Bookplanet: Zizek's latest

Zizek’s Refusal
By Adam Kotsko
Review of The Parallax View (Short Circuits) by Slavoj Zizek

Within the last few years, Slavoj Zizek has gained a name for himself as a political commentator. After his essay on 9/11, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” he steadily increased his popular writing, publishing in seemingly every possible venue (including In These Times ) in response to virtually every major news story. Meanwhile, Zizek was said to be hard at work on another long book, The Parallax View, which he was already claiming as his magnum opus months before its recent release.

Frankly, a magnum opus is exactly what Zizek needs right now. His performance as a public intellectual has met with decidedly mixed reviews, with much of his new audience wondering if they should take his counterintuitive and often outrageously provocative assertions seriously. At the same time, many of his long-time readers have grown impatient with Zizek’s failure to produce more work of the caliber that made his academic reputation in the 1990s.

Zizek is known for his frequent use of film and pop culture, his huge range of philosophical and literary references, and his obscene jokes—all packaged in overarching metaphors involving something like a rollercoaster (or in one particularly bizarre case, a mulcher). The Parallax View includes all of these things: extended riffs on the Matrix trilogy, a section on Henry James’ prose style, a Hegelian approach to sexual positions, a highly questionable analysis of anti-Semitism and a wide array of other digressions, often brilliant, sometimes plodding, with varying degrees of relevance to the topic at hand. More significantly, however, The Parallax View consolidates Zizek’s work as a whole and decisively moves it forward.

Zizek uses “parallax” to refer to situations in which the “same thing,” when viewed from two different perspectives, presents itself to the observer in two completely irreconcilable ways. A good example of this is light, which can be viewed as both a wave and a particle, with no way of mediating between the two positions. Rather than a conflict of two opposing principles, parallax names “the inherent ‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence” of reality with itself.

His ambition here is to develop a new dialectical materialism. The philosophical idea of materialism is simple enough: no God, no souls, etc. Matter is all there is. What a specifically dialectical materialism adds is the idea of the conflictual and inconsistent character of matter itself, in contrast to the idea of the universe as a machine running smoothly in accordance with transparent physical laws. Zizek uses this fundamental insight into the conflictual character of existence to investigate three kinds of parallax—philosophical, scientific and political. (This division allows for, in Zizek’s words, “a minimum of conceptual order.”)

The philosophy section is the most loosely organized. One chapter expands on his recent work on Christianity. For Zizek, part of Christianity’s “subversive core” is the idea of Christian love: “the excessive care for the beloved, a ‘biased’ commitment which disturbs the balance” of normal reality. The space for this love is opened up by the believer’s act of “unplugging” from all social ties in order to be completely faithful to Christ. For Zizek, St. Paul’s relativization of all social roles, indicating that the believer does not “belong” to the present order, is a subversive action of refusal. It explains Zizek’s interest in Christianity in the first place: This refusal to identify with the present order is a vital precursor to any attempt at revolutionary change.

The science section is the most important: No one is going to be impressed by a materialism, dialectical or not, that cannot make sense of science. Embracing cognitive and brain science—a subject many psychoanalysts have viewed with suspicion—Zizek rejects the idea that science can somehow “go too far” and destroy something essential to humanity, in this case, the idea of consciousness and free will. Rather than fretting that discovering the brain processes that underlie consciousness will somehow undermine our experience of consciousness, Zizek wants to determine what happens at the level of neuronal processes to give rise to the dimension of consciousness, and of human free agency.

To determine this, Zizek surveys a range of cognitive scientists, pointing out inconsistencies in their accounts of how consciousness arose. Acknowledging the field’s diversity, he lays out several basic positions, ranging from the idea that consciousness simply doesn’t exist to the idea that consciousness cannot be explained by other forces and must be taken as an independent force analogous to gravity or magnetism. But he rejects these ideas in favor of a more materialist position. Zizek agrees with those who think consciousness emerges out of a kind of short-circuit in the neuronal circuitry. Essentially, according to cognitive scientists such as Antonio Damasio, the “mental map” of the human being’s surroundings increased in complexity until it finally reached the point where there was a representation of the “self” in the map. Thus, the mind was able to think about itself, and for Zizek this reflexive move produced the unintended consequence of consciousness.

Within this scheme, conscious free choice does not directly “cause” human action in a straightforward way. Instead, free choice is first of all a negative move of refusal, because only the refusal to continue along in the chain of instinctual reactions opens up space for other possibilities. Far from being the pinnacle of evolution, then, humanity becomes the ultimate anti-adaptive species, with consciousness opening the way for the expenditure of huge amounts of energy on pursuits—such as language, art, and above all, non-procreative sex—that have nothing to do with “survival of the fittest.” Thus, Zizek is proposing a model of human freedom that avoids both pure mechanical determinism and the illusion of pure Promethean self-creation, where humanity creates itself by continually turning the given reality toward surprising new ends. As with his analysis of Christianity, this vision also has a political punch: We are most human when we refuse to act according to a supposed historical necessity or biological laws.

