A Priori False

Zizek’s recent LRB essay really seems to have caused problems for various (self-proclaimed) Liberals. Now Mr Clive James has weighed in. For those unfamiliar with the man, he’s a Cambridge educated media personality with an inimitable rhetorical style used indifferently for both speaking and writing. He famously hosted a program laughing at foreign popular culture, esp. the Japanese (yes, always easier to see it in others, isn’t it).

As with others, James has particular difficulty with Zizek’s contention that

‘The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences…[etc] is a priori false.’

Now the ‘a priori’ bit may indeed need a few moments consideration, but it really doesn’t merit the blank non-recognition that seems to be the default liberal response. It is a priori, I assume, in the sense that it’s not something that will be decided by empirical exercises such as (as some have done) counting the respective dead of the Gulags and the Camps. It’s not that some new factual discovery about Nazi or Soviet atrocities will decide the issue once and for all.

Zizek is saying there is a basic difference between the two that results from the fact that Communism was a failed emancipatory project. It's clearly this that he wants to debate; but this position, the failed emancipatory project, is one that Zizek’s respondents seem not to address or even recognise. It’s really not too difficult to grasp. You might think its nonsense. Fair enough. But don’t pretend you don’t get it.

Zizek draws attention to a number of phenomenon worthy of discussion. Why is it senseless to speak of ‘really existing fascism’ as opposed to ‘really existing socialism’? How is it that an advertising campaign can use a hammer and sickle whereas using a swastika is inconceivable? Why would ‘fascist nostalgia’ be abhorrent where Ostalgia is acceptable or tolerated? Why did the Soviets, in particular, go through the spectacle of show trials – totally unnecessary to the Nazis? Or take Adorno’s example: why is it that (German) fascism was unable to produce "a single work of art, a single mental structure capable of satisfying even the meagre liberalistic requirement of ‘quality’" whereas the Bolshevik revolution led to breathtaking artistic innovation. And so on. All this, note, comes before the ‘a priori’ bit, making the latter rather easier to comprehend. Granted, these are not elaborate arguments. They are questions appropriate to a short journal essay.

But to engage with such questions is clearly to concede too much. Why? For the Liberal both fascism and communism are equally distant from the only yardstick that matters, Liberal democracy. Because they are equally distant they must, logic goes, be the same, at least in the essentials. ‘Totalitarian’ is thus a way of giving name and consistency to this ‘sameness’. We are dealing with a kind of interpretive error in which the Identity between two things is merely a function of the device used for measuring them. Now since this is an error of method it is, indeed, a priori false, because any ‘empirical evidence’ will simply feed into and consolidate this error*.

But of course, none of this can be conceded. There is an insistence that Zizek should speak their language and make himself intelligible to them, but that they are under absolutely no obligation to extend any interpretive generosity to his language at all, but only question why, inexplicably, he has chosen that language.

[*I am neither agreeing nor disageeing here, merely trying to interpret, generously, Zizek's argument]

p.s. There seem to be a few tickets left for the Zizek talk at Birkbeck on May 20th.