Nothing Doing

In my previous post, "If All Else Fails", I gave a brief overview of the typology of violence that Slavoj Zizek develops in his new book, Violence. I did so to indicate a form of violence I believe Zizek to have omitted, or rather, to explicate the relation between revolutionary violence and the other types, a relation Zizek leaves unclear. However, I should clarify my account of his typology, which was perhaps too brief. Zizek does not simply enumerate three distinct forms of violence - subjective, systemic, and symbolic - but aims to show how violence is always caught in the knot of these three modes, which parallel the Lacanian triad of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

Subjective violence is simply what we would ordinarily recognize as such: abusive, injurious actions that occur between people, inflicted by one person or group of people on another. This has the simple form of an Imaginary relation, in which the relation of ego to others and the predominance of Eros are the frame.

Such subjective violence is only visible against the background or context of normal, nonviolent relations, and is hence a disturbance of this equilibrium. Systemic violence is precisely an anonymous and impersonal collateral effect of sustaining the nonviolent background of Imaginary relations, it is that which cannot enter the contextual frame of subjective experience, but sustains this frame. If such violence does enter into the frame of our experience, we cannot help but to contextualize it, to ascribe it to a particular offender violating the normal run of things; we cannot accept that our comfortable life-world is sustained by an immense suffering. In this sense, systemic violence is the Real, that which cannot be integrated into Imaginary/Symbolic legibility, but is only a blotch or distortion, or better, the horrible thing behind the veil of non-violent normalcy.

Symbolic violence is visible as the relation between the subjective violence and its context, in the sense that the very standards by which we can recognize something as violent, and hence stand apart from it in a non-violent reflection, already is a form of violence itself. It is not simply that normalcy is sustained by a violence hidden behind its veil - the very act of veiling, of covering-up, is the very source of what it must hide, or better, what it hides is the fact that nothing is hidden. There is no reason for the massive excesses of systemic violence to not be recognized as such, they are not covered up or denied, but ignored, disavowed. "I know very well there is a genocide occuring somewhere in Africa, that hundreds of millions live in the worst poverty in urban slums, that children are starving all over the world, but nevertheless...what does that have to do with me, my non-violent lifestyle, in my innocent little town?" It is the very symbolic medium that, in enabling us to not subjectively register some things as violent, or better, to not subjectively account for the systemic violence that sustains our contextual life-world, is the most pressing form of violence.

In the aforementioned post, I elaborated the link between Symbolic violence and mythic violence, or law-founding violence, as Benjamin conceives it. Zizek also draws this link, and from there elaborates his notion of revolutionary or emancipatory violence, which he links to Benjamin's divine violence. Yet here we find a difficulty. Zizek associates this divine violence with what he calls "Bartleby politics", or passive aggression. The point here is that any intervention we make to correct the violent excesses of capitalism is inevitably incorporated into the system, making it run more smoothly. Every form of resistance is assimilated, and so all we can do is 'nothing'; that is, everything we try to do to change things ends up reinforcing the way they are, but if we do nothing, if we refuse to intervene, it would be unbearable for the system, it would not know how to react. This kind of passive aggression is the answer he offers to his own question from the final chapter of his book on Deleuze: how is revolution possible against an order that constantly revolutionizes itself?

The difficulty with this position has been registered in the philo-blogosphere, with complaints and criticism being the standard reaction. Moreover, this position seems quite inconsistent, both with the ethic of discipline and self-sacrafice (Those who have nothing have only their discipline, to paraphrase Badiou) that he elaborates in Lost Causes, and with his claim that we find examples of divine violence in the revolutionary terror of the French Revolution, the October Revolution, and so on. Can these apparent inconsistencies be reconciled?

I propose that Bartleby politics is far from simply doing nothing, from refusing to engage with struggles and socio-political problems of any kind, despite Zizek's apparent claims to the contrary. Rather, it rests with the distinction between not doing anything, simply not acting, and doing nothing in the sense of enacting a negativity or void, an act which renders visible the nothingness at the heart of the constituted order. Zizek himself gives us evidence in this direction in his exegesis of Saramago's story Seeing, in which the government of an unnamed democratic city is deeply disturbed when an overwhelming majority of their citizens, during an election, submit blank ballots. For Zizek, this mass refusal is a true Act, in the Lacanian sense. But is this a case of not doing anything, of passively sitting back and refusing to engage, or is it rather an act of making nothing happen, of foregrounding the void upon which this world stands, like the coyote hovering over the precipice, before looking down?

Bartleby himself is characterized not by simply not acting, by doing nothing at all. No, Bartleby acts, but in the paradoxical manner of enacting a refusal to act, of acting out nothing, through his familiar refrain: "I'd prefer not to". He does not say no, nor does he simply do nothing in response. He does something, he registers the void of his motivation. This is thus quite similar to other political themes Zizek has mobilized in the past: Badiou's Event as registering the void of the empty set, Ranciere's democracy as the demand of the part-of-no-part, and even Marx's proletariat as articulating their lack of place within the capitalist order. It would be fruitful to explicate the differences between Zizek's turn to Bartleby and these earlier references, but I cannot do so now. I would like to emphasize, however, that there is an undeniable political force - violence, we might say - at work in the tearing asunder of the existing order, the introduction of a void into the space of politics. The practical question is hence, what does it mean to actively do nothing, to will nothingness into existence? And where do we go from there? How do we live together, how do we found a society or reorient this society, on the basis of nothingness?

