Žižek on Multiculturalism,
Or Why Liberals Love a Good Tea Party
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Lacan and the repressed truth of Multiculturalism
With this talk of position of enunciation, of symptom, of fantasy and of jouissance, we have thus entered the third stage of our presentation, that of Žižek’s Lacanian psychoanalysis. As we shall see, Žižek uses psychoanalytic logic to cast light on the intimate relation between multiculturalism and the modern re-emergence of fundamentalism. Before we examine this more closely, we note that it is already from his Lacanian-influenced Hegelianism that he is able to adequately deal with those familiar pseudo-psychoanalytic criticisms of multiculturalism. Consider a public lecture Žižek delivered in Australia in 1995, where he directly opposed the fashionable challenges made today in the name of multiculturalism against Eurocentrism by proposing the exact opposite: ‘[m]ulticulturalism is... always strictly Eurocentric.’ (Žižek 2005a: 74) This result is already discernable from what we have examined above. This fact, that multiculturalist tolerance is enunciated without roots in any particular culture, ‘can emerge only in a culture within which its own tradition, communal heritage, appears as contingent; that is to say, in a culture that is indifferent towards itself, towards its own specificity…. only within modern-age subjectivity is it possible to experience one’s own tradition as a contingent ingredient to be methodologically “bracketed” in the pursuit of truth.’ (Žižek 1994: 157) The first such culture, of course, was European. Žižek’s claim is that historically, it was the European tradition which first experienced itself as contingent, thus enabling it to enunciate itself from a completely empty position. But at the very same time, he warns us that we should not fall into the opposite trap of dismissing multiculturalism’s neutrality as false by seeking to expose its position of enunciation as silently privileging Eurocentrist content. Again and again, Žižek emphasizes that this content is entirely empty and any claim to have uncovered its true position, some stain of Eurocentrist particularity, is a ‘phantasmatic screen which conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly “rootless,” that his true position is the void of universality.’ (Žižek 1999: 217) So we must reverse the usual pseudo-Freudian relationship between the surface-pretext (appearance) and the supposedly deeper-unacknowledged wish (essence): the most difficult thing is to accept multiculturalism’s appearance at its surface value and to refrain from coving it over with an alleged deeper ‘Eurocentrist’ truth. (Žižek 1997: 45)
So if there is no secret Eurocentrist conspiracy lurking behind multiculturalism, what exactly is the problem? Again, we have to consider it against the background of capitalism. What is implied above is that any reference to a particular cultural formula operates as a screen that ensures global Capital will remain anonymous. But is it any better to conceive of it as a neutral net within which a diverse set of cultural life-worlds coexist, implied by the very term multi-culturalism? Žižek answers that the problem with multiculturalism is that the appearance of its celebration of diversity ‘bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world. It is effectively as if... everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay [and] critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact.’ (Žižek 1997: 46) So in this climate of homogenization and increasing standardization, it should be no surprise that theorists channel their energies where they can in an anxious attempt to avoid this truth. Todorov, for example, celebrates the heterogeneity and plurality of culture (Bammer 1995: 50); whereas Hall theorizes ‘a new cultural politics which engages rather than suppresses difference and... [constructs] new ethnic identities’ (Hall 1996b: 446); while Taylor’s own project of a new ‘politics of recognition’ should now be read as seeking public outlets to distinguish ourselves from the herd in some desperate attempt to stay ahead of global Capital’s pursuit to reduce all to the least common (economic) denominator.
