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Nature and its Discontents Slavov Zizek SubStance, Issue 117 (Volume 37, Number 3), 2008, pp. 37-72 (Article) Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: 10.1353/sub.0.0017 For additional information about this article Access Provided by Tsinghua University Library at 12/23/11 2:33AM GMT http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v037/37.3.zizek.html SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008 37Nature and its Discontents Nature and its Discontents Slavov Zizek Beyond Fukuyama Where do we stand today? Gerald A. Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority of society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; (6) it can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society (Cohen, 2001). None of the first four features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. (Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today’s society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers. Correct as it is, this enumeration should be supplemented by a systematic theoretical deduction: for Marx, they all follow from the basic position of a worker who has nothing but his labor power to sell. As such, workers are by definition exploited; with the progressive expansion of capitalism, they constitute the majority that also produces the wealth, and so on. How, then, are we to redefine a revolutionary perspective in today’s conditions? Is the way out of this predicament the combinatoire of multiple antagonisms, their potential overlappings? The underlying problem is here: how are we to think the singular universality of the emancipatory subject as not purely formal—as objectively-materially determined, but without working class as its substantial base? The solution is a negative one: it is capitalism itself that offers a negative substantial determination: the global capitalist system is the substantial “base” that mediates and generates the excesses (slums, ecological threats, etc.) that open up the site of resistance. It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, but the majority today is “Fukuyamaian”: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally-found formula of the best possible society; all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, etc. The only true question today is: do we endorse this “naturalization” of capitalism, or does © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2008 37 Slavoj Zizek SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008 38 today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms that will prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are three (or, rather, four) such antagonisms: (1) Ecology: in spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution. Why? Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies trust in the objectified/“reified” mechanism of the market’s “invisible hand” which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now, historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated—overdetermined—by the historical Substance. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military- social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived “not only as Substance, but also as Subject.” This is why, when confronted with singular catastrophic prospects (say, a political group that intends to attack its enemy with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer can rely on the standard logic of the “Cunning of Reason” which, precisely, presupposes the primacy of the historical Substance over acting subjects: we no longer can adopt the stance of “let the enemy who threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby self-destruct”—the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too high since, in the meantime, we may all perish along with the enemy. (2) The inappropriateness of private property for so-called “intellectual property.” The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries thus is: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of profit can be maintained? (See also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music.) And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? The key element of the new SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008 39Nature and its Discontents international trade agreements is “the protection of intellectual property.” The crucial date in the history of cyberspace is February 3, 1976, when Bill Gates published his (in)famous “Open Letter to Hobbysts,” the assertion of private property in the software domain: “As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most of you steal your software. […] Most directly, the thing you do is theft.” Bill Gates has built his entire empire and reputation on his extreme views about knowledge being treated as if it were tangible property. This was a decisive signal, triggering the battle for the “enclosure” of the common domain of software. (3) The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in bio-genetics). Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that the biogenetic interventions into the human species are the most serious threat to his vision of the End of History. What is false with today’s discussion concerning the “ethical consequences of biogenetics” (along with similar matters) is that it is rapidly turning into what Germans call Bindenstrichethik, the ethics of the hyphen—technology-ethics, environment-ethics, and so on. Ethics does have a role to play, a role homologous to that of the “provisional ethic” Descartes mentions at the beginning of his Discourse on Method: when we engage on a new path, full of dangers and shattering new insights, we need to stick to old established rules as a practical guide for our daily lives, although we are well aware that the new insights will compel us to provide a fresh foundation for our entire ethical edifice (in Descartes’ case, this new foundation was provided by Kant, in his ethics of subjective autonomy). Today, we are in the same predicament: the “provisional ethics” cannot replace the need for a thorough reflection of the emerging New. In short, what gets lost here, in this hyphen-ethics, is simply ethics as such. The problem is not that universal ethics gets dissolved in particular topics, but, quite on contrary, that particular scientific breakthroughs are directly confronted with the old humanist “values” (say, how biogenetics affects our sense of dignity and autonomy). This, then, is the choice we are confronting today: either we choose the typically postmodern stance of reticence (let’s not go to the end—let’s keep a proper distance towards the scientific Thing so that this Thing will not draw us into its black hole, destroying all our moral and human notions), or we dare to “tarry with the negative [das Verweilen beim Negativen],” that is, we dare to fully assume the consequences of scientific modernity, with the wager that “our Mind is a genome” will also function as an infinite judgment. Slavoj Zizek SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008 40 (4) Last, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The latter date announced the “happy ‘90s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history,” the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community was just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy ‘90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border. So, what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times.1 Since, sometime very soon (or maybe, given the imprecision of the Third World censuses, it has already happened), the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural population, and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon. We are thus witnessing the fast growth of the population outside state control, living in conditions half outside the law, in terrible need of the minimal forms of self-organization. Although their population is composed of marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and ex- peasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many of them working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) They are the true “symptom” of slogans like “Development,” “Modernization,” and “World Market”: not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.2 No wonder the