Brian Donahue

Department of English
Gonzaga University
donahue@gonzaga.edu

 

This essay begins in the midst of the ongoing dilemma posed by late-capitalist society and postmodern culture, namely, whether these remain the ultimate horizon of the contemporary world and whether efforts to resist, oppose, represent critically, or propose alternatives to the “cultural dominant” of postmodernism are merely atavistic. Below, I address some of the challenges to Marxism (as the discourse of the alternative to and the critique of capitalism par excellence) posed by the conditions of what Ernest Mandel has famously named “late capitalism” and by the theoretical discourse of what Dick Hebdige has called “the posts,”¹and make a case for the continued relevance and value of Marxist theory for an ostensibly post-Marxist, would-be post-ideological period. The developments in the theory of ideology advanced in Slavoj Zizek’s work, focusing on the role of psychology in the functioning of ideology under conditions of late capitalism, are then taken as valuable criticisms and revisions of the Marxist tradition that open useful avenues for critically understanding American culture and society in recent decades.

 

Hard Times for Marxism

 

The zeitgeist is anti-Marxist to the same extent that it is antimodern, exhibiting what Jean-François Lyotard calls in The Postmodern Condition, in what has become one of the great slogan-definitions of postmodernism, an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv), including especially those inherited from the modern European Enlightenment tradition, such as progress and liberation. Lyotard’s argument in brief: totalizing “master narratives” no longer function to legitimate and unify knowledge; the postmodern condition is marked by heterogeneous and radically incommensurable language games; attempts to reconcile language games through the principle of consensus are “terrorist” (63). This argument is typical of postmodern neopragmatist theorizing in that it precludes the kind of large-scale analyses that would allow adequate attempts to elaborate connections between the epistemological-linguistic theory he proposes and the social, economic, and cultural forces to which he only occasionally refers. Obviously, Marxism is directly challenged in Lyotard’s analysis since it traditionally promotes both a progressive teleology and an emancipatory politics.

 

Other specific challenges to particular Marxist concepts and protocols are widespread; for example, its utopianism, a topic much discussed by Fredric Jameson,² often comes under fire. As Clint Burnham notes, the contemporary criticisms of utopia take two primary forms: “First, the culture doubts the possibility of some ‘better place’ than the undoubtedly excellent world of late capitalism,” a criticism that he characterizes as “‘bad,’ or negative, or ideological, or neoconservative”; and second, “that culture characterizes itself as already nonrepresentational by doubting the possibility of representationalism,” a claim that he calls the “‘good,’ or positive, or utopian, or postmodern critique of utopia” (2). In either case, a conception of radical social change toward an imagined (better) future beyond the capitalist horizon is eradicated. Other Marxist categories and concepts–everything from the labor theory of value to the claims for dialectical materialism as a “science” of inquiry³–have come under attack in various high theoretical arguments. Such writings, combined with the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, have raised the question for leftist intellectuals at the start of the twenty-first century: why Marxism (still)?

 

Burnham offers several answers to this question that are worth repeating: first, Marxism has for the past thirty years or so found its “moral legitimacy (for better or for worse)” more in the Western new social movements of “youth, ecology, feminism, antiracism” and the like and in the “Third World (from Che to postcolonialism)” than in Eastern European state socialism; second, Marxism is not a monolithic discourse, and even during the Soviet era its most significant theorists always maintained an “independent and skeptical attitude” rather than a blind allegiance to the Communist party; third, the European revolutions have demonstrated that “the masses can opt to take control of their own destinies,” invalidating fascist hopes for efficient control, even if these particular revolts were “as much about consumer goods as… about freedom”; and fourth, Marxist Third World liberation movements and Marxist critical analyses of world political-economic situations remain as relevant as ever in the post-Cold War period (4-5). Regardless of whether we wish to accept Burnham’s claims in their entirety, they certainly indicate at a minimum that Marxism should not be dismissed as casually as it often is in the current intellectual climate. For all of its demonstrable continued relevance, however, Marxism does face difficult times, not least among intellectuals, as can be seen in the debates over postmodernism in theoretical circles since the 1970s as well as in the events and developments that have prompted those debates.

 

Postmodernism as Post-Marxism

 

Most theoretical accounts of postmodernism have focused on various features of advanced industrialized societies since the end of the second World War, citing an array of historical transformations as signs of the birth of a new era. Such trends and events as the detonation of the first atomic bomb; the proliferation of television; the rise of rock and roll and youth culture; the first transmissions of images of the earth as seen from space; the expansion of finance capital and money markets; the attenuation of the distinction between high art and commercial popular culture; the development of sophisticated computer technology and the related nexus of information, power, and profit; the migration of the middle classes from cities to suburbs; the emergence of new social movements and political alliances unconstrained by older party affiliations; the shift in economically advanced regions away from heavy industrial manufacturing toward a service economy and consumer society, accompanied by an increased international division of labor; the rise of nationalist political independence movements; the proliferation of cynicism and suspicion of traditional narratives of legitimation; the expansion of multinational corporations; and the consolidation of reactionary fundamentalist religious and political movements have all been deemed hallmarks or inaugural moments of postmodern times.

 

Different theorists associated with the discourse on postmodernism have taken different features as definitive and have approached the topic through different critical frameworks. Lyotard, as noted above, focuses on epistemology and aesthetics in The Postmodern Condition, addressing the crisis of legitimation in contemporary intellectual discourse and advocating the agonistics of irreconcilable language games. Jean Baudrillard, especially in his work since the late 1970s, experiments with a postmodern theoretical sociology that abandons traditional modes of critique and conceptual schemata in favor of pointed, ironic descriptions of consumer society and mass media. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari espouse a militant philosophy of desire, championing the decentered, nomadic, postmodern subject as “schizo.” Jameson, writing on the postmodernism question from within the Marxist tradition, takes a broad historical perspective, linking postmodern culture explicitly to changes in the structure of capitalist political economy in the postwar era.⁴ The differences among the critical perspectives underlying these positions–in particular the differences between those that treat postmodernism as an aesthetic style, discursive problematic, or mood of schizophrenic, contradictory, conflicted subjectivity, and those that conceptualize postmodernity via a totalizing dialectical model as an overarching global, political-economic, historical reality or periodizing concept–remain significant. They are the differences that make a difference in this debate, marking a key theoretical dividing line.

 

Slavoj Zizek discusses the implications of the way this dividing line is usually presented in contemporary theory. In a defense of dialectical totalization against the notions of dissemination and radically irreconcilable fragmentation that prevail in postmodern theory, Zizek claims that the very form of the opposition as posed in the question “gives predominance to the second term of the alternative” because it “silently assumes that every attempt at rational totalization is in advance doomed to failure” (For They 99). But this characterization misrepresents the Hegelian understanding of a rational totality, he writes, in that “the very impetus of the ‘dialectical progress'” has to do with “the possibility of ‘making a system’ out of the very series of failed totalizations, to enchain them in a rational way, to discern the strange ‘logic’ that regulates the process by means of which the breakdown of a totalization itself begets another totalization” (99). He goes on to make a similar argument with regard to the Marxist notion of the class struggle, which is widely criticized by postmodernists as “the ‘totalizing’ moment of society, its structuring principle,… a kind of ultimate guarantee authorizing us to grasp society as a rational totality” (100). Such characterizations, Zizek argues, overlook “the ultimate paradox of the notion of ‘class struggle,'” which is that

 

society is “held together” by the very antagonism, split, that forever prevents its closure in a harmonious, transparent, rational Whole–by the very impediment that undermines every rational totalization. Although “class struggle” is nowhere directly given as a positive entity, it none the less functions, in its very absence, as the point of reference enabling us to locate every social phenomenon not by relating it to class struggle as its ultimate meaning (“transcendental signified”) but by conceiving it as an(other) attempt to conceal and “patch up” the rift of the class struggle, to efface its traces–what we have here is the typical structural-dialectical paradox of an effect which exists only in order to efface the causes of its existence; of an effect which in a way “resists” its own cause. (100)

 

Here Zizek, like Jameson, rebuts condemnations of the maligned “closed, totalized system,” claiming that Hegelian and Marxist dialectical theory never aimed at total closure in the first place and reasserting its methodological value in the face of postmodern criticisms by arguing that those criticisms are based on a generalized and mistaken conception of Hegelian and Marxist thinking in terms of absolute, total, and unified systems. In other words, even Hegel knew that Absolute Spirit’s destiny of perfect, static self-contemplation was always already rendered impossible by the ineluctable necessity of movement, and, as Zizek writes, even Marx understood that the “‘normal’ state of capitalism is the permanent revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence,” even though he sometimes proceeded “as if he [did] not know it, by describing the very passage from capitalism to socialism in terms of… vulgar evolutionist dialectics” (Sublime 52-53). While he does defend the dialectical tradition, Zizek does not simply revert to a “vulgar” Marxism (although Jameson has recently suggested that such a move might in fact be called for in the post-Cold War era⁵). I develop a more thorough discussion of his work below.