Žižek points out how philosophers as different as Badiou and Jameson have detected that ‘today’s multiculturalist celebration of the diversity of lifestyles, how this thriving of differences relies on an underlying One: on the radical obliteration of Difference, of the antagonistic gap.’ (Žižek 2001a: 238) He goes on to point out how Badiou devastatingly critiques Deleuze, the philosopher of the ‘thriving rhizomatic multitude, [who] is at the same time the most radical monist in modern philosophy, the philosopher of the Sameness, of the One that pervades all differences.’ (ibid: 269) Thus, what we have here is a structure that is quite paradoxical: the more multiculturalism asserts difference, the more it actively serves the unrestrained development of the One – the capitalist world-system – by rendering it all the more invisible. Žižek has been able to analyze this structure using psychoanalysis because it has the same structure as that of a symptom. (Žižek 1997: 46)
With global Capital’s multiculturalism and its attendant attitude of tolerance and respect for difference, we are dealing with a universal structuring principle which should apply to everyone. In theory, no one should be excluded from the full benefits of our liberal, tolerant society and when they are, this empirical non-realization of the principle of multiculturalism is usually experienced as merely due to contingent circumstances. But a symptom is an element that has to remain an exception and Žižek points to many exceptions of groups of people who do not enjoy the benefits of our society: the homeless, the ghettoized and the permanently unemployed. And his point is that they operate precisely as symptoms of the late capitalist global system. This is what is missed by much of the literature. The hope of theorists like Hall is that, through a progressive ‘ideological struggle’ that involves re-articulating particular ‘chains of equivalences’ which critically define for him the experience of such disenfranchised groups as blacks in Jamaica, former negatively associated terms which affect a group’s cultural exclusion can thereby be positively transformed toward a new societal inclusion. (Hall 1985: 112) But as the title of his essay suggests, such a project is limited to what Lacan called the Imaginary, involving as it does ‘representation’ and ‘signification,’ whereas Žižek’s symptomatic analysis touches the Lacanian Real, allowing us to understand how the
‘necessity of failure is structural: the point is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular “progressive” fights will never be united, that “wrong” chains of equivalences will always occur… but rather that emergencies of “wrong” enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today’s “progressive” politics of establishing “chains of equivalences:” the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations is sustained by the “repression” of the key role of economic struggle – the leftist politics of the “chains of equivalences” among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the silent abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system and to the acceptance of capitalist economic relations as the unquestionable framework.’ (Žižek 1997: 47)
This abandonment takes a repressed energy which should properly be directed toward considering say, immigration, as a class issue of global Capital and refocuses it into the multiculturalist problematic of (in)tolerance of Otherness. (Žižek 2006: 301) But in our current ideological constellation, we are actually witnessing another phenomenon which is no more a threat to the process of globalization than liberal multiculturalism: the reemergence of (predominately neoconservative) fundamental populism, today most visibly exemplified by the Tea Party ‘movement’ in the US with its strong advocacy of patriotism and individualist freedom. Many have already noted that such populism often carries with it a strong undertone of intolerance toward the Other just below its surface - the traces of racist elements in speeches by Tea Party supporters is rightly suspected. But Žižek’s critique is much stronger. He argues that even an overt fundamentalist intolerance for the Other that opposes itself to tolerant multiculturalism is only a superficial opposition. The two positions are actually two sides of the same coin. (Žižek 2001c) Crucial here is Žižek’s Lacanian thesis that we tolerate the Other only as long as the Other keeps a proper distance. The moment the traumatic kernel of the Other gets too close, anxiety in the precise psychoanalytic sense of the term ensues and the situation becomes quite intolerable for the modern subject, which is why Žižek tells us that ‘the PC stance realizes Kierkegaard’s old insight into how the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor.’ (Žižek 2005b) The mistake to avoid here is the pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of a subject unable to confront his inner traumas, the ‘stranger in himself’ who, if he could simply come to terms with this inner-repressed element, a full acceptance of the Other would be actualized. This false matrix underscores some of the essays in the aforementioned Encountering the Other(s), perhaps most notably in Waldenfels’ contribution. (cf. Waldenfels 1995: 37) On the contrary, Žižek argues that the experience of the inherent complicity between post-ideological, liberal tolerance and the particularist fundamentalism of today – as two co-dependent and grossly inadequate responses that leave intact global process – is the first step in opening up a new political space to adequately confront class antagonisms of global capitalism.
Certainly the long-time advocate of Žižek’s work, Terry Eagleton, is exemplary here in recognizing such complicity. In his recent book, The Idea of Culture, he argues in a much similar vein regarding multiculturalism. What brings to mind our discussion above of the logic surrounding the One, he first tells us that the modern, Western multiculturalist society is not just made up of a set of distinctive cultures, but rather does have an underling transcendent entity ‘which nowhere appears as a specific culture but which is the measure and matrix of them all.’ (Eagleton 2000: 46) Later, he provides a remarkably similar historical sketch to Žižek’s own, arguing that at first, the unity of culture was embedded in a strong Nation-State which only later extended its reach outward during the colonial era. This latter expansion proved to be its ultimate undoing, as transnational capital weakened the Nation-State while multiculturalism simultaneously arose. (ibid: 62–3) Showing a healthy disdain for identity politics and of a cultural relativism far too divorced from politics and economics throughout his book, Eagleton concludes by pressing for a radical politics to challenge both the ‘flawed universality of Culture and the blemished particularism of culture.’ (ibid: 80)
Žižek would certainly commend this conclusion in spirit, especially because it results from the recognition of the false opposition before us. But he does seem to formulate an additional movement toward a solution that takes us beyond the simple call for a new political commitment. Asking, how exactly we are to reinvent a political space in today’s globalization, he answers of a need to reject the post-ideological position of fake neutrality and reliance on the rule of Law for the ‘old leftist motif of the necessity to suspend the neutral space of Law.’ (Žižek 1997: 49)
Lacanian-themed puzzles
