Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 00:41:57 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] The Agreement of Zizek and Katsiafiacas on Multiculturalism


To the person who asked where you can find more of
Zizek's ideas about Cultural Studies, I would suggest
Chapter 5 of 'Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism' which
is called 'Are Cultural Studies Really Totalitiarian'
where he goes into some depth, arguing that the
original Marxist-Leninism of the old English school of
Cultural Studies (which he also refers to as 'Critical
Studies' in order to be clear) was more radical than
what exists today under that name, which he basically
implies has stripped out the class-reductionist
argumentation that predominated originally in favor of
liberal multicultural critique. 

Of course, as seems to always be the case with Zizek,
as soon as you think you have him pegged he throws you
for a loop a few pages later with an argument that
contradicts precisely what you thought he was saying
previously, which should actually be obvious here,
since what Zizek does very much *is* Cultural Studies,
albeit in a different register; otherwise why would he
spend so much time, so much like his fellows to which
he refers, critiquing such movies as The Truman Show
and the Matrix, showing the ideological
presuppositions that they assume? Indeed, the 2002
interview with Doug Henwood (not the one on LBO),
published on the Bad Subjects website, confirms this
asseration - as the following excerpt shows, Zizek
even sees culture as 'the central ideological
battlefield today':

"BS: You talk and write a lot about popular culture,
particularly movies. How does your thinking about pop
culture relate to your thinking about politics?

Zizek: We can no longer, as we did in the good old
times, (if they were really good) oppose the economy
and culture. They are so intertwined not only through
the commercialization of culture but also the
culturalization of the economy. Political analysis
today cannot bypass mass culture. For me, the basic
ideological attitudes are not found in big picture
philosophical statements, but instead in lifeworld
practices — how do you behave, how do you react —
which aren't only reflected in mass culture, but which
are, up to a point, even generated in mass culture.
Mass culture is the central ideological battlefield
today."

As for Sasha's argument that "*nowhere in the text you
quote does he call for coexistence with Islamic
fundamentalism in any way*" I really disagree here,
because, just as with the issue of Cultural Studies,
which he seemingly 'flatly rejects' but at the same
time turns around and says that actually, it should be
our central concern (and certainly Cultural Studies
folks are using his critiques *all the time* these
days), here too he is not saying just that either. His
argument is basically that in the West we believe that
we are multicultural, liberal and tolerant, but oddly
enough, the one thing we are really intolerant of, is
other societies that we percieve to be intolerant,
such as what we dismiss as Islamic 'fundamentalist'
societies, thus resulting in what he calls an
'anti-racist racism', which is what Katsiaficas says
as well - in this way I would say he is in fact
arguing for a coexistence with Islamic
'fundamentalism' with the caveats endorsed by
Katsiaficas.

For a little textual support of this assertion, I
would refer you first of all to 'Welcome to the Desert
of the Real', where on page three he argues, after
critiquing a Hollywood film in which a boyfriend won't
take no for an answer from his girlfriend after asking
if she will marry him, demonstrating that it really is
not a 'choice' that it is the same thing with the
juxtaposition of democracy and fundamentalism in
contemporary world politics (whether by the State,
liberal multiculturalists or well meaning radicals):
as he argues, "is it not that, within the terms of
this choice, it is simply not possible to choose
'fundamentalism'? What is problematic in the way the
ruling ideology imposes this choice on us is not
'fundmantalism' but rather democracy itself, as if the
only alternative to 'fundamentalism' is the political
system of liberal parliamentary democracy". 

Another example from the same book would be the many
places where he almost endorses the terrorist actions
of September 11 (which I totally disagree with of
course), arguing "is not so-called fundamentalist
terror also a passion for the Real?" (p. 9) (which he
then compares to the German RAF). A few pages later he
says that like the emptiness of contemporary
capitalist society, in which we have beer without
alcohol, sweetness without sugar, sex without contact,
etc. the liberal version of multiculturalism gives us
"an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness"
(11) - precisely the 'fundamentalism' being denounced
here as not conforming to 'our' ideals - as
Katsiaficas argues, if we really respected the
Otherness of the Other, we would be taking a rather
different approach, supporting internal struggles
within, without imposing our values as the immediate,
thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction.