 

Returning now to the issues at stake in the postmodernism debate, I find persuasive the efforts of Jameson and Zizek to link them to a dialectical tradition that, according to their arguments, has not been “made obsolete” by the advent of postmodern theory. The concerns of this latter discourse–from problems of representation and language to concerns with history, subjectivity, aesthetics, and politics–have been and continue to be central concerns of Marxist theory, notably in the work of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. Thus, just as the postmodernism question–even after all the pages devoted to it over the past thirty years–still looms in the background of any contemporary Marxist criticism, so too the questions of totality, capitalism, praxis, telos, and the “properly political” must be brought to bear on any postmodern theory and criticism that avoids such topics.

 

As for the term postmodernism itself, it has taken on multiple meanings in its various incarnations and has provoked numerous attacks and debates. The semantic widening that has occurred as the term has appeared in more and more discursive fields over the course of its popularization should not, however, according to Hebdige, be taken as reason to dismiss it as meaningless gibberish. On the contrary, following Raymond Williams’s reasoning in Keywords, he suggests that “the more complexly nuanced a word is, the more likely it is to have formed the focus for historically significant debates, to have occupied a semantic ground in which something precious and important was felt to be embedded” (182).

 

As nonacademic writers and traditional humanist scholars have made forays into this semantic ground, the assaults against the concept of postmodernism have taken a variety of forms, including claims that the term has no clear definition, that it’s a faddish sign of changing academic fashion or an irrelevant topic for elites to ponder and debate in coded jargon, and especially recently, that the arguments surrounding the term have run their course and deserve to die out quietly. Yet each of these claims holds whatever degree of validity it may retain only to the extent that it implicitly accepts to some degree from the start the very kind of immanent, nominalist epistemology that is alleged to be the hallmark of postmodernism, an epistemology according to which the Jamesonian thesis–that postmodernity names the current historical totality of our actual global political economy (even if an exhaustive catalog of its empirical features remains properly impossible and if a selective description of such features would necessarily reveal contradictions)–is bracketed from the start. That is, it is possible to dismiss the concept of postmodernism as a “mere” fad only within an epistemological context that assumes that such fads constitute nothing more than elements of a linguistic game played by the academic “discourse community” and that they have relevance only to the extent that they, for example, provide fodder for conversations, presentations, and publications without ever “touching ground.” In this sense, conservative intellectuals who call for a return to essential Western values, the great classics, moral authority, and foundational principles and who simultaneously dismiss theories of postmodernism out of hand as fashionably relativistic nihilism are trying to have it both ways: they want foundationalism, but they want to insist at the same time that in the case of the concept of postmodernism, there is no foundation, as if with a vigorous enough rhetorical flourish they could make it–and what it signifies–disappear.

 

In other words, there is a call to a reflection model of language in the conservative position, yet the idea that the sign postmodernism might refer to or reflect an actual “reality” is dismissed (and therefore the sign is deemed meaningless). Of course, one of the key features of postmodern theory–insofar as its lineage includes structuralist linguistics and the application of the linguistic model across the full range of theoretical discourse and cultural practices (and even the critique of the binary coding of this model in the poststructuralist moment)–is its questioning of the strict distinction between the “real world” and (linguistic) representation. As Derrida put it, “From the moment there is meaning there are nothing but signs” (50). But then at another level, mimesis reintroduces itself because such a theory may be held to “reflect” a certain virtualization, spectacularization, and intensified semioticization of the “real world” itself in the era of mass media and computerization and of the movement of scientific research toward what Lyotard calls “postmodern science” (53-60).⁶

 

In any case, the conservative criticism wants to refuse both postmodern theory itself and the possibility that the theory may indicate that something “really has changed” about the world conceived and described in the discourses of modernity. Any tendencies in intellectual and cultural discourse that have emphasized the role of language and cultural forms in constructing social reality are therefore deemed suspect and potentially dangerous in that they allegedly put the cart of language and culture before the horse of the reality they reflect. Examples would include the aesthetic and cultural politics of the modernist avant-garde, who understood their work to be ahead of its time and who emphasized the autonomy of art and its consequent role in shaping rather than reflecting social reality; the Nietzschean-Heideggerian-Derridean philosophical lineage that emphasizes language as a kind of inescapable horizon circumscribing reality, history, experience, and consciousness; the Althusserian structuralist-Marxist emphasis on “ideological state apparatuses” as determinants of subjectivity; the propensity within literary criticism after the rise of semiotic theory to see signs everywhere, even where–the conservative critic would want to say–we used to see things; and the Lacanian psychoanalytic focus on the linguistic structure of the unconscious and the determining role of language in the formation of subjectivity. All of these very different critical approaches would be considered a departure from “common sense” realism and traditional foundational premises.

 

The reflection or mimetic model of language and representation is also, however, a simplified version of a certain line of anti-poststructuralist Marxist critique. That is, as a counter to the tendency in poststructuralism to insist on the omnipresence of textuality, a traditional Marxist theoretical response insists on the determination of the cultural superstructure in the last instance by the economic base even if that “last instance” functions as a limit that is never actually reached and even if such determinations are mediated in multiple complex ways. So a kind of affinity can be seen between conservative and Marxist arguments against extreme versions of poststructuralism, but that shared criticism is where the similarity generally ends. The conservative argument is usually made in the name of an idealized conception of intellectual history as “great men who wrote great books.” Thus the critical-materialist dimension of Marxism is at odds with it. But there is a contending discourse, to which I have already referred, that offers a dialectical critical theory also strictly at odds with extreme versions of postmodern theory yet at the same time apparently comfortably “post”-Marxist and therefore (more of) a puzzle (than humanist liberalism or conservatism) for anyone claiming allegiance to traditional or “vulgar” Marxist materialism.

 

Zizek, Defender of the Dialectic

 

Among the most celebrated academic celebrities of the nineties, Slavoj Zizek is a prolific and authoritative writer who explains philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts through references to popular culture, jokes, and political ideologies. His work has done much to advance a psychoanalytic theory of ideology, offering a combined Lacanian-Hegelian model as a counter to both traditional Marxist ideology critique and more recent poststructuralist discourse analysis. His style is often breezy, associative, enjoyable, and hyperbolic, to the extent that it is not until one finishes reading that one begins to feel that he has been repeating the same idea throughout the various short segments of the text. This observation is not meant to imply that he is literally repeating himself but to suggest that the form of his arguments often appears the same even if the content shifts restlessly. From a certain distance, he appears to be an entertainer who can quickly and cleverly make Moebius strips out of every kind of material he encounters. Nonetheless, much of his work seems to capture perfectly the workings of ideology in our “post-ideological” times.

 

To take one example, in The Sublime Object of Ideology Zizek revisits Pascal’s argument about the real effectivity of material practice, regardless of what one takes to be one’s subjective beliefs (33-40). The simplified version of Pascal’s approach to this topic is, “Kneel, and you will believe.” In other words, the ritualized practice of regulated bodily movements in particular religious settings, accompanied by specific physical sensations over time in a regular pattern, is enough to “induce” belief in a doubter. Zizek is careful to stress, however, the distinction between this materialism of “custom” and the simplistic concept of brainwashing or “insipid behaviorist wisdom (‘the content of your belief is conditioned by your factual behavior’)” (40), a distinction based on “the paradoxical status of a belief before belief“:

 

By following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what we have already believed. In other words, what the behaviorist reading of Pascalian “custom” misses is the crucial fact that the external custom is always a material support for the subject’s unconscious. (40)

 

Zizek applies this argument about the “automatism of the signifier” to a variety of homologous situations, such as the spinning of Tibetan prayer wheels and the practice in some cultures of hiring “weepers” to grieve on one’s behalf. He draws from these various examples the general lesson that external, material factors play an important though paradoxical role in producing, which is to say enabling retrospective recognition of, what are usually taken to be internal, spiritual-ideological states. This process thus demonstrates “the objectivity of belief”: the ritualized behavior “does the believing” for the doubter and induces/allows acknowledgment of “real” belief; the spinning wheels carrying written prayers effectively “do the praying” for whoever spins them; the hired mourners “do the grieving” for the relative of the deceased. As further examples, Zizek cites Lacan’s comments on the Chorus in Greek tragedy, which does “our duty of compassion for the heroes” even if we are “just drowsily watching the show,” as well as the familiar current example of canned laughter and applause on the soundtracks of television shows, sounds that perform the same function as the classical Chorus: “the Other–embodied in the television set–is relieving us even of our duty to laugh–is laughing instead of us” (35).

