Žižek on Multiculturalism,
Or Why Liberals Love a Good Tea Party
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Hegel and the Nation-State
If any of the three major influences on Žižek’s thought should be considered the most important, it would undoubtedly be his Hegelianism, which represents a crucial break from the standard reading of Hegel. Žižek has taken great pains from his earliest books onward to demonstrate that Hegel is not the teleological historian that most make him out to be. It is precisely this mistaken view of Hegel that Gilroy makes use of in his Against Race when he writes of Hegel’s ‘provocative teleological sequence’ which ‘had consigned Africa to a condition of permanent historylessness... [and had] identified America as the land of the future, a special place where the burden of world history would reveal itself.’ (Gilroy 2000: 338) For Gilroy, Hegel articulates the exclusion of Africans as ‘prehistoric’ and ‘pre-political’ from the workings of a history that seems to be absolutely determined. (ibid 56, 275) However, Žižek’s own reading of the very same Hegelian text shows us how Hegel makes reference to ‘negroes’ as ‘standing in for’ topological figures which are couched within a non- deterministic reasoning. Hegel’s actual argument is, in fact, far removed from the naïve empirical and historical account one usually accuses Hegel for holding. (Žižek 1999: 37) So while we can sympathize with Gilroy’s project of dismissing what he calls ‘race thinking’ and ‘raciology’ as toxic, there is a much more radical (and accurate) use of Hegelian thought that Žižek champions. In our present context, Žižek’s argument is made with respect to the question of how ethnic ideology functions in constructing American national identity. Let us attempt to re-construct this argument.
Instead of some teleological process of history in which positively existing, actual states gradually approach their full notion along with their subjects becoming fully actualized in that notion, Žižek argues that Hegel held almost the opposite: there is a split inherent in the very notion of the state that articulates itself through a series of irreducible antagonisms on account of which individual subjects are never fully themselves. (ibid: 177) Žižek demonstrates the logic behind this claim with his well-known example of the ‘Single Black Mother’ whose particularity as an excluded element operates as the politically contested, fantasmatic support for the universal notion that the ‘welfare system is inefficient.’ (Žižek 1997: 29) What is crucial to note is that the element ‘Single Black Mother’ inscribes itself into a contested space and ultimately fills it out in a distorted way. And it is precisely over which element should occupy such an excluded space that ideological battles are fought. If ‘ideology is nothing but the form of appearance, the formal distortion/displacement, of non-ideology,’ then in this case, the economic efficiency or non-efficiency of a welfare system would appear to us as non-ideological. (ibid: 30) This is an important result, for Žižek will argue that one of the key features of contemporary capitalism is its withdrawal from ideology. This has foreclosed political discussion in key areas because they have been made to appear non-ideological and beyond debate (eg, class/economic issues). However, we first need to examine Žižek’s Hegelian understanding of how it is that the Nation-State has historically constituted itself and how this process has undergone a profound change today, especially in the case of America.
Žižek utilizes and extends Balibar’s three notions of universality to explicate his understanding of the Nation-State. He notes Balibar’s matrix follows that of Lacan’s triad of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. (Žižek 1999: 213) Firstly, what is real is the universality of globalization and how it forcefully impacts our very survival in making our fate dependent on the intricate web of global market relations. Secondly, there is the universality of the fiction which regulates the ideological hegemony of the subject so that he gains a comfortable distance toward those social groups to which he immediately belongs. For example, the State itself prevents complete immersion into one’s class position, which also simultaneously posits the subject as free. Finally, there is the Ideal universality, which is defined as an unconditional excess and is something which can never be included in the existing order. Such a universal is Balibar’s notion of égaliberté (equality-freedom), which sets in motion permanent insurrection against the existing order. The point to take away is that the boundaries between these three universals are unclear and undergo continual shifts. So the question naturally arises whether the universal is ‘abstract’ (as opposed to having a concrete content) or ‘concrete’ (in that the subject experiences his particular mode of social life as that specific way he participates in the universal social order). Balibar answers that there is an irreducible excess of abstract universality which prevents it from full integration into the harmonious whole of a concrete universality. However, Žižek argues that today there is a much more crucial tension between the two modes of concrete universality itself. (Žižek 1997: 40) He explains that the real universality of globalization today involves its own hegemonic, fictional ideal of multiculturalist tolerance and respect for the other in such a way that it is now the universal features of the world market that allow specific ‘life-styles’ to flourish in their particularity. So the true tension today is between the concrete universality of this post-nation-state and the earlier concrete universality of the Nation-State, the latter of which is continuing to weaken as globalization expands.
We can enlist some concepts from Charles Taylor’s influential essay “The Politics of Recognition” to initially aid us in understanding what Žižek is driving at with these distinctions. Taylor’s own work on Hegel is well known and in this essay he links the subject’s need for ‘recognition’ with the formation of the subject’s identity in two spheres, the first the intimate sphere of dialogue with significant others, while the other sphere is on a more social or public level where a ‘politics of universalism’ takes place. (Taylor 1994: 36–8) But whereas Taylor’s notion of modern identity stops at what he calls a ‘politics of difference,’ Žižek’s own political project shuns such a limited notion, instead asking the more fundamental question of how it is the modern subject finds himself in such a situation in the first place, so that he must compete or negotiate with others for a ‘public recognition.’3 As we shall see, instead of Taylor’s notion of ‘difference,’ Žižek opts for the more radical Marxist notion of ‘antagonism’ when examining the reality of modern subjectivity.