And like Katsiaficas, Zizek argues too that Jews,
Christians and others have more often than not been
much better off the cultural umbrella of
'fundamentalist' Islam than they have under
self-righteous 'tolerant' Western secularism, for
instance, one could point to his argument in the
conclusion of 'Weclome to the Desert of the Real' in
which he argues that "Sarajevo...had by far the
largest Jewish community in ex-Yugoslavia, and,
moreover, was the most cosmopolitan Yugoslav city, the
thriving center of cinema and rock music - why?
Precisely because it was the Muslim-dominated city,
where the Jewish and Christian presence was tolerated,
in contrast to the Christian-dominated large cities
from Jews and Muslims were purged long ago" (p. 137). 

Earlier in the same text we find him arguing that the
reprehensible elements of Islam today are not
'fundamentalist' at all but are, as Katsiaficas
argues, direct products of the reaction to global
capitalism as imposed by the West; "a brief look at
the comparative history of Islam and Christianity
tells us that the 'human rights record' of Islam (to
use the anachronistic term) is much better than that
of Christianity: in past centuries, Islam has been
significantly more tolerant towards other religions
than Christianity. Now it is also time to remember [as
postcolonial Cultural Studies theorists such as
Ziauddin Sardar have argued - Jason] that it was
through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in
Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek
heritage. While they in no way excuse today's acts of
horror, these facts none the less clearly demonstrate
that we are dealing not with a feature inscribed into
Islam as such, but with the outcome of modern
sociopolitical conditions...the Muslim
'fundamentalist' target is not only global
capitalism's corrosive impact on social life, but also
the corrupt 'traditionalist' regimes in Saudi Arabi,
Kuwait and so on" (p.41) [as Katsiaficas argued].

A few pages later he is arguing, like Katsiaficas,
that "the rise of the Taliban, this apparent
'regression' into ultra-fundamentalism, far from
expressing some deep 'traditionalist' tendency was the
result of the country being caught up in the whirlpool
of international politics - it was not only a
defensive reaction to it, it emerged directly as a
result of the support of foreign powers" (p. 43) -
which adds to his idea that true Islamic
fundamentalism is actually quite tolerant by global
standards, indeed he goes so far as to say that "the
Muslim fundamentalists are not true fundamentalists,
they are already 'modernists', a product and a
phenomenon of modern capitalism" (p. 52) as well as
"if [the] image of Belgians as chocolate-eaters and
child-abusers is a media cliche, so is the image of
Afghanistan as a country of opium and female
oppression" (p. 56).

So I think we can see that for Zizek, the main problem
is not difference as such, not the horizontal respect
for differences advocated by *radical* postmodernists
(as opposed liberal ones) but rather the vertical
respect for differences, which accepts the
'difference' of the boss's domination over the worker
or the 'difference' of the West's domination over the
Third World, as liberal tolerance (p. 65), this is
seen for instance in his advocacy of identity politics
in the case of Russia, where he asks, "where, then
should we look for an alternative?...why should we not
see emancipatory potential even in such an apparently
'reactionary' notion as 'Russian identity'?" (p. 80)
So what it seems to be said here is that liberal
tolerance is expressed *most clearly* in the current
War on Terror, which is being pushed through in the
name of our supposedly open societies, in contrast to
the closedness of Islamic 'fundamentalism' (p. 90).

All of this of course ties into Zizek's rejection of
mainstream dismissals of the Balkans as 'totalitarian'
and 'naturally' and 'constantly' in a state of
perpetual dissolution and war, such as that made by
Habermas or Engels; as he argues in regard to the
former's assertion that republics like Slovenia could
never be democratic or sovereign, "is this not the
echo of Friedrich Engels' famous remarks about how the
small Balkan nations are politically reactionary since
their very existence is a reaction, a survival of the
past? Here we encounter a 'reflexive racism' of racism
which assumes the very form of dismissing the Other as
racist, intolerant and so on" (p. 122). This seems
like what I am hearing from some quarters, and it is
precisely this discourse that ignores the
'fundamental' point that Islam's refusal of
modernization could, under the right conditions, open
a path toward what Zizek calls an 'Islamic socialism'
(p. 133) (or, for our purposes, an 'Islamic
anarchism') which ironically enough would not be all
that far from a true Islamic 'fundamentalism', in the
sense argued by Zizek and Katsiaficas.

I could go on into the other book, 'Did Somebody Say
Totalitarianism' but I think this should be enough to
generate significant discussion already...







===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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