 

Developing this idea in specifically Marxist terms, Zizek emphasizes the point that commodity fetishism is a property not of consciousness but of objective behavior and that belief in the fetish is always ascribed to a “subject presumed to believe.” Thus in their actual socioeconomic behavior, in their everyday activity, people fetishize commodities, even though consciously, they are perfectly aware that the “relations between things” mask “relations between people” (“Supposed” 41). In such a context, Zizek points out, the task for theory is not to “demonstrate how the original human belief was transposed onto things”; on the contrary, “displacement is original and constitutive” (“Supposed” 41). No one consciously acknowledges that he or she believes in the magical properties of commodities; rather, this belief is attributed always to an Other, in this case, to the uncritical consumer who is duped by the messages of advertising, ignorantly seeking happiness through the consumption of commodities:

 

There are some beliefs, the most fundamental ones, which are from the very outset “decentered,” beliefs of the Other; the phenomenon of the “subject supposed to believe” is thus universal and structurally necessary…. All concrete versions of this “subject supposed to believe” (from the small kids for whose sake their parents pretend to believe in Santa Claus to the “ordinary working people” for whose sake communist intellectuals pretend to believe in socialism) are stand-ins for the big Other. So the answer to the conservative platitude according to which every honest man has a profound need to believe in something is that every honest man has a profound need to find another subject who would believe in his place. (“Supposed” 41-42)

 

After summarizing this argument about the psychological displacement of belief that characterizes the subject’s relation to commodities in capitalist society, Zizek specifies the appropriate Marxist response, which is not to perform a kind of primary-level ideology critique, since the bourgeois subject is already consciously critical:

 

What the fetish objectivizes is “my true belief,” the way things “truly seem to me,” although I never effectively experience them this way…. So when a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not “Commodity may seem to you a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people”; the actual Marxist’s reproach is rather “You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you–in your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers.” (“Supposed” 54)

 

In other words, bourgeois subjects think they see through the veil of the commodity form and rest comfortably in that critical knowledge of socioeconomic relations; but in reality, they behave as if they believe differently from what they know, and their relation to commodities is the objective illustration of this disavowed belief.

 

This line of reasoning, then, locates ideology not in consciousness but in real activity. Zizek cites the formula for contemporary cynical ideology proposed in Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason: as opposed to the traditional Marxist notion, according to which people are “duped” into believing the ruling ideology and thus “do not know what they are doing” when they effectively participate in their own subjugation, contemporary popular cynicism forces us to consider the notion of an “enlightened false consciousness” whereby “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (Sublime 29).

 

Like most analyses of subjectivity in contemporary theory, this version disrupts radically the notion of a fully self-present subject: the grain of material practice in time is always already altering all ideological symbolization. To use Zizek’s Lacanian language: the irreducible “hard kernel” of the Real remains unassimilated into the Symbolic order. One can, for example, have a self-conception as an ironic, critical viewer who watches TV comedies as kitsch or as the detritus of the culture industry, but according to Zizek’s version of externalized ideology, as long as one sits and watches–whether laughing idiotically or making ironic, cynical comments–objectively, one is doing one’s duty to “enjoy the show.” This notion has significant implications for theories of both ideology and subjectivity. For example, the determining effect of objective activity regardless of subjective intention can be read as another way of stating the existentialist slogan that there is no “dress rehearsal” for life: at each moment actions are final and decisive, even if one believes oneself to be, for example, merely “performing a role” temporarily before returning to some other “real life.” That real life is being determined at each instant by numerous material factors in the face of which a concept like “personal choice” loses the certainty of its suggestion of direct action in pursuit of clearly understood interests.

 

This Lacanian “hard kernel” that appears prominently in Zizek’s work can have varying political valences. Its value for radical politics derives from its affirmation of the Lacanian notion of the inherent lack enabling subjectivity: the subject is constituted through, yet simultaneously split by, the object-cause of desire such that the “it” is always already there before the “I” can be recognized. This focus on that which cannot be made consciously transparent to the subject through linguistic symbolization counters a prevailing current of contemporary mainstream U.S. culture that denies or derides the unconscious as an invention of psychoanalysis in the same way that it denies or derides class struggle as an invention of Marxism, both treated as entirely discredited projects. The idea that rational linguistic processes can never achieve transparency and that subjects are unable to know fully their own motivations is corrosive to the basic assumptions of liberalism. If rational discourse is subtended by an unassimilable, extradiscursive Real, then the model of liberal politics–free, rational subjects representing their interests through transparent communication in an effort to achieve consensus–is called into question. “Freedom,” “rationality,” and “transparency” are shown to be ideological fictions draped over the Real, which is never fully covered by them. Such a model poses problems for, among other projects, the Habermasian social-democratic ideal of rational intersubjective communication as well as the American liberal neopragmatism promoted by Richard Rorty.⁷

 

For all the ground it gains in destabilizing liberal politics, the “hard kernel of the Real” also raises problems for radical politics. To the extent that it can be understood as a zone of absolute, prediscursive otherness beyond criticism, the Real can function as a naturalized, ahistorical alibi that assures in advance the failure of systemic critique and future-oriented political projects by fetishizing the moment at which we must throw up our hands and admit ignorance and the failure of representation. This insistence on the Real as radically foreclosed from symbolization thus effectively serves existing hegemonic relations by reinforcing the lines of inclusion and exclusion that determine the relative power accorded to various subject positions as inevitable effects of an invariant law of the Real. This is essentially Judith Butler’s critique of Zizek along feminist-poststructuralist lines.⁸

 

Another common criticism of Zizek holds that he ultimately takes no position on the ideological issues he addresses. The problem is related to that Moebius strip quality mentioned above: Zizek consistently performs stunning critical analyses, but the question of where they are supposed to lead is not always answered, especially in The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book published in English. Indeed, at the 1999 MLA convention, Teresa Ebert criticized Zizek from a strictly traditional Marxist standpoint, characterizing him as a contemporary cynic trapped in the dead-end of “enlightened false consciousness,” and arguing that despite his self-presentation as a critic who exposes the workings of contemporary popular-cynical ideology, Zizek himself assumes what amounts to a meta-cynical posture that does not free him from the charge of cynicism.

 

Perhaps as a result of criticisms that his work avoids adopting clear and consistent political stances, Zizek has made some of his “ideological” positions more explicit in his recent writing.⁹ These recent essays directly address contemporary ideological issues, undermining critical comments such as the following by Sean Homer:

 

His work never really moves to that second moment, whereby a consideration of what ideology returns to us may facilitate the formulation of oppositional ideologies and the space of politics proper. I always remain unclear, for example, what Zizek is actually arguing for. Moreover, for Zizek, this is not really a legitimate question; it is somehow to miss the point. (par. 12)

 

In a similar gesture, Denise Gigante has made this characterization of Zizek’s work as apolitical or “undecidable” the central point of her recent article on him: “But where Zizek is unique, and where he makes his radical break with other literary theorists who take up a position, any position at all that pretends to some notional content, is the fact that he fundamentally has no position” (153).

 

This conception of Zizek as a political cipher is perhaps understandable on a first reading of a text like Looking Awry or even The Sublime Object of Ideology and on a hasty categorization of him as a “poststructuralist psychoanalytic theorist” (a categorization that would require considerable elaboration). But in light of careful analysis of a wide selection of his writings, it would be difficult to insist on Zizek’s political inscrutability. On the contrary, his work evinces a general ideological commitment to a radical democracy that is critical of both the globalizing capitalism of the present and the bureaucratic state socialism of the recent past. Thus, he advocates an (admittedly somewhat nebulous) “third way” for the future while acknowledging the need for nation-states in the present as a counter both to the increasing transnationalism of capital and to the dialectically co-determined phenomenon of increasing ethnic and religious “fundamentalist” violence and racism. While Zizek does not frequently perform detailed analysis of specific policy issues, he does write consistently from within the broad ideological framework I have described above–contrary to the effort of Gigante to build an entire argument on the premise that Zizek’s “subjective transparency is precisely his point” (154) and of Homer to chastise him for failing to draw connections between his critical writing and the political sphere. Indeed, the following passage provides a clear statement of his ideas about at least one major topic of recent political philosophy, the “civil society” of late capitalism:

 

People have this ethics of the bad state and good civic, independent structures. But sorry, in Slovenia I am for the state and against civil society! In Slovenia, civil society is equal to the right-wingers. In America, after the Oklahoma bombing, they suddenly discovered that there are hundreds of thousands of jerks. Civil society is not this nice social movement but a network of moral majority conservatives and nationalist pressure groups, against abortion, for religious education in schools: a real pressure from below. (“Japan,” par. 24)

