Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 225, 1997, Pages 28-51

  Žižek, Slavoj ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040833314     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Another name for this short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular is, of course, 'suture': the operation of hegemony 'sutures' the empty Universal to a particular content.
2. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, London 1990, pp. 14-15.
3. See Etienne Balibar, La crainte des masses, Paris 1997.
4. Now, when this magic moment of universal solidarity is over, the signifier which, in some post-Socialist countries, is emerging as the signifier of the 'absent fullness' of society, is honesty: it forms the focus of the spontaneous ideology of 'ordinary people' caught in the economic and social turbulence in which the hopes of a new fullness of Society that should follow the collapse of Socialism were cruelly betrayed, so that, in their eyes, 'old forces' (ex-Communists) and ex-dissidents who entered the ranks of power joined hands in exploiting them even more than before under the banner of democracy and freedom. The battle for hegemony, of course, is now focused on the particular content which will give a spin to this signifier: what does 'honesty' mean? And, again, it would be wrong to claim that the conflict is ultimately about the different meanings of the term 'honesty': what gets lost in this 'semantic clarification' is that each position claims that their honesty is the only 'true' honesty: the struggle is not simply a struggle among different particular contents, it is a struggle which splits from within the universal itself.
5. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy, Oxford 1996, p. 149.
6. Cited in ibid.
7. Retroactively, one thus becomes aware of how deeply the phenomenon of so-called 'dissidence' was embedded in the socialist ideological framework, of the extent to which 'dissidence', in its very utopian 'moralism' (preaching social solidarity, ethical responsibility, and so forth) provided the disavowed ethical core of socialism: perhaps, one day, historians will note that - in the same sense in which Hegel claimed that the true spiritual result of the Peloponnesian war, its spiritual End, is Thucidydes's book about it - dissidence' was the true spiritual result of Really Existing Socialism.
8. See Tiziana Terranova, 'Digital Darwin', New Formations, no. 29, Summer 1996.
9. See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford 1989.
10. Michael L. Rothschild, Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, Armonk, NY 1992.
11. See Slavoj Žižek, 'Introduction', in Mapping Ideology, Verso, London 1995.
12. See Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, Verso, London 1995, p. 22.
13. Fot a more detailed account of the role of jouissance in the process of ideological identification, see Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London 1997, ch. 2.
14. 'Propos de Emir Kusturica, Cabiers de cinéma, no. 492, June 1995, p. 69.
15. As to this Western perception of the Balkans as a fantasy-screen, see Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, London 1995.
16. See Slavoj Žižek, ''I Hear You with My Eyes'; or, The Invisible Master', in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Durham, NC 1996.
17. See Balibar, La crainte des masses, pp. 421-54.
18. Here, the parallel is clear with Laclau's opposition between the logic of difference (society as a differential symbolic structure) and the logic of antagonism (society as 'impossible', thwarted by an antagonistic split). Today, the tension between the logic of difference and the logic of antagonism assumes the form of the tension between the liberal-democratic universe of negotiation and the 'fundamentalist' universe of struggle between Good and Evil.
19. One of the minor, yet tell-tale, events that bear witness to this 'withering-away' of the Nation-State is the slow spreading of the obscene institution of private prisons in the USA and other Western countries: the exercise of what should be the monopoly of the State (physical violence and coercion) becomes the object of a contract between the State and a private company which exerts coercion on individuals for the sake of profit - what we have here is simply the end of the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence which (according to Max Weber) defines the modern State.
20. These three stairs (pre-modern communities, the Nation-State and todays emerging transnational 'universal society') clearly fit the triad of traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism, elaborated by Fredric Jameson: here also, the retro-phenoment that characterize postmodernism should not deceive us - it is only with postmodernism that the break with pre-modernity is fully consummated. The reference to Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso, London 1993) in the title of this essay is thus deliberate.
21. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, New York 1993, p. 1.
22. See Darian Leader, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, London 1996.
23. Karl Marx, 'The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850', in Surveys from Exile. Political Writings: Volume 2, London 1973.
24. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton 1995.
25. See Paul Piccone, 'Postmodern Populism', Telos, no. 103, Spring 1995, Exemplary here is also the attempt by Elizabeth Fax-Genovese to oppose to the upper-middle-class feminism interested in the problems of literary and cinema theory, lesbian rights, and so forth, a 'family feminism' which focuses on the actual concerns of ordinary working women and articulates concrete questions of how to survive within the family, with children and work. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism is Not the Story of my Life, New York 1996.
26. See Paul Piccone, 'Postmodern Populism', Telos, no. 103, Spring 1995, Exemplary here is also the attempt by Elizabeth Fax-Genovese to oppose to the upper-middle-class feminism interested in the problems of literary and cinema theory, lesbian rights, and so forth, a 'family feminism' which focuses on the actual concerns of ordinary working women and articulates concrete questions of how to survive within the family, with children and work. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism is Not the Story of my Life, New York 1996.
27. The most concise formulation of the rightist suspension of public (legal) norms was provided by Eamon de Valera: 'The people has no right to do wrong.'
28. This, perhaps, is how one should read Rancière's notion of singulier universel: the assertion of the singular exception as the locus of universality which simultaneously affirms and subverts the universality in question. When we say, 'We are all citizens of Sarajevo', we are obviously making a 'false' nomination, a nomination which violates the proper geopolitical disposition; however, precisely as such, this violation gives word to the injustice of the existing geopolitical order. See Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente, Paris 1995.