The final section on politics is probably of greatest interest to a general audience that came to Zizek through his popular articles and hope to learn of the positive program that underlies his criticism of various politicial movements. However, a large chunk of this section is taken up with those very same articles, including pieces on why Stalinism is to be preferred over Nazism, on Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? , etc. While these articles actually do make more sense when presented together, their inclusion contributes to an overall feeling of anti-climax. This feeling is only deepened when he advocates as a model revolutionary Herman Melville’s Bartleby, whose constant refrain, “I would prefer not to,” is the exact opposite of an inspiring political slogan.

Even here, however, Zizek is making a serious argument. As he has demonstrated throughout, negativity or refusal was at the core of both the Christian movement and the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness and culture. In both cases, what has been most valuable has stemmed from continued refusal, for example, the refusal to submit to the laws of nature by settling for the satisfaction of one’s animal needs. And so Zizek’s vision of revolution is one in which “an underlying ‘I would prefer not to’ … forever reverberates,” in which the refusal never lets up, even and especially in the building of a new positive order. If Zizek is correct that, “there is no final solution on the horizon today; Capital is here to stay; all we can hope for is a temporary truce,” then perhaps the true task of those who hope for revolution is to imagine what such a thorough-going refusal might mean.

(Adam Kotsko is a doctoral student at the Chicago Theological Seminary. His blog can be found at www.adamkotsko.com/weblog.)

Reader Comments:

I’ve only studied Zizek’s work in fragments, so I’m not qualified to render a judgment about his work. I have yet to read “Parallax View” but after reading this review, I think I will pick up a copy.

I have always been fascinated with the way academics focus on the “in-between” to address the ways in which we offer “temporary” solutions or resistance to ongoing struggles. For example, it is interesting how the human voice is used to mediate the boundaries between concepts and their formal representations, or even how a “sign” can function as a kind of mediation that exposes the tension between the finite existence of something, that is particular and specific to a given situation, and what is possible, thus given rise to a host of other “signs” as potentials fields of contested terrains.

As the author suggested, this approach can be, at first, discouraging in a time when we so desperately long for radical change. For example, a Marxist perspective on dialectical materialism would prefer that we expose the contradictions in society in order to bring about an “actual” change, rather than locate ourselves in between everything (recalling Marx’s famous statement: “we have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it..") Yet, this model seemed possible when there was a belief (and some still feel this way) that everything constituting societal divisions and excesses were based purely on capitalism and the class struggle.

The psychology of human beings has dominated contemporary scholarship, which has expanded our understanding of conflict to include ideology, which is deeply informed by psychological underpinnings that buttress conceptions of self and nation.

The self and society has been deemd an unfinished project caught in the interstices of conscious and unconscious moments, temporal moments and infinite time. I think Zizek and the author of this review are suggesting that each moment embodies a tension that is held together by a fictional binary structure that must be continually “worked through” to sustain our hope as human beings.

Posted by Epistrophy on Apr 25, 2006 at 6:12 AM

I have not picked up Parallax yet.

It’s funny Kotsko describes the end of Z’s book as anticlimactic when it’s precisely Z’s comment on the Matrix trilogy’s anticlimax that he quotes…

What leads to this deadlock is that, in a typical ideological short-circuit, the Matrix functions as a double allegory: for the Capital (machines sucking energy out of us) and for the Other, the symbolic order as such.

Perhaps, however - and this would be the only way to (partially, at least) redeem Revolutions - there is a sobering message in this very failure of the conclusion of the Matrix series. There is no final solution on the horizon today, Capital is here to stay, and all we can hope for is a temporary truce. That is to say, undoubtedly worse than this deadlock would have been a pseudo-Deleuzian celebration of the successful revolt of the multitude.

Is Z claiming, as Kotsko seems to think, that the ending of the Matrix trilogy with the truce is the only thing we can hope for? Is temporary truce secret Lacanian code for temporary truce? Anyway, following the thought, the truce represents an acceptance of extant reality. What is our reality like?

Besides the fact that we accept capital sucking energy out of us, we accept it (and us) sucking energy out of the planet. And I’d think this is what would determine the duration of any such truce.

We are not in a state of truce with capital. We think we are; but its mechanisms seem to involve us in a never-ending assault upon our environment and so, ultimately, upon ourselves. Capital is not a rational, thinking agent. It’s not human. It does not need an environment to live in or consider, because it is not alive. We do not actually parlay with capital, we simply choose to accept it as rational or not. If we choose to see it as rational, then we choose to believe our ecocidal behaviour at its behest is too.

What truce?

Z’s angle on the Matrix is interesting because he points out it’s possible Neo’s revolution is actually part of the Matrix’s grand design, orchestrated by some of its agents, assuring its survival in the end. It may not really be a revolution at all. Maybe it functions socially like a valve on a pressure cooker. Also (and what I think the point is here) the truce in question is made between two Matrix programs about the fate of some humans, not between the programs and the humans. The humans are not a party to the treaty and do not have a say. It’s a choice made for others by the force that eats them. So when Kotsko asks “what such a thorough-going [Bartlebyian] refusal might mean,” I’d say it’s refusing that kind of pact’s legitimacy.