 

As for his stance with respect to political economy, it is clear that a major aim of Zizek’s work is a critique of capitalism in an effort to contribute to the building of an anti-capitalist agenda in the realm of the political, where struggles for hegemony are constantly engaged and renewed. Following the general thrust of post-Gramscian Marxism, he stresses that this hegemonizing process of “winning consent” is always at work, even at the supposedly objective level of the economy. Thus he argues, for example, that warnings from financial experts about the dangers of certain economic reform measures, even when such warnings are backed up by citations of crises “caused” by similar policies in other situations, should not be understood as neutral descriptions of “objective” economic causality:

 

The fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis “really follows,” in no way “proves” that the necessity of these limits is an objective necessity of economic life. It should rather be conceived as proof of the privileged position Capital holds in the economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner threatens that if you do X, you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Y effectively ensues. (“Multiculturalism” 35)

 

While this is a recent and fairly direct comment on the dynamics of multinational capitalist economic policy, his work has always exhibited an engagement with Marxist theory and has always been implicitly and often explicitly grounded in the project of a critique of capitalist social relations and ideology, especially as these are connected with questions of subjectivity. Numerous other examples could be cited in addition to the two passages above, each a rebuke to the attempt to represent Zizek as an apolitical ironist, resistant “to being born into any critical stance,” as Gigante characterizes him (160).

 

In any case, many of Zizek’s arguments and concepts seem “intuitively” accurate in the contemporary world: representation does fail; evil does show itself; rational discourse does break down; motivations for behavior are not always explicable; ideology does seem to function through enjoyment at some level; ironic distance and cynicism, far from being subversive, do seem to be built into hegemonic discourse today. The relevance of these issues can be seen in recent episodes of violence in U.S. schools. It is possible to string the shootings together and interpret their meaning, drawing rational conclusions of various ideological shadings: the events are a sign of the moral bankruptcy of our secular society, an aftereffect of the permissive, anti-establishment counterculture of the sixties, which has left young people without a consistent moral code and ex-hippie adults with no authority to enforce such a code if it did exist. Conversely, one can argue that the violence is a sign of the growing alienation of youth in an increasingly competitive late-capitalist socioeconomic system in which all value has been translated into market value, a situation that sends parents to work for more hours of the week and leaves children to be surrogate-parented by television and other forms of commercial mass culture, which merely replicate and augment the alienation of the adult world, cynically positioning them solely as consumers representing market segments. Zizek’s work seems to suggest that neither the moralistic-conservative nor the Marxist-radical analysis (nor even the liberal reformer’s argument for gun control and educational prevention programs) will ultimately touch the “hard kernel of the Real” that emerges in all these cases of youth violence. Indeed, notwithstanding broad characterizations of contemporary theory as “antimetaphysical,” something like a theological conception of primal evil seems to be operating here and in work by theorists like Baudrillard, who argues in The Transparency of Evil that all the effort at eliminating evil from contemporary discourse (the various constructive engagement policies, win-win scenarios, conflict resolution programs, self-esteem workshops, and up-with-people organizations) cannot eradicate it, even if that evil is hidden and denied, or more accurately, is desymbolized:

 

The world is so full of positive feelings, naive sentimentality, self-important rectitude and sycophancy that irony, mockery, and the subjective energy of evil are always in the weaker position. At this rate every last negative sentiment will soon be forced into a clandestine existence. (107-08)

 

Another passage in the same text seems to forecast the logic of the school-violence outbursts of recent years:

 

In a society which seeks–by prophylactic measures, by annihilating its own natural referents, by whitewashing violence, by exterminating all germs and all of the accursed share, by performing cosmetic surgery on the negative–to concern itself solely with quantified management and with the discourse of the Good, in a society where it is no longer possible to speak of Evil, Evil has metamorphosed into all the viral and terroristic forms that obsess us. (81)

 

Thus evil erupts in any number of instances of the return of the repressed, among which the school shootings would no doubt be deemed exemplary, ¹⁰ as would the plot of their precursor text, Michael Lehmann’s film Heathers (1989), a dark comedy about the class structure of a “typical” suburban high school (an especially relevant reference in light of media reports about the clique-resentment that at least in part fueled the April 1999 killings at a “typical” suburban high school in Colorado). In this film the narrator, who at first tries to become accepted by the dominant group of girls (all named Heather), is eventually drawn by her sociopathic boyfriend into unknowingly helping him murder their popular-girl and jock-boy classmates, passing off the incidents as suicides, an explanation that the adults and other students are exceedingly willing to accept. The point for Baudrillard, following Bataille, is that the “accursed share” cannot be extricated from any economy: the “bad subject” may eventually try to blow up the school during the pep rally. This analysis essentially repeats a formula that Zizek frequently quotes from Lacan’s Third Seminar, Les Psychoses: “What is refused in the Symbolic order returns in the Real.”

 

But we should not let this “theological” reading of contemporary evil stand without further elaboration since neither Zizek nor Baudrillard grounds his comments in Christian theology or calls for a stricter adherence to traditional moral codes as a “solution.” For Zizek this would be no solution at all, since morality operates in Symbolic reality while the particular kind of evil that he diagnoses in, for example, racist violence, skinhead beatings, and school shootings has roots in the non-symbolized Real of jouissance.

 

Simulacrum, Superego, Lacanian Ethics, and the Problem of Evil

 

According to Zizek, theorists of postmodern society who make much of the usurpation of the Real by the simulacrum either long nostalgically for the lost distinction between them or announce the final overcoming of the “metaphysical obsession with authentic Being,” or both (he mentions Paul Virilio and Gianni Vattimo, and we might add Baudrillard to the list). In either case they “miss the distinction between simulacrum and appearance”:

 

What gets lost in today’s plague of simulations is not the firm, true, nonsimulated Real, but appearance itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: the simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while appearance is symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate, imaginary and real become more and more indistinguishable…. And, in sociopolitical terms, this domain of appearance (that is, symbolic fiction) is none other than that of politics…. The old conservative motto of keeping up appearances thus today obtains a new twist:… [it] stands for the effort to save the properly political space. (“Leftist” 995-96)

 

Making the same argument about a slightly different version of this problem, Zizek writes that the standard reading of “outbursts of ‘irrational’ violence” in the postmodern “society of the spectacle” is that “our perception of reality is mediated by aestheticized media manipulations to such an extent that it is no longer possible for us to distinguish reality from its media image” (Metastases 75). Violent outbursts in this context are thus seen as “desperate attempts to draw a distinction between fiction and reality… [and] to dispel the cobweb of the aestheticized pseudo-reality” (75). Again with reference to the Lacanian triad of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real, Zizek argues that this analysis is “right for the wrong reasons“:

 

What is missing from it is the crucial distinction between imaginary order and symbolic fiction.

 

The problem of contemporary media resides not in their enticing us to confound fiction with reality but, rather, in their “hyperrealist” character by means of which they saturate the void that keeps open the space for symbolic fiction. (75)

 

A society of proliferating, promiscuous images is thus not overly fictionalized but is, on the contrary, not “fictionalized” enough in the sense that the basis for making valid statements, the structure guaranteeing intersubjective communication, the order permitting shared narratives and, to use Jameson’s term, “cognitive mapping”¹¹–in short, the realm of the Symbolic–is short-circuited by an incessant flow of images, which solicit not analysis and the powers of thought but rather nothing more than blank, unreflective enjoyment.

 

The kind of subjectivity that corresponds to this hyperreal, spectacularized society without a stable Symbolic order is what Zizek calls in Looking Awry the “pathological narcissist” (102). That is, following the predominance of the “‘autonomous’ individual of the Protestant ethic” and the “heteronomous ‘organization man'” who finds satisfaction through “the feeling of loyalty to the group”–the two models of subjectivity corresponding to previous stages of capitalist society–today’s media-spectacle-consumer society is marked by the rise of the “pathological narcissist,” a subjective structure that breaks with the “underlying frame of the ego-ideal common to the first two forms” (102). The first two forms involved inverted versions of each other: one either strove to remain true to oneself (that is, to a “paternal ego-ideal”) or looked at oneself “through the eyes of the group,” which functioned as an “externalized” ego-ideal, and sought “to merit its love and esteem” (102). With the stage of the “pathological narcissist,” however, the ego-ideal itself is dissolved:

 

Instead of the integration of a symbolic law, we have a multitude of rules to follow–rules of accommodation telling us “how to succeed.” The narcissistic subject knows only the “rules of the (social) game” enabling him to manipulate others; social relations constitute for him a playing field in which he assumes “roles,” not proper symbolic mandates; he stays clear of any kind of binding commitment that would imply a proper symbolic identification. He is a radical conformist who paradoxically experiences himself as an outlaw. (102)

 

Thus the “permissive” society of the last decades of the twentieth century, marked by the often-noted “decline of paternal authority,” turns out not to be more liberating than earlier social formations after all; in fact, Zizek writes, “this disintegration of the ego-ideal entails the installation of a ‘maternal’ superego that does not prohibit enjoyment but, on the contrary, imposes it and punishes ‘social failure’ in a far more cruel and severe way, through an unbearable and self-destructive anxiety” (103).