Žižek’s own clarification of the distinction he makes between the former Nation-State and the contemporary post-nation-states of today involves an important reference to the Philosophy of Right where Hegel elaborates a paradox surrounding the way modern subjects achieve their identities. (Žižek 1997: 41) The dialectical logic used here is crucial to understanding Žižek’s claims regarding multiculturalist ideology. Hegel tells us that at first, the subject is thoroughly immersed in his particular, immediate surroundings, such as those found with family and the local community. The only way to tear out of such primordial or organic communal relations is to shift allegiances and recognize the substance of one’s being in another, secondary community which is universal, more ‘artificial’ and less ‘spontaneous’ than the organicism to be had in the primary community. This secondary community is more ‘mediated’ in the sense that it is only through the free activity of its subjects that it sustains itself. It is in this sense that Žižek conceptualizes the notion of ‘Nation’ and it is through the consequences of this shift from primary to secondary identification that we can understand what the concrete universal entails. This shift transubstantiates the primary identification in such a way that it starts to play another role, functioning as the very form of appearance of the universal secondary identification. As Žižek illustrates, it is ‘precisely by being a good member of my family [that] I thereby contribute to the proper functioning of my Nation-State.’ (ibid) So here we have the precise answer to the question posed above when we discussed Balibar’s three universals. My national identity is an ‘abstract universal’ insofar as it remains directly opposed to the particularity of the various forms of my primary identifications, so that it compels me – making use of Sartre’s famous ethical dilemma, for instance – to abandon my ailing mother to answer the call of national duty and fight with the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers. But my identification as a Frenchman becomes a ‘concrete universal’ when it reintegrates my primary identification, transforming it into the mode of appearance of my national identity: staying home to care for my mother becomes the truest expression of an authentic French identity qua opposed to the Nazi occupation.
It is obvious that throughout modernity, it has been the Nation-State which has been the predominant social form of the ‘concrete universal’ which has mediated the modern subject’s particular social identity. The specific way the subject has participated in the universal life of his Nation-State has been expressed in the determinate form of his economic vocation, be it professor or farmer, lawyer or factory worker. However, Žižek argues that this logic surrounding the ideological unity of the Nation-State has met with a unique historical exception, that of the experience of the United States of America. The uniqueness of the American Nation-State is that its own process of transubstantiation has to do primarily with ethnic roots rather than with vocational or other particular determinate forms of identification. Of course, one could make the same argument regarding other ‘New World’ nations, Canada included. But Žižek correctly highlights the fact that the American ideological apparatus, from the very time of America’s inception as a nation, has always had a specific ethnic element such that one’s particularity of ethnicity is precisely what makes the American an American. To be American, one does not need to renounce, for instance, one’s Lithuanian roots; rather, it is in and through the very celebration of such ethnic heritage that makes one an American.
It is at this point in his argument that Žižek tells us a crucial turn of events has taken place, ultimately due to global economic events. Today, the American Dream is no longer fully operational. This once substantial, yet ‘pathetic patriotic identification with the universal frame of the American Nation-State has been seriously eroded’ and is now less and less likely to give ‘rise to the sublime effect of being part of a gigantic ideological project’ and is ‘more and more experienced as a simple formal framework for the coexistence of the multiplicity of ethnic, religious or life-style communities.’4 (Žižek 1997: 42) What we are experiencing today is the reversal of what Hegel identified as the main characteristic of our modern age. No longer is it the case that the subject smoothly passes from primary to secondary identification, but he now increasingly experiences the abstract universal of the latter as something external and not really binding. So if national identifications no longer entail any binding obligations, the subject increasingly looks for substantial support in the primary forms of identification, such as the ethnic, the religious and among the growing number of alternative ‘life-styles’ now available to us. This reversal results in a paradox: while we have remarkably increased our (formal) freedom to choose our own identities from a diverse, shifting array of life-styles, we are increasingly losing the abstract freedom we once possessed as citizens of a Nation-State. Though termed ‘abstract,’ this freedom is something that we now experience as an authentic loss. And it is precisely this loss, retroactively constituted, which we seek to ‘fill in’ through our pursuit and reassertion of primary forms of identification. So while it seems we may have made some measure of progress in terms of the freedom to enjoy our more organic communities in a climate of universal respect for all particular ethnicities, the reverse is actually the case. Žižek tells us that this regression from the previous ‘nationalization of the ethnic’ to today’s ‘ethnicization of the national,’ is an ongoing process that is itself mediated by the real universal dimension of the world market. (ibid) That is, this very terrain – on which our increased freedom to choose over how to constitute our identities takes place – is newly opened for us only because it is itself a reaction to global economic considerations. Because this process takes place against such a background, ‘this very reassertion of “primordial” identification signals that the loss of organic-substantial unity is fully consummated.’ (ibid)5
Lacanian-themed puzzles
