Читать книгу Living in the End Times - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 12

This, finally, brings us to the core of the liberal utopia. For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit people to an ethical ideal held to be universal is “the crime which contains all crimes,” the mother of all crimes—it amounts to the brutal imposition of one’s own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of “moral temptation”: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered “realistic,” taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations. Here the market is exemplary: human nature is egotistic, there is no way to change it—what is needed is a mechanism that makes private vices work for the common good (the “Cunning of Reason”). In his “Perpetual Peace” essay, Kant provided a precise formulation of this key feature:

many say a republic would have to be a nation of angels, because men with their selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form. But precisely with these inclinations nature comes to the aid of the general will established on reason, which is revered even though impotent in practice. Thus it is only a question of a good organization of the state (which does lie in man’s power), whereby the powers of each selfish inclination are so arranged in opposition that one moderates or destroys the ruinous effect of the other. The consequence for reason is the same as if none of them existed, and man is forced to be a good citizen even if not a morally good person.

The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: “Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.” A problem like this must be capable of solution; it does not require that we know how to attain the moral improvement of men but only that we should know the mechanism of nature in order to use it on men, organizing the conflict of the hostile intentions present in a people in such a way that they must compel themselves to submit to coercive laws. Thus a state of peace is established in which laws have force.³⁹

One should pursue this line of argument to its conclusion: a fully self-conscious liberal should intentionally limit his altruistic readiness to sacrifice his own good for the good of others, aware that the most effective way to act for the common good is to follow one’s private egotism. The inevitable obverse of the Cunning of Reason motto “private vices, common good” is “private goods, common disaster.” There is in liberalism, from its very inception, a tension between individual freedom and objective mechanisms which regulate the behavior of a crowd—early on, Benjamin Constant clearly formulated this tension: everything is moral in individuals, but everything is physical in crowds; everybody is free as individual, but merely a cog in a machine when part of a crowd. Nowhere is the legacy of religion clearer: this, exactly, is the paradox of Predestination, of the unfathomable mechanism of Grace embodied, among other places, in market success. The mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits.

The tension internal to this project is discernible in the two aspects of liberalism, market liberalism and political liberalism. Jean-Claude Michéa perspicuously links this to two meanings of the term “right”: the political Right insists on the market economy, the politically correct culturalized Left insists on the defense of human rights—often its sole remaining raison d’être. Although the tension between these two aspects of liberalism is irreducible, they are nonetheless inextricably linked, like the two sides of the same coin.

Today, the meaning of “liberalism” moves between two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, etc.) and political liberalism (with an accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.). In the US, Republicans are more liberal in the first sense and Democrats in the second. The point, of course, is that while one cannot decide through closer analysis which is the “true” liberalism, one also cannot resolve the deadlock by proposing a kind of “higher” dialectical synthesis, or “avoid the confusion” by making a clear distinction between the two senses of the term. The tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that “liberalism” endeavors to designate, it is constitutive of the notion itself, so that this ambiguity, far from signaling a limitation of our knowledge, signals the innermost “truth” of the notion of liberalism.

Traditionally, each basic form of liberalism necessarily appears as the opposite of the other: liberal multiculturalist advocates of tolerance as a rule resist economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from unencumbered market forces, while market liberals as a rule advocate conservative family values, and so on. We thus get the double paradox of the traditionalist Rightist supporting the market economy while ferociously rejecting the culture and mores that economy engenders, and his counterpoint, the multiculturalist Leftist, resisting the market (though less and less so, it is true, as Michéa notices) while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders. (Half a century ago, the symptomatic exception was the unique Ayn Rand, who advocated both market liberalism and a full individualist egotism deprived of all traditional forms of morality concerning family values and sacrifice for the common good.) Today, however, we seem to be entering a new era in which it is possible for both aspects to be combined: figures such as Bill Gates, for instance, pose as market radicals and as multiculturalist humanitarians.

Here, we encounter the basic paradox of liberalism. An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very core of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a “politics of the lesser evil,” its ambition is to bring about the “least worst society possible,” thus preventing a greater evil, since it considers any attempt to directly impose a positive good as the ultimate source of all evil. Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst of all political systems, with the exception of all the others, holds even better for liberalism. Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is a selfish and envious animal, and if one attempts to build a political system appealing to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind of terror (both the Jacobins and the Stalinists presupposed human virtue).⁴⁰ However, the liberal critique of the “tyranny of the Good” comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, gradually replicates the very features of the enemy it claims to be fighting against. The global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds; its modest rejection of utopias ends with the imposition of its own market-liberal utopia which will supposedly become reality when we subject ourselves fully to the mechanisms of the market and universal human rights. Behind all this lurks the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, the vision of a New Man who has left behind all the old ideological baggage.

As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness—which should be relativized and historicized—ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly referred to as “common decency” (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects “harassing” other subjects, who—in the absence of such mores—is to decide what counts as “harassment”? In France, there are associations for obese people demanding that all public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating habits be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the “speciesism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal—for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegetophobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right to incest-marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . .

The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rules. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns members of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case of meddling with other “ways of life.” It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the “fight against discrimination” is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Michéa puts it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.”⁴¹

The ideological coordinates of such liberal multiculturalism are determined by two features of our “postmodern” zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism (all values and rights are historically specific, hence any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent)⁴² and the universalized “hermeneutics of suspicion” (all “high” ethical motifs are generated and sustained by “low” motives of resentment, envy, etc.—the call to sacrifice our life for a higher cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or a pathological expression of masochism—and this either/or is an inclusive vel, i.e., both terms can be true at the same time). Another way to formulate Badiou’s insight that we live in a world-less universe would be to say that the functioning of ideology today no longer relies on mechanisms for the interpellation of individuals into subjects: what liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, a mechanism “whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point interpellating individuals into subjects.”⁴³ The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it—all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to “re-create” himself or herself.

There is a problem with this liberal vision of which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic such as Francis Fukuyama, is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as “socialization” which it simultaneously undermines, thereby sawing off the branch on which it is sitting. In the market—and, more generally, in the social exchange based on the market—individuals encounter each other as free rational subjects, but such subjects are the result of a complex previous process which concerns symbolic debt, authority, and, above all, trust (in the big Other which regulates exchanges). In other words, the domain of exchange is never purely symmetrical: it is an a priori condition for each of the participants to be able to give something without return so that he or she can participate in the game of give-and-take. For a market exchange to take place, there have to be subjects involved who participate in the basic symbolic pact and display an elementary trust in the Word. Of course, the market is a domain of egotistic cheating and lying; however, as Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to present itself and be taken as truth, i.e., the dimension of Truth has to be already established.

Kant missed the necessity of unwritten, disavowed, but necessary rules for every legal structure or set of social rules—it is only such rules that provide the “substance” on which laws can thrive, or properly function. (One could again imagine, along these lines, yet another version of the Kantian secret clause enjoining states to always take into account the unwritten rules, without publicly admitting so.) The exemplary case of the effectiveness of such unwritten rules is “potlatch”; the key feature that opposes potlatch to direct market exchange is thus the temporal dimension. In market exchange, the two complementary acts occur simultaneously (I pay and I get what I paid for), so that the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but merely to a momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately afterwards, return to their solitude. In potlatch, on the contrary, the time elapsed between my giving a gift and the other side returning it to me creates a social link which lasts (for a time, at least): we are all linked together by bonds of debt. From this standpoint, money can be defined as the means which enables us to have contacts with others without entering into proper relations with them. (Is the function of the masochistic practice of bondage not [also] to supplement this lack of social bond proper, so that, in it, the foreclosed returns in the real—the suspended symbolic bond returns as literal bodily bondage?)⁴⁴

This atomized society, in which we have contact with others without entering into proper relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism. The problem of organizing a state thus cannot be solved “even for a race of devils,” as Kant put it—the idea that it can be is the key moment of the liberal utopia. One should link this Kantian reference to a race of devils to another detail of his ethical thought. According to Kant, if one finds oneself alone on the sea with another survivor of a sunken ship near a floating piece of wood which can keep only one person afloat, moral considerations are no longer valid—there is no moral law preventing me from fighting to the death with the other survivor for the place on the raft; I can engage in it with moral impunity. It is here, perhaps, that one encounters the limit of Kantian ethics: what about someone prepared willingly to sacrifice himself in order to give the other person a chance of survival—and, furthermore, who is ready to do it for non-pathological reasons? If there is no moral law commanding one to do this, does this mean that such an act has no ethical status proper? Does this strange exception not demonstrate that ruthless egotism, a concern for personal survival and gain, is the silent “pathological” presupposition of Kantian ethics—that the Kantian ethical edifice can only maintain itself by silently presupposing the “pathological” image of man as a ruthless utilitarian egotist? In exactly the same way, the Kantian political structure, with his notion of ideal legal power, can maintain itself only by silently presupposing the “pathological” image of the subjects of this power as “a race of devils.”

According to Kant, the mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits: “The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord.” This is ideology at its purest. One can claim that the notion of ideology was posited “for itself” only in the liberal universe, with its founding distinction between the ordinary people immersed in their universe of Meaning—of (what appears from the properly modern perspective as) the confusion between facts and values—and the cold rational observers who are able to perceive the world the way it is, without moralistic prejudices, as a mechanism regulated by laws (of passions) like any other natural mechanism. Only in this modern universe does society appear as an object of a possible experiment, as a chaotic field to which one can (and should) apply a value-free Theory or Science (a political “geometry of passions,” or economics, or racist science). It is only this modern position of the value-free scientist, approaching society the same way as a natural scientist approaches nature, that amounts to ideology proper, not the spontaneous attitude of the meaningful experience of life dismissed by the scientist as a set of superstitious prejudices—it is ideology because it imitates the form of the natural sciences without really being one. “Ideology” in a strict sense is thus always reflexive, redoubled on itself: it is a name for neutral knowledge which opposes itself to common “ideology.”⁴⁵ There is thus a duality inscribed into the very notion of ideology: (1) “mere ideology” as the spontaneous self-apprehension of individuals with all their prejudices; (2) neutral, “value-free” knowledge to be applied to society to engineer its development. In other words, ideology always is (or, rather, appears) as its own species.