 

While its generalized form may be more recent, the effects of this overbearing presence of the maternal superego are already evident in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).¹² The film offers viewers a fairly simple “psychological” reading of the title character’s dying utterance, “Rosebud”: we learn at the end of the narrative that this was the name of Kane’s childhood sled; thus we surmise that Kane’s saying the word as he dies indicates his nostalgic longing for his idyllic Colorado childhood. The word evokes the period before Kane was separated from his parents–at a time when he was not yet mature enough (still a “rosebud”) to make decisions for himself–and was inserted into a position of wealth and power that he never sought and in which he could not, after all, find true happiness. But this reading overlooks the fact that it is Kane’s mother who initiates the tragic progression of her son’s future through her desire that Charles should have a “better life” than was possible in their rural home. It also overlooks the related fact that she does so over the impotent objections of Kane’s ineffectual father, a man who is without power because he is without property: the deed to the mine that has become the source of the family’s sudden wealth belongs to Mrs. Kane alone.

 

Kane’s acts of youthful rebellion against his despised guardian-father Thatcher, which include transgressions that get him expelled from various elite colleges, and his decision to enter adult public life as the publisher of a sensationalistic, populist, anti-big-business newspaper because running a newspaper might be “fun,” as he tells Thatcher, appear at first to be attempts to break free of the restrictive “law of the father” embodied in the stern and humorless banker, who predictably disapproves of Kane’s activities and decisions. But Thatcher is merely a substitute-father put in place to enact the desire of Kane’s mother that Charles should grow up to be someone important, a situation that Kane never shows any awareness of in his defiance. As Kane’s friend Jed Leland, thinking back on their relationship, comments about Kane, “He loved Charlie Kane, of course, very dearly; and his mother–I guess he always loved her.” Kane’s explicit rebellion, then, is directed against the world of sober responsibility as law-of-the-father and thus takes the form of his “enjoying himself,” “having fun,” and “championing the cause of the common man,” behavior that he experiences as transgressive but that actually involves his acting out the paradoxical injunction to enjoy imposed by the maternal superego.

 

As for Kane’s fight for “the common man,” it is ambiguous at best and seems to be motivated initially by the enjoyment that he derives from defying Thatcher and promoting causes antithetical to his interests. His “convictions” are sustained thereafter by his enjoyment of the support and adulation of friends and voters during his political campaign. Significantly, it is just when it appears inevitable, according to polls, that Kane will win the election and become governor–that is, just when he will have to make good on his attested convictions and assume the symbolic position of paternal authority as embodiment of Law–that he initiates an extramarital affair, which, when exposed, leads to his defeat on election day. This pathological pattern is continued later in the film as he begins wasting money by making wildly irrational expenditures on useless objects to fill his “fantasy palace,” Xanadu, violating the paternal laws of utility and economy and evading the “reality principle”: he remains trapped in a cycle of compulsive repetition on a narcissistic quest for enjoyment that can never be achieved precisely because it is demanded by the maternal superego, which determines his actions despite his properly egotistical claims that only he himself decides what he will do.

 

On the night when he first meets his mistress and second wife Susan Alexander while on the way to a warehouse where his deceased mother’s possessions are stored, Kane learns that Alexander’s mother always wanted Susan to be an opera singer. As if by command, he immediately asks her to sing for him that evening and soon begins the process of training her for an opera career, fulfilling the desire of her mother regardless of Susan’s own desire and thereby taking on the role that Thatcher played for Kane himself as a youth. As both Kane’s and Susan’s misery demonstrate, however, avoiding the law of the father by fulfilling the desire of the mother is hardly an advisable course of action.¹³ As Leland remarks, directly contradicting the affected ethical resolution of Kane’s “declaration of principles,” which Kane signs with a flourish in front of Leland and publishes in his newspaper early in the film, Kane “never believed in anything except Charlie Kane; he never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life”–precisely the definition of the “pathological narcissist.” This subjective structure is figured near the end of the film in the famous shot of Kane walking past a mirrored mirror, producing a brief infinite regression of images of himself. Inasmuch as his “self” of infinite narcissistic images and his own private (blocked) enjoyment mark the limits of his “care,” Kane has remained under the command of the maternal superego and never acceded to symbolic law.

 

Zizek specifies this crucial opposition between symbolic law and superego explicitly in terms of the movement from permission to obligation, from possibility based on clearly defined universal prohibition to necessity based on radical contingency. Paradoxically, in the absence of prohibition, where one might expect the free flow of libidinal energy, superego intervenes to require what is already permitted:

 

Law is the agency of prohibition which regulates the distribution of enjoyment on the basis of a common, shared renunciation (the “symbolic castration”), whereas superego marks a point at which permitted enjoyment, freedom-to-enjoy, is reversed into obligation to enjoy–which, one must add, is the most effective way to block access to enjoyment. (For They 237)

 

It is because of this obscene, harsh, punitive quality of the superego that the subject can never settle accounts with it. There is always more that can be sacrificed, Zizek explains, which is why Lacanian psychoanalytic ethics is based explicitly on opposing the coercion of the superego, in contrast to the ordinary association of superego with “conscience” or the moral sense guiding ethical behavior:

 

Lacan’s maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis (“not to compromise one’s desire”) is not to be confounded with the pressure of the superego…. Lacan takes seriously and literally the Freudian “economical paradox” of the superego–that is, the vicious cycle that characterizes the superego: the more we submit ourselves to the superego imperative, the greater its pressure, the more we feel guilty. According to Lacan, this “feeling of guilt” is not a self-deception to be dispelled in the course of the psychoanalytic cure–we really are guilty: superego draws the energy of the pressure it exerts upon the subject from the fact that the subject was not faithful to his desire, that he gave it up. Our sacrificing to the superego, our paying tribute to it, only corroborates our guilt. For that reason our debt to the superego is unredeemable: the more we pay it off, the more we owe. (Metastases 67-68)

 

Indeed, Lacan’s ethical imperative must be taken as explicitly opposed to the concept of conventional morality with its focus on maximizing the Good, which functions as the arbiter of all action, since this model ultimately leads to a psychological paralysis arising from infinite consideration of ramifications, a process that turns the subject into a perpetual Hamlet, standing behind Claudius but unable to decide whether killing him or not killing him would be the better option. The interminable process of trying to decide which course of action leads to the “greater Good” entails its own kind of choice (that is, to “compromise one’s desire” by default) with its own kind of psychic consequences for the subject. Zizek explains this ethical-moral distinction through a Greimasian semiotic square based on the four possible arrangements of the positive and negative versions of these terms and the figures corresponding to the four pairings–moral, ethical (Saint); immoral, unethical (Scoundrel); immoral, ethical (Hero); and moral, unethical (superego)–and endorses the Lacanian championing of Hero over superego (Metastases 67).

 

Zizek also anticipates the anxious objection that this Lacanian ethical attitude is too radical in its practical implications: is it reasonable to propose that everyone unrelentingly pursue his or her own desire and renounce all other considerations? Don’t “ordinary” people need an “ethics of the ‘common Good,’… despicable as it may appear in the eyes of the suicidal heroic ethics advocated by Lacan?” (Metastases 69). But he concludes that this concern–“What if everyone were to do the same as me?”–is simply another way of introducing the “pathological consideration of the consequences of our act in reality” and therefore functions as a way of imposing superego injunctions, restraints, and cycles of guilt through the insistence that we renounce our desire precisely because it cannot be universalized (69).