If All Else Fails

In his recent book, Violence, Slavoj Zizek aims to distinguish between 'subjective' violence - violence as we ordinarily experience it, as a disturbing intrusion into the normal run of things, which only appears against a background of non-violent normality - and two forms of 'objective' violence. These latter forms are invisible, in that they sustain the very appearance of non-violence presupposed by the former.

On the one hand, there is 'symbolic violence', which is not merely that of injurious phrases or expressions, 'hate speech' or 'fighting words', slander or libel, et cetera, but rather, the violence of an imposition of a symbolic order or world of meaning. This involves the disintegration of the existing set of meanings, values, and associations, the traumatic uprooting of subjects from their contextual habituation, as well as the absorbtion of this trauma into the new symbolic order, which renders this violence invisible by depriving evaluation of any standard of measure, any value, that would allow it to register abuse, violation, or injury.

Here we should note that violence, in whatever form, refers to a force that exceeds a threshold of 'abuse', such that the victim has a normally defined range of proper 'use' or 'treatment'. Symbolic violence is invisible precisely insofar as the injury it induces is so severe that it redefines the normal limits of treatment, redistributes the thresholds of abuse, and in the extreme, erases the being that may be treated properly or improperly, replacing it with a new being.

We can see the close relation between 'symbolic violence' and the law-constituting 'mythic violence' of which Benjamin speaks. Whether the realm of meaning or the realm of law, in either case we are dealing with a violence that disposes with the previous order, and in doing so, establishes a new order in its place. This violence cannot coexist with the law thereby established, but must be ejected into an eternally past 'primitivity' or 'mythos'. Within the standards of this new order, it would necessarily appear as the greatest crime, but since this order had not yet come to be, and could only come to be on the condition of this crime, there is no standard of judgement.

Any previous standard of judgement by which we could condemn it is the very casualty of this violence, and this opens a kind of vaccuum between the two orders. Moreover, this vaccuum is not simply an anomic period between two constituted orders, but cleaves the plane of constituted order to/from the groundless, shadowy realm in which constituting power struggles to assert itself, in a time before any constituted time.

The second form of objective violence, according to Zizek, is 'systemic violence', which he defines as the enormously destructive side-effects, the 'collateral damage', of global captialism. Although this system is said to be the epitome of freedom, fairness, democracy, and so on, it nonetheless is sustained by a disavowed underside of orgiastic violence and destitution. Examples of this would be the enormous, and growing, populations living in slums, the emergence of ever-new ethnic civil wars and genocides, the massive death tolls in the Global South attributed to cured or treatable infections that nonetheless go untreated...

The point I would like to make is that there is another form of violence that is not accounted for in Zizek's typology. If the revolutionary aim would be to bring the two forms of objective violence to light, and hence undermine the reactionary form of subjective violence, then the violence of which I speak is the very supression or silencing of this revolutionary activity. This is not as obvious as it may sound. The point is not that there is a systematic effort to discredit or ignore pleas for 'recognition' of objective violence. Rather, as subjects, we are already unable to recognize objective violence; there is no 'enlightened' position one could occupy in this regard. The pained attempts to undermine the constituted order are defeated, failed, in that they must necessarily fail to take place at all.

Every order, of law and language, is born of and sustained by an unaccountable explosition of violence that breaks not only with the previous order, but with power in its 'constituted' form altogether. It is here that we can glimpse the constituting power, which is also revolutionary violence, in that it reveals itself as objective violence. Hence, the revolutionary aim is not simply to denounce such a violence, but to become this violence: both the symbolic violence that dissolves existing law, meaning, and value, and as the product of systemic violence, the collateral damage (the proletariat) of this order turned against the very order that created it. Yet, insofar as this revolutionary break of constituting power becomes a means to the establishment of another constituted order, the revolutionary violence degrades into mythic violence. (Here, we would do well to revisit Deleuze's discussion of the 'eternally New' vs. the 'eternally established' in Difference and Repetition.)

This other kind of violence of which I speak - we might call it 'catastrophic violence' - is hence that which binds constituting power to constituted power, and thereby enlists the revolutionary break in sevice of its own erasure. The radical conclusion here is that this violence is nothing other than revolutionary violence turned back upon itself, ejecting itself into an mythic eternal past. So many attempts to break with the existing order had to fail, that is, failed to happen, in that they ultimately became identical to the establishment and service of this order. The point here would be, not to see what might have happened otherwise, what could have been different, inventing ineffectual 'alternative histories', but rather, to see what had to not happen, what must have failed to occur; to see that which, though impotential, was nonetheless, paradoxically, actual, that which did fail to happen. To make the explosive break of constituting power not an exception to the rule that sustains the rule, but an example of the rule that deactivates the rule - to make visible the inclusion of constituting violence within the realm of law, and insodoing, to step outside that realm - these are imperatives yet to be deciphered.