on the one hand, people who are conscious of these issues and, on the other, the majority who just follow their careers and are indifferent to these socio-ecological problems. We should build bridges between the two. It was a most beautiful moment, for me, when those really important scientists, from Einstein to Oppenheimer, started to raise more general, fundamental questions about the atomic bomb and other such political issues. So, again, I think it is more important than ever that people become aware that much more is at stake, especially with biogenetics and other scientific development, than just technological problems.

  15

  Embodying a Proletarian Position

  The problem being raised when one is to respond to “the private use of reason” is the fact that this cannot be achieved. We all are aware that there should be certain socio-political responses to this, but still the question of “who?” remains. Who is the subject/agent of revolution? Who is going to make the new world possible?

  SŽ: I don’t think there is only one agent. There will not be a new working class, or whatever. I think they are the people who find themselves in what I call a proletarian position: they are sometimes poor, sometimes well-off. What I would like to say about this notion of the proletarian position is that when you are reduced to some kind of zero level, then another subject emerges who is no longer the same self. I’d like to refer to the book The New Wounded (Les nouveaux blessés), written by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, who claimed that even now we have a new form of psychic illness. If the twentieth century was defined by hysterical neurosis, now, increasingly, we have a “post-traumatic personality.” This is the new order, which means we were submitted to some kind of trauma. It can be rape, public disorder, illness, or whatever. Well, we will survive, but as the living dead, deprived of all our social existence and substance.

  When Malabou develops her notion of “destructive plasticity,” of the subject who continues to live after its psychic death, she touches the key point: the reflexive reversal of the destruction of form into the form acquired by destruction itself. Quite simply, you are so shocked that, even if you are still alive, yourself, your ego is destroyed. Overdoing it a bit, perhaps, one is tempted to say that the subject deprived of its libidinal substance is the “libidinal proletariat.” This is a position of desperation.

  In the same way, in ecological terms, we are becoming proletarians. By this I mean that we are deprived of our natural basis. In biogenetics, if it’s possible to manipulate even our genetic base, the same things happen.

  So my point is that we have to look for possible proletarian positions. By proletarian positions, I mean in the sense that we are reduced to the zero level and all objective conditions of our work are taken away from us. This is why I agree with those who claim that the first Matrix movie is, in a way, a proletarian film. There is a wonderful scene, which the director didn’t exploit further in the movie, where, if you remember, they lie down as if they are dead and the energy is sucked from them. Aren’t we, again, reduced to some kind of proletarian position?

  Of course, some people are excluded – and this is crucial for me. I think what is sad about what we are witnessing now is that Marx was too optimistic. For Marx, capitalist exploitation has to take place in conditions of legal freedom and equality. That is to say, we all have the sam
e rights formally and legally and we are free, but then, in effect, if you don’t have money, you have to sell yourself and you are exploited. But now, I claim that worldwide capitalism can no longer sustain or tolerate this global equality. It’s just too much. I think that, more and more, illegal immigrants or refugees are in this problem of what Giorgio Agamben called “Homo Sacer.” They are in or out, and reduced to a bare existence outside the polis. We are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to take preventative measures. This, I think, will be another proletarian position in our time.

  And again, look at the proletarian position on the internet. It’s clear who will control the internet. What is really worrying, with so-called cloud computing, is a massive reprivatization of global spaces. Instead of having big computers with all the data, we will just have our individual machines – PCs, iPhones, etc. – to be connected with limited access; all effective power will be out there. Of course, in a way this is nice. We will have instant access to all the movies, etc. Everything thus becomes accessible, but only when mediated through a company that owns it all: software and hardware, content and computers. The question is, what is this everything? Everything will be censored. So cloud computing offers individual users an unprecedented wealth of choice – but isn’t this freedom of choice sustained by the initial choice of a provider, in respect to which we have less and less freedom?

  To take one obvious example, it’s horrendous that Apple made a deal with Rupert Murdoch allowing the news on the Apple cloud to be supplied by Murdoch’s media empire. The news you will get from iPhones will be Murdoch’s news. This is a problem. The internet interests me as, to use an old-fashioned term, “a field of class struggle.” The fight has been going on there from the very beginning. Steve Jobs was no better than Bill Gates. Now I discover Steve Jobs was even worse. Because it’s clear how he manipulates it with these machines. It’s pure manipulation.

  As you may know, the first version of the iPod didn’t have a function for phone calls or have a USB connection. It became clear to me, after speaking with someone who is connected with Apple, that he knew the first one would sell well and he wanted people to buy the next generation immediately after. It’s pretty horrible. You see that it’s not as simple as that. Global access is increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access. The more an individual user is given access to universal public space, the more that space is privatized. I think the key is to prevent these clouds from being privately owned. This is not a technological problem; indeed, it is a purely ideological economic decision.

  Again, here we have a proletarian problem. In the sense that apparently you have it all, with your iPhone you are connected to everything, but at the same time you have nothing. Everything is outside of you, which means you are somewhat crippled. And now something new is emerging that I cannot but call “private public space.” When you chat erotically on the internet, even showing your photos or whatever, you feel like you are in contact with the global world, but you are still isolated in a private space. It’s a kind of global solipsism. You are totally alone but in contact with everyone. Or you are in contact with everyone, but, in a way, still not socially connected. Again, interesting things are emerging here.