hegemonic form of ideology in slums is Pentecostal Christianity, with its mixture of charismatic miracles-and-spectacles- oriented fundamentalism and social programs like community kitchens and care for children and the elderly. While one should resist the temptation to elevate and idealize slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class, one should nonetheless, in Badiou’s terms, perceive slums as one of SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008 41Nature and its Discontents the few authentic “evental sites” in today’s society— slum-dwellers are literally a collection of those who are the “part of no part,” the “surnumerary” element of society, excluded from the benefits of citizenship, uprooted and dispossessed, with “nothing to lose but their chains.” It is surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (“freed” from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life- forms. Of course, there is a crucial break between the slum-dwellers and the classic Marxist working class: while the latter is defined in the precise terms of economic “exploitation” (the appropriation of surplus-value generated by the situation of having to sell one’s own labor as a commodity on the market), the defining feature of the slum-dwellers is socio-political, it concerns their (non)integration into the legal space of citizenship with (most of) its incumbent rights—in somewhat simplified terms, more than a refugee, a slum-dweller is a homo sacer, the systemically generated “living dead” or “animal” of global capitalism. He is a kind of negative of the refugee: a refugee from his own community, the one whom the power is not trying to control through concentration, where (to repeat the unforgettable pun from Ernst Lubitch’s To Be Or Not to Be) those in power do the concentrating while the refugees do the camping, but pushed into the space of the out-of-control. In contrast to the Foucauldian micro-practices of discipline, a slum-dweller is the one with regard to whom the power renounces its right to exert full control and discipline, finding it more appropriate to let him dwell in the twilight zone of slums.3 What one finds in the “really-existing slums” is, of course, a mixture of improvised modes of social life, from religious “fundamentalist” groups held together by a charismatic leader to criminal gangs and germs of a new “socialist” solidarity. The slum dwellers are the counter-class to the emerging so-called “symbolic class” (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists, etc.), which is also uprooted and perceives itself as directly universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with Blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the “symbolic class” inherently split, so that one can make the emancipatory wager on the Slavoj Zizek SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008 42 coalition between the slum-dwellers and the “progressive” part of the symbolic class? What we should be looking for are the signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives; they will be the germs of the future. What makes slums so interesting is their territorial character. While today’s society is often characterized as the society of total control, slums are the territories within a state, with boundaries from which the state (partially) has withdrawn its control—territories that function as white spots, blanks, on the official map of a state territory. Although they are de facto included in a state by the links of black economy, organized crime, religious groups, etc., state control is nonetheless suspended therein; they are domains outside the rule of law. In the map of Berlin from the times of the now defunct GDR, the area of West Berlin was left blank, a weird hole in the detailed structure of the big city; when Christa Wolf, the well- known East German half-dissident writer, took her small daughter to East Berlin’s TV tower, from which one had a nice view over the prohibited West Berlin, the small girl shouted gladly: “Look, mother, it is not white over there, there are houses with people like here!”—as if discovering a prohibited slum Zone... This is why the “destructured” masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a non-proletarianized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. These masses are an important factor in the phenomenon of globalization. True globalization, today, would be found in the organization of these masses—on a worldwide scale, if possible—whose conditions of existence are essentially the same. Whoever lives in the banlieues of Bamako or Shanghai is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieue of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago. Effectively, if the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the nineteenth century was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by politicizing the working class, and if the task of the twentieth century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the twenty-first century is to politicize—organize and discipline—the “destructured masses” of slum-dwellers, those regarded as the “animals” by global capitalism. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez’s biggest achievement in the first years of his rule was precisely the politicization (inclusion into the political life, social mobilization) of slum dwellers; in other countries, they mostly persist in apolitical inertia. It was this political mobilization of the slum dwellers that saved him from the US-sponsored coup; to the surprise of everyone, Chavez included, slum dwellers descended to the affluent city center en masse, tipping the balance of power in his favor. SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008 43Nature and its Discontents The course on which Chavez embarked in 2006 is the exact opposite of the postmodern Left’s mantra on de-territorialization, the rejection of statist politics, etc.: far from “resisting to state power,” he grabbed power (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the state apparatuses and interventions to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarizing favelas, organizing training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of the “resistance” to his rule of the capital (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidized supermarkets), he has announced the constitution of his own political party! Even some of his allies are skeptical about this move—does it signal the return to the standard party-state politics? However, one should fully endorse this risky choice: the task is to make this party function not as a usual (populist or liberal-parliamentary) party, but as a focus for the political mobilization of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). So what should we say to someone like Chavez? “No, do not grab state power, just subtract yourself, leave the laws of the [State] situation in place”? Chavez is often dismissed as a clownish comedian, but would not such a subtraction reduce him to a new version of Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, to whom many Leftist refer as “Subcomediante Marcos”? Today, it is the great capitalists, from Bill Gates to ecological polluters, who “resist” the State… The four features presupposed in the Marxist notion of the proletariat are, of course, grounded in the singular capitalist mechanism; they are four effects of the same structural cause. Perhaps one can even map Cohen’s four features that threaten the indefinite self-reproduction of the global capital: “majority” appears as ecology, a topic that concerns us all; “poverty” characterizes those excluded and living in slums; “producing wealth” is more and more dependent on scientific and technological developments like biogenetics; and, finally, “exploitation” reappears in the impasses of intellectual property, where the owner exploits the results of collective labor. The four features form a kind of semiotic square, the intersecting of two oppositions along the lines of society/nature and inside/outside the social Wall of a new apartheid: ecology designates the outside of nature; slums designate the social outside; biogenetics, the natural inside; and intellectual property, the social inside. Why in this overlapping of the four antagonisms is not the Laclauian empty signifier—(“people”)—filled in throug