 

From these comments on the Lacanian ethics of desire, Zizek moves, understandably, into a section on the unavoidable corollary to such an ethics, that is, the problem of evil, which has prompted the present discussion. Zizek identifies three kinds of evil, categorized according to the Freudian scheme of Ego, Superego, and Id. Ego-Evil is the most common kind: “behavior motivated by selfish calculation and greed”; Superego-Evil is the kind attributed to “fundamentalist fanatics,” that is, “Evil accomplished in the name of fanatical devotion to some ideological ideal”; finally, there is Id-Evil, “structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the Ich and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance at the very heart of it” (Metastases 70-71). In other words, Id-Evil involves a kind of pure, irrational enjoyment in the evil act. The skinheads who beat up foreigners because it “feels good” to do so, the white racists who killed an African-American man by dragging him from a chain tied behind their pickup truck because the mere presence of a black man “bothered” them, the adolescents who committed the shooting sprees in U.S. schools over the past several years: all of these cases involve “violence not grounded in utilitarian or ideological reasons” (“Leftist” 998) but rather raw outbreaks of the Real of jouissance:

 

The psychotic passage à l’acte is to be conceived of as a desperate attempt of the subject to evict objet a from reality by force, and thus gain access to reality. (The psychotic “loss of reality” does not arise when something is missing in reality, but, on the contrary, when there is too much of a Thing in reality.) (Metastases 77)

 

Of course, what is most disturbing about such instances of the psychotic passage à l’acte is the often-reported “desensitization” of the subject toward the violent acts that he performs. The reports about the Columbine High School shooting incident, for example, included witnesses’ recollections of some details of the two killers’ comments as they walked around shooting their classmates. It was reported that they were laughing and saying, “We’ve been wanting to do this for years,” and commenting to each other about how “cool” it looked to see blood and pieces of victims’ bodies “fly” when they shot them. This last statement precisely illustrates Zizek’s diagnosis of the breakdown of the distinction between the Imaginary and the Real in a society marked by the attenuation of the Symbolic: the Real, the actual spraying of blood, is experienced as Imaginary, as a “cool” image or effect, a purely aesthetic phenomenon, while the Symbolic identity of the victim (someone with a name, a family, a “story,” a network of intersubjective connections) is not considered or recognized.

 

Violence, Evil, and Late Capitalism at the Movies

 

Such cases of “desensitization” toward violence and desymbolization of victims’ identities are widespread in contemporary film, as conservative politicians, desperate to locate in the culture industry the “causes” of violent crime (while impeding legislative efforts to curb easy access to guns), are quick to mention. But limited claims for causality (bad movies, bad parenting, bad guns) begin within a positivist framework that, as discussed above, misses the eruption of the Real in these cases of Id-Evil and that fails to account for the socioeconomic, historical context of multinational capitalism within which such eruptions take place. Even broader claims for causality based on the notion of a widespread “culture of death”–encompassing media violence, the prevalence of guns, drug abuse, as well as legalized abortion, euthanasia, and other indicators of an alleged rejection of belief in the “sanctity of human life”–fail to address the ways in which the structural demands of capitalism have contributed to the unwelcome social and cultural transformations since the “good old days” (usually meaning anytime before the 1960s).

 

These criticisms, in both narrow and broad versions, are underwritten by the belief that with the correct combination of policy reforms to excise the diseased elements of the social body we might return to the “normal” state of society, having eliminated its anomalous, disruptive features. This belief, however, itself depends on ignoring the dialectical logic of the symptom, which Zizek, following Lacan, reminds us was “invented” by Marx:

 

Marx’s great achievement was to demonstrate how all phenomena which appear to everyday bourgeois consciousness as simple deviations, contingent deformations and degenerations of the “normal” functioning of society (economic crises, wars, and so on), and as such abolishable through amelioration of the system, are necessary products of the system itself–the points at which the “truth,” the immanent antagonistic character of the system, erupts. (Sublime 128)

 

Thus if many U.S. adolescents feel isolated and desperate, see no future for themselves that they would want to occupy, feel no symbolic identification with any entity beyond themselves (nation, community, family), resent their “well-adjusted” peers, expect little from others or themselves, and shift among affective states of manic euphoria, defensive denial, and depressive anomie, and if some of these adolescents realize their abject frustration in acts of violence, those acts are not to be understood as anomalies that might be “fixed” with appropriate reform measures but rather as symptomatic eruptions of the “truth” of the current capitalist world system. In other words, the explanation for these violent outbursts has more to do with what Zizek has assessed as the attenuation of the Symbolic order under conditions of globalizing media-technology-consumer capitalism and the concomitant rise of the “pathological narcissist” as a dominant mode of subjectivity than with any isolated individual “causes” upon which empirical studies may be (and will be) performed.

 

Still, a brief examination of late-capitalist film violence is worthwhile, not as a direct cause behind actual violent incidents but as a symptom of rationalized systemic violence and also (sometimes) as a critical representation of it. For examples of the former, we need look no further than action-adventure genre films, as well as the video games based on this genre, and their often-noted uncritical, “gratuitous” violence, which may certainly be characterized as “symptomatic” of late capitalism to the extent that it functions within hyper-masculine fantasy scenarios.¹⁴ While such cultural products may encode a justifiable desire for an alternative to the “managed society” of “soft” liberalism, that alternative is usually figured in terms of a fascistic emphasis on law and order brought about through the exercise of violent masculine power and domination.

 

But then other films present violent situations in ways that challenge prevailing genre conventions and invite critical reflection on the meaning of the violence depicted. Perhaps the most relevant case of the latter in recent years is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), especially the famous scene in which John Travolta’s working-man gangster character Vincent Vega, gesturing with his gun, accidentally shoots the character Marvin in the face when the car they are riding in goes over a bump. The incident is treated as an irritating inconvenience, prompting arguments between Vincent and Samuel Jackson’s Jules Winnfield character over Vincent’s carelessness, the potential for being seen by cops, and the general disruption in the smooth routine of their day. Cleaning the car and disposing of the body are regarded as chores to be dealt with as efficiently as possible. In fact, “The Wolf” (Harvey Keitel), a specialist who “fixes things,” is called in to manage the clean-up operation. He, like Jules and Vincent, wears a black business suit.

 

First, it should be noted that many features of the film, including the business suits, combine to create what looks like an allegory of contemporary capitalism: Vincent and Jules are, after all, hit-men working for Ving Rhames’s black-market entrepreneur character Marsellus Wallace, and their sudden, unpredictable violence is the truth of a system whose purpose is to rationalize and manage that violence and its perpetual threat efficiently in order to ensure the continuation of exchange and profit. The Wolf is a free-agent consultant called in when business “difficulties” arise. The “postmodern” quality of the representation of capitalism here is evident by contrast with earlier generations of crime films, in which the criminal enterprise is justified by reference to some ideological principle, such as “beating the system” by sticking together in bonds of friendship and allegiance to the “old neighborhood,” as in William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) and Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), or maintaining the “old way of life” associated with family and ethnic heritage, as in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990).

 

Pulp Fiction “reflects” the late capitalist moment in that its “post-ideological” criminals have no commitment to anything but getting their own “piece of the action”: the performativity of the system is its own justification; no metanarrative is needed for ideological legitimation. Other features of the film are also consistent with late capitalism and contrast with earlier crime genre films: the structure of the criminal operation appears to be decentralized and “flexible”; the dividing line between criminal and non-criminal is blurry at best; the criminals maintain loose, diversified connections across a wide range of social strata, covering the decentered space of greater Los Angeles’s urban sprawl; and the idea of an alternative way of life–what might have appeared as the position of the “good citizen” in an earlier crime story–can be figured only by reference to a possibility that is never shown.

 

This alternative possibility is raised hypothetically in Jules and Vincent’s conversations about miracles and the gangster life. After he and Vincent are fired upon multiple times in a surprise attack from across a room without being hurt–an experience that Jules interprets as a miracle–Jules raises the idea of giving up “the life” to “walk the earth” as a kind of modern-day religious mendicant. Dismissing Jules’s interpretation of what he considers a “freak occurrence,” Vincent scoffs and tells Jules that there is a name for people who do what he has proposed: “they’re called bums.” A typical contemporary “pathological narcissist,” Vincent mocks the suggestion that he and Jules have experienced a miracle. As a skeptical nominalist, he is living in what he takes to be, for better or worse, the “best of all possible worlds” and cannot accept even the possibility of singularity or transcendence or of a utopian potential beyond “the life.” Significantly, Vincent is killed on his next job for Marsellus, after Jules has quit, and the fact that his death has been shown out of chronological sequence earlier in the plot adds dramatic impact to the conversation in which Jules decides to quit and Vincent ridicules him. We know already as they leave the diner at the end of the film what their respective fates are–or at least we know Vincent’s; we never learn what happens to Jules. That reference to the alternative–the desire to “walk the earth,” to live outside the paranoid circuits of power without participating in rationalized violence and exploitation–suggests the utopian (and non-representable) dimension of the film: the continuation of Jules’s story cannot be shown precisely because it gestures beyond the limits of contemporary capitalist society. Any actual content provided for this future story would restrict and trivialize the utopian desire suggested by his speculations.