  This would have been my answer. One English analytic Marxist made a very simple but nice point, and I think there is an element of truth in it. He says that, in Marx’s time, the proletariat – the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject – was defined by a series of features: they were from the poorest part of society, the most populated, and they created wealth on behalf of others, etc. Today, we still have all these features, but they are no longer united in one subject.

  So what I am trying to do is redefine the concept of the proletariat as those who belong to a situation without having a specific “place” in it; they are included but have no part to play in the social edifice. It means that the concept of the proletariat becomes a shifting category. For example, the poorest, these days, are not those who work, but those who are jobless, excluded, and so on. So we don’t have one subject. We just have to look to see, let’s call them, different proletarian positions.

  And here I have problems with my orthodox leftist friends, who still identify the old notion of proletariat as the working class. To annoy them, I give them this example and it makes them furious. If you stick to the Marxist notion of exploitation and labor theory of value, then you should say that Chávez is exploiting the United States through oil profits. Because Marx, in Capital, demonstrates that the natural resources are not a source of value. So this means that we need to rethink the category of exploitation. Marx is absolutely clear here – he even uses oil as an example – that all new value is created by labor. So where do the big profits used to finance the revolution of Chávez come from? From selling the oil and getting money from the United States. So my argument is that we have totally to rethink the notion of exploitation and all other features. Everything has to be rethought again.

  16

  New Forms of Apartheid

  If we are all potentially Homo Sacer, in the sense that the Marxist notion of the agent is no longer appropriate for this globalized era, how can the selection of who is included and who excluded be done ethically? Some must be excluded as agents of revolution – the notion of fundamental exclusion. Is there a contradiction between your seeking an ethical, self-critical subject/agent (the barred subject) of revolution, and your ideas of perpetual revolution? To make a revolution, we need a powerful agent, but at the same time that agent has to be able to renounce his power. (The revolutionary state should both use and renounce power at the same time.) What if you were considered to be among the excluded, and threatened with death by the revolutionaries?

  SŽ: One thing that still works from the idea of Marx is that, with capitalism, there exists this radical gap. On the one hand, we have reality, real people working and consuming, and, on the other, we have this virtual circulation of capital, which goes on and on. There is a gap between the two. The whole country can effectively be in ruin and people starving, and then a financial expert comes and tells you the economy is in a good state.

  We saw just this after the 2008 crisis. The shock was that nothing happened in reality, but all of a sudden we realized that we were in a terrible crisis. I think the problem will be that the crisis will become much more metaphysical and economically spiritual. There will be no catastrophe and everything will go on as normal, then, all of a sudden, we will learn that it’s catastrophic and everything is wrong. This gap between financial circulation, which follows its own speculative rules, and reality is growing rapidly. I think where we are now is extremely dangerous. I think we are moving toward a much more authoritarian global apartheid society.

  There are multiple levels. I even tried to enumerate them. I see this problem of exclusion, which is no longer about the old class division between workers and capitalists, but simply about not allowing some people to participate in public life. They are considered as the invisible ones. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.

  So we might say that new forms of apartheid are appearing. When we read the book Planet of Slums, written by Mike Davis, it’s shocking to learn that more than one billion people already live in slums. Slums are exploding, even in China. So we have those who are “part of no-part,” the “supernumerary” element of society, in slums, which is a very interesting phenomenon because, contrary to what people say, that we live in a society of total control, there are larger and larger populations outside the control of the state. It is as if states allow large parts of their state territory to become off limits. I see a tremendous problem here.

  If you go to Los Angeles, everybody knows where the slums are. They are, of course, around the airport. You have huge slums in Inglewood. Do you know why they are there? Because no one cares if there’s a lot of noise where
only poor people live, so they built the airport there. LA International Airport is located in a perfect place: not far from the airport to the north, for example, is Beverly Hills, which is the richest part of the city. But at the same time, it’s a slum area.

  In addition to this slum situation, there are other big problems, which I think are economically insolvable. One of them is so-called intellectual property. Intellectual products are, in a very naive sense, communist by nature. Everybody knows this. Take a bottle of water, for example: when I drink it, then you will not drink it – and vice versa. When we use it, it loses its utility. But with knowledge, it’s exactly the opposite. The more it circulates, the more it grows. It’s a totally different logic. The difficult task for companies is how to prevent the free circulation of knowledge. Sometimes they spend more money and time trying to prevent free copying than they do on developing products. This is why what is happening now is totally arbitrary.

  So it is clear that what Bill Gates did is one big kidnapping. The problem is the following: with physical products, at least up to a certain level, who owns what? You can see this book. I bought it and it’s a material object. But when you talk about intellectual products, which circulate, it’s always very arbitrary to say they are private property, especially when you apply patents.

  Indian farmers – they explained it to me in India – have discovered that certain agricultural methods and materials, which they have been using for centuries, are now owned by American companies, just because an American company patented them. So this American company wants the Indian farmers to pay for what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years. The next problem will be that when the biogenetic companies patent genes, we will all discover that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others. In the end, your genes will literally be owned by a certain company. So what is you, which is not owned, is just pure Cartesian cogito. This paradox is totally absurd.