[spectre] Zizek-again (June 4)

[Aliette Guibert]

Source Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,1499062,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,1499062,00.html#article_continue


The constitution is dead. Long live proper politics

Like Amish teenagers, Europe's voters were not offered a truly free choice

Slavoj Zizek
Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian

Amish communities practise the institution of rumspringa. At 17 their
children, until then subject to strict family discipline, are set free. They
are allowed, solicited even, to go out and experience the ways of the modern
world - they drive cars, listen to pop music, watch TV and get involved in
drinking, drugs and wild sex. After a couple of years they are expected to
decide: will they return to be full members of the Amish community or leave
it forever and become ordinary American citizens?

But far from being permissive and allowing the youngsters a truly free
choice, such a solution is biased in a most brutal way. It is a fake choice
if ever there was one. When, after long years of discipline and fantasising
about the illicit pleasures of the outside world, the adolescent Amish are
thrown into it, of course they cannot help but indulge in extreme behaviour.
They want to test it all - sex, drugs and drinking. And since they have no
experience of regulating such a life they quickly run into trouble. There's
a backlash that generates unbearable anxiety, so it is a safe bet that after
a couple of years they will return to the seclusion of their community. No
wonder that 90% of Amish children do exactly that.

This is a perfect example of the difficulties that always accompany the idea
of a "free choice". While the Amish adolescents are formally given a free
choice, the conditions they find themselves in while they are making that
choice make the choice itself unfree. In order for them to have an
effectively free choice they would have to be properly informed on all the
options. But the only way to do this would be to extract them from their
embeddedness in the Amish community.

So what has all this to do with the French no to the European constitution,
whose aftershock waves are now spreading all around, immediately giving a
boost to the Dutch, who rejected the constitution with an even higher
percentage? Everything. The voters were treated exactly like the Amish
youngsters: they were not given a clear symmetrical choice. The very terms
of the choice privileged the yes lobby. The elite proposed to the people a
choice that was effectively no choice at all. People were called to ratify
the inevitable. Both the media and the political elite presented the choice
as one between knowledge and ignorance, between expertise and ideology,
between post-political administration and the old political passions of the
left and the right.

The no was dismissed as a short-sighted reaction unaware of its own
consequences. It was charged with being a murky reaction of fear of the
emerging new global order, an instinct to protect the comfortable welfare
state traditions, a gesture of refusal lacking any positive alternative
programme. No wonder the only political parties whose official stance was no
were those at the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Furthermore,
we are told, the no was really a no to many other things: to Anglo-Saxon
neoliberalism, to the present government, to the influx of migrant workers,
and so on.

However, even if there is an element of truth in all this, the very fact
that the no in both countries was not sustained by a coherent alternative
political vision is the strongest possible condemnation of the political and
media elite. It is a monument to their inability to articulate the people's
longings and dissatisfactions. Instead, in their reaction to the no results,
they treated the people as retarded pupils who did not understand the
lessons of the experts.

So although the choice was not a choice between two political options, nor
was it a choice between the enlightened vision of a modern Europe, ready to
embrace the new global order, and old, confused political passions. When
commentators described the no as a message of befuddled fear, they were
wrong. The real fear we are dealing with is the fear that the no itself
provoked within the new European political elite. It was the fear that
people would no longer be so easily convinced by their "post-political"
vision.

And so for all others the no is a message and expression of hope. This is
the hope that politics is still alive and possible, that the debate about
what the new Europe shall and should be is still open. This is why we on the
left must reject the sneering insinuations of the liberals that in our no we
find ourselves with strange neo-fascist bedfellows. What the new populist
right and the left share is just one thing: the awareness that politics
proper is still alive.

There was a positive choice in the no: the choice of choice itself; the
rejection of the blackmail by the new elite that offers us only the choice
to confirm their expert knowledge or to display one's "irrational"
immaturity. Our no is a positive decision to start a properly political
debate about what kind of Europe we really want.

Late in his life, Freud asked the famous question " Was will das Weib? ",
admitting his perplexity when faced with the enigma of female sexuality.
Does the imbroglio with the European constitution not bear witness to the
same puzzlement: what Europe do we want?

To put it bluntly, do we want to live in a world in which the only choice is
between the American civilisation and the emerging Chinese
authoritarian-capitalist one? If the answer is no then the only alternative
is Europe. The third world cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the
ideology of the American dream. In the present world constellation, it is
only Europe that can do it. The true opposition today is not between the
first world and the third world. Instead it is between the first and third
world (ie the American global empire and its colonies), and the second world
(ie Europe).

Apropos Freud, Theodor Adorno claimed that what we are seeing in the
contemporary world with its "repressive desublimation" is no longer the old
logic of repression of the id and its drives but a perverse pact between the
superego (social authority) and the id (illicit aggressive drives) at the
expense of the ego. Is not something structurally similar going on today at
the political level: the weird pact between the postmodern global capitalism
and the premodern societies at the expense of modernity proper? It is easy
for the American multiculturalist global empire to integrate premodern local
traditions. The foreign body that it cannot effectively assimilate is
European modernity.

The message of the no to all of us who care for Europe is: no, anonymous
experts whose merchandise is sold to us in a brightly coloured
liberal-multiculturalist package will not prevent us from thinking. It is
time for us, citizens of Europe, to become aware that we have to make a
properly political decision about what we want. No enlightened administrator
will do the job for us.


· Slavoj Zizek is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for
the Humanities