 

Just as the violent incidents in Pulp Fiction in the context of the film as a whole estrange the violence of the “normal,” smooth, everyday functioning of contemporary capitalism, inviting critical reflection, so too the jarring suddenness of the violence when Vincent shoots Marvin, and in other scenes (and in other Tarantino films), disrupts the smooth operation of ordinary narrative film form, in which climactic, redemptive violent moments are usually cued through narrative suspense, music, editing, lighting, and other techniques. The unexpected intrusion of violence into scenes of witty hipster banter among likable characters forces us to confront these characters as agents of the violent system in which they participate, even when they do not intend to use violence, that is, even when someone like Marvin is killed “accidentally” as opposed to someone who “had it coming.”

 

In other words, the ethical-political lesson is Zizekian: actions speak louder than words; the material actuality of practice overrides intention. Vincent cannot guarantee that the Real will not intrude on his rationalized, mundane, and solipsistic Ego-Evil. His participation in the criminal life would be justified from his perspective in terms of self-interest: as a contemporary cynic, he would reason that if the entire capitalist system is just a large-scale criminal racket, then his work as a gangster is the only intelligent response–he might as well enjoy the high life instead of working like a sucker to line the pockets of the corporate bosses in the legitimate economy. At the allegorical level, then, this reading suggests that smart, hip cynics like Vincent are actually the dutiful foot soldiers of contemporary capitalism. Justifying any action in terms of “enlightened” cynical reason, such a person is, as Zizek puts it in another context, a “crook who tries to sell as honesty the open admission of his crookedness,” effectively functioning as a “conformist who takes the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it” (“Leftist” 1004-05).

 

Two final and related points deserve to be made, via Zizek, about Jules and Vincent and their relationship to the event that only Jules takes to be a miracle. First, their difference in interpretation perfectly exemplifies Zizek’s argument about the strict separation between belief and knowledge:

 

Belief can only thrive in the shadowy domain between outright falsity and positive truth. The Jansenist notion of miracle bears witness to the fact that they were fully aware of this paradox: an event which has the quality of a miracle only in the eyes of the believer–to the commonsense eyes of an infidel, it appears as a purely natural coincidence. (“Supposed” 44)

 

This precise relationship is enacted in the conversation in which Jules and Vincent argue over their respective interpretations of the event: no amount of convincing will cause the other to abandon his interpretation because logical proofs and rhetorical appeals operate in the realm of knowledge, which will not touch belief. As Zizek puts it, “the miracle is inherently linked to the fact of belief–there is no neutral miracle to convince cynical infidels” (“Supposed” 44).

 

The other point is that this argument also takes place in the somewhat different register of class consciousness and subjectivity. Perhaps stretching the allegorical reading of the Jules and Vincent story in Pulp Fiction to its limit, I would suggest that Jules’s “conversion” experience might as easily be read in Marxist as in religious terms. (And for the reasons cited above, the Marxist reading is not without justification.) Thus allegorically, if Vincent clings to his egocentric and effectively neoconservative cynicism, Jules’s experience of the miracle amounts to his interpellation as a proletarian subject, or at least (since his story ends after his testament of faith) to a protopolitical baptism. This moment of divergence in the trajectories of the stories of two (until then) similar characters illustrates what Zizek identifies as the crucial importance of class consciousness as distinct from objective class position in the class struggle:

 

From a truly radical Marxist perspective, although there is a link between the working class as a social group and the proletariat as the position of the militant fighting for universal Truth, this link is not a determining causal connection, and the two levels are to be strictly distinguished. To be proletarian involves assuming a certain subjective stance (of class struggle destined to achieve redemption through revolution) that, in principle, can occur to any individual; to put it in religious terms, irrespective of his (good) works, any individual can be touched by grace and interpellated as a proletarian subject. The limit that separates the two opposed sides in the class struggle is thus not objective, not the limit separating two positive social groups, but ultimately radically subjective; it involves the position individuals assume towards the Event of universal Truth. (“Leftist” 1003)

 

Thus a long line of conversion stories–from the sudden, terrible hailing of Saul of Tarsus through the more gradual radicalization of American literary proletarians like Tom Joad and Biff Loman (whose relationship to his brother Happy, despite numerous differences in detail, including especially the absence of cynicism in Death of a Salesman, is nonetheless homologous with that of Jules to Vincent after the disputed event)–become enmeshed in the sociohistorical narrative of the formation of revolutionary subjectivity. Zizek’s commentary explains, among other things, how class traitors are possible, since the class struggle, as he puts it,

 

mobilizes… not the division between two well-defined social groups but the division, which runs “diagonally” to the social division in the Order of Being, between those who recognize themselves in the call of the Truth-Event, becoming its followers, and those who deny or ignore it. (“Leftist” 1003)

 

The impetus behind this recognition and conversion need not, of course, be a brush with violent death, as in the case of Jules. In principle, the negative motivation for conversion is available everywhere in capitalist society. As for positive or utopian “calls to conversion,” these can be found in unexpected spaces occasionally wrested free from the demands of the vast commerical strip mall of contemporary U.S. culture.

 

Conclusion: Zizek as Late Marxist

 

The title of this essay may be read to imply a progression of the type thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Such a progression is not my intention. I certainly do not wish to give the impression that I take Zizek’s work to be the culminating synthesis of the problematic of Marxism and postmodernism. Nonetheless, I do regard his work, which responds with dialectical thoroughness (and with humor, and with perceptive references to popular culture, and with brilliant on-the-run insights) to new problems of ideology and subjectivity in late capitalism, as a valuable critical contribution to the tradition of Marxist theory, despite Ebert’s (and others’) criticisms characterizing him as a cynical “post-Marxist.” If anything, his explicit appropriation of Hegel would perhaps better qualify him for the critical label “pre-Marxist.” But even such a half-serious appellation would fail to account for the variety of careful analyses, explanations, and criticisms appearing throughout his work that can be characterized only as Marxist without a prefix. Or, if a prefix is needed, then Jameson’s term late Marxist would perhaps actually be the most accurate for Zizek’s work.

 

Jameson has the following to say about the term late Marxism in his 1990 book of that title:

 

I find it helpful above all for a sharpening of the implication I developed above: namely, that Marxism, like other cultural phenomena, varies according to its socioeconomic context. There should be nothing scandalous about the proposition that the Marxism required by Third World countries will have different emphases from the one that speaks to already receding socialism, let alone to the “advanced” countries of multinational capitalism. (11)

 

Thus late Marxism’s “big tent,” according to this conception, would have room for a revival of a Freudian-Marxist theory of ideology by way of Lacan and Hegel in the socioeconomic context of defeated state socialisms in the former Eastern bloc and in the context of a triumphal, expanding multinational capitalism based in the “advanced” capitalist countries. If this version of Marxism is among those “required” for critically understanding the dynamics of capitalist society and culture in this context, then it belongs alongside the other Marxisms speaking to other contexts of the late-capitalist world system.

 

The more narrow context for Zizek’s project of a revived psychoanalytic Marxism is, as he puts it in the abstract opposite the title pages of books in the Wo Es War series that he edits, “the twin rule of pragmatic-relativist New Sophists and New Age obscurantists” in critical writing. Commenting more specifically on the state of theory and criticism in the age of globalizing capitalism and dominant market ideology, Zizek writes:

 

It is effectively as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism–since, as we might put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay–critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact. (“Multiculturalism” 46)

 

If we accept these descriptions of the socioeconomic and critical contexts into which Zizek intervenes, then the revival of dialectical models of criticism that are capable of addressing systemic problems at a level of sufficient generality and of drawing connections between “local” objects and the “totality” of their relations is indeed precisely what is needed. In any case, efforts to purge or discredit Zizek from an assumed position of orthodoxy are not especially helpful to the Marxist cause in either of the above contexts.

 

Marxist and Freudian theory are parallel and privileged theoretical discourses, according to Zizek, in part because the relationship of each to theory itself is one aspect of its domain of inquiry. This contentious reflexivity makes error a structurally necessary element of the theory, as opposed to the case of positivist sciences:

 

In both cases we are dealing with a field of knowledge that is inherently antagonistic: errors are not simply external to the true knowledge…. In Marxism, as in psychoanalysis, truth literally emerges through error, which is why in both cases the struggle with “revisionism” is an inherent part of the theory itself…. The “object” of Marxism is society, yet “class struggle in theory” means that the ultimate theme of Marxism is the “material force of ideas”–that is, the way Marxism itself qua revolutionary theory transforms its object (brings about the emergence of the revolutionary subject, etc.). This is analogous to psychoanalysis, which is also not simply a theory of its “object” (the unconscious) but a theory whose inherent mode of existence involves the transformation of its object (via interpretation in the psychoanalytic cure). (Metastases 181-82)

 

Each theory, in short, “acknowledges the short circuit between the theoretical frame and an element within this frame: theory itself is a moment of the totality that is its ‘object'” (Metastases 182). Such a process, Zizek insists, is not to be confused with a “comfortable evolutionary position,” which, “from a safe distance,” seeks “to relativize every determinate form of knowledge” (Metastases 182-83). On the contrary, each tradition is characterized by what he calls a “thought that endeavors to grasp its own limitation and dependence” even as it proceeds, and this perpetual critical interrogation of its own “position of enunciation” enables whatever claims to truth it may make: “Marxism and psychoanalysis are ‘infallible’ at the level of enunciated content, precisely insofar as they continually question the very place from which they speak” (Metastases 182-83).

 

I cite these comments in order to defend Zizek’s Marxist credentials against charges of post-Marxist cynicism. But I also recognize that his welding of Lacanian psychoanalysis onto Marxism is not seamless: irreducible traditional antagonisms between the two discourses can easily seem to disappear because of Zizek’s deft handling of both. Nonetheless, his writing offers fresh and cogent criticism of contemporary culture and society and opens avenues for further critical reflection, as I hope the preceding analyses have shown. His Marxism is “late” not in the sense of “fading fast” or even “already deceased” but rather in the Jamesonian sense cited above. It is “recent” and addresses current socioeconomic and critical contexts. In other words, Zizek’s Marxism is only as late as what it proposes to criticize–the late capitalism so named in the somewhat hopeful title of Ernest Mandel’s 1978 book. Whatever label is attached to it, Zizek’s work fulfills one of the primary goals of Marxist theory, that is, to harness the “material force of ideas” in an effort to expose and criticize the workings of capitalism.

Notes

 

1. Hebdige uses this abbreviated term to accommodate the various “post” terms and discourses that have emerged in theoretical writing since the late 1960s, especially postmodernism/postmodernity. See Hiding in the Light, Chapter 8, “Staking out the Posts.”

 

2. See especially Jameson’s essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979), reprinted as Chapter 1 of Signatures of the Visible.

 

3. Jean Baudrillard’s writing in the late 1960s and 1970s offers a critique of the production-oriented labor theory of value in favor of a consumption-oriented model of sign value; see Selected Writings, especially Chapters 1-4. The implicit and explicit critique of dialectical method and teleology can be seen in many versions of postmodern theory; Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition is exemplary, especially the discussions of postmodern science and paralogy in Chapters 13 and 14. The generally critical stance of “French poststructuralists” toward Marxism may be explained partly as a reaction against the influential role of Communist parties in European intellectual debates of the 1950s and 1960s, as Burnham suggests:

 

Lyotard’s critique, based as it is on a certain causal relationship between grand narratives and local actions, is more suited to a culture of powerful communist parties and unexamined Stalinism than the less rigorous Marxism to be found in the Anglo-American tradition…. An important flaw in Lyotard’s analysis is that he overestimates the aforementioned causality. (13)

 

4. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; Baudrillard’s recent apocalyptic and impressionistic essays can be found in America, Cool Memories, and The Transparency of Evil; Deleuze and Guattari develop their project of “schizoanalysis” in Anti-Oedipus, especially Section 4; Jameson presents his extended critique of postmodern culture in Postmodernism.

 

5. Commenting on the ongoing globalization of capital and the accompanying triumphalist discourse of neoliberal market economists, Jameson writes:

 

Now that, following master thinkers like Hayek, it has become customary to identify political freedom with market freedom, the motivations behind ideology no longer seem to need an elaborate machinery of decoding and hermeneutic reinterpretation; and the guiding thread of all contemporary politics seems much easier to grasp, namely, that the rich want their taxes lowered. This means that an older vulgar Marxism may once again be more relevant to our situation than the newer models. (“Culture” 247)

 

6. The notion of a historical transformation of the “real world” into semiotic spectacle is the thesis of Guy Debord’s critique of media-consumer capitalism in Society of the Spectacle: “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” (par. 1). Debord, however, has no patience for the structuralist effort to interpret all phenomena in terms of differential sign-systems, a project that he sees as the philosophical corollary to spectacular society: “Structuralism is the thought guaranteed by the State which regards the present conditions of spectacular ‘communication’ as an absolute” (par. 202). My citation of Derrida in this context should by no means be taken as an effort to characterize his work as part of this “thought guaranteed by the State,” merely uncritically reflecting prevailing semio-capitalist society. On the contrary, the opening pages of the first chapter of Of Grammatology indicate an acute critical awareness of the historical determination of the meditation on writing undertaken in that text: beyond his general emphasis on the historical dimension of the problem, Derrida mentions specifically the “death of the civilization of the book” and the rise of cybernetic theory and the DNA-coding paradigm in biology, among other historically recent developments, as catalysts for a theory of generalized writing (6-10).

 

7. See Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, among other texts by these authors.

 

8. See Butler, Chapter 7, “Arguing with the Real,” in Bodies That Matter.

 

9. See Zizek’s essays “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism” and “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,'” as well as the interview “Japan through a Slovenian Looking Glass.”

 

10. For an analysis–via Bataille and Baudrillard–of the Columbine High School shooting incident in Colorado in terms of a heterological politics of the unassimilable, see Wernick.

 

11. For discussion of this term, see Jameson’s essay “Cognitive Mapping” as well as the last segment of Chapter 1 of Postmodernism (45-54).

 

12. My reading of a “darker” truth behind the film’s overt suggestion of nostalgia for lost childhood as an explanation for Kane’s downfall is based on Marshall Deutelbaum’s article “‘Rosebud’ and the Illusion of Childhood Innocence in Citizen Kane.” Zizek includes Citizen Kane among those films in which, he claims, Welles depicts a “larger-than-life” individual with an “ambiguous relationship to morals” but a nonetheless heroic ethical nature (Metastases 66). My reading suggests a rejection of this notion that Kane’s “acts irradiate a deeper ‘ethics of Life itself'” (66).

 

13. A useful contrast to this case of oppressive desire of the mother is raised in the following passage in which Zizek discusses Lacan’s determination of Name-of-the-Father as the “metaphoric substitute of the desire of the mother” (For They 135). Zizek explains this relationship in terms of the scene from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in which Roger Thornhill–certainly also a “pathological narcissist,” but one whose story ends “happily”–is “‘mistakenly identified’ as the mysterious ‘George Kaplan’ and thus hooked on his Name-of-the-Father, his Master-Signifier.” The precise instant of the mistaken identification, Zizek writes,

 

is the very moment when he raises his hand in order to comply with his mother’s desire by phoning her…. North by Northwest thus presents a case of “successful” substitution of the paternal metaphor for the mother’s desire. (For They 135)

 

14. See Susan Jeffords’s analysis of Hollywood masculine-fantasy narratives and the New Right in Hard Bodies.

Works Cited

 

• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127-86.
• Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1989.
• —. Cool Memories, 1980-1985. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1990.
• —. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988.
• —. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. 1990. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993.
• Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.
• Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore. RKO, 1941.
• Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1977. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
• Deutelbaum, Marshall. “‘Rosebud’ and the Illusion of Childhood Innocence in Citizen Kane.” The Kingdom of Dreams: Selected Papers from the Tenth Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film. Ed. Douglas Fowler. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1986. 46-61.
• Ebert, Teresa L. “Beyond ‘Enlightened False Consciousness’ and for a Red Theory.” Div. on Sociological Approaches to Literature, MLA Convention. Chicago, IL. 28 Dec. 1999.
• Gigante, Denise. “Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Zizek and the ‘Vortex of Madness.'” New Literary History 29 (1998): 153-68.
• Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1984.
• Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• Homer, Sean. “Psychoanalysis, Representation, Politics: On the (Im)possibility of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Ideology?” University of Sheffield, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies (1995): 16 pars. <http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/sihomer/prp.html>.
• Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 347-57.
• —. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1997): 246-65.
• —. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.
• —. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses. Trans. Russell Grigg. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1993.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1984.
• Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. Trans. Joris DeBres. London: Verso, 1978.
• Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman. Miramax, 1994.
• Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.
• Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Wernick, Andrew. “Bataille’s Columbine: The Sacred Space of Hate.” Ctheory (3 Nov. 1999): 43 pars. <http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=119>.
• Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 1983. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
• Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991.
• —. “Japan through a Slovenian Looking Glass: Reflections of Media and Politics and Cinema.” Interview. InterCommunication 14 (1995): 40 pars. <http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/zizek/zizek_e.html>.
• —. “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.'” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 988-1009.
• —. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• —. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso, 1994.
• —. “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review 225 (1997): 28-51.
• —. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
• —. “The Supposed Subjects of Ideology.” Critical Quarterly 39.2 (1997): 39-59.