A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Slavoj Žižek
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forms, and while Bolsheviks certainly loved them, wanted to help and redeem them, they followed the model of what Lacan called “university discourse”: prochie were their objet petit a, and they put all their effort into enlightening them, into changing them in modern subjects. The conflict that lies at the heart of Platonov’s work is thus not a conflict between enemies but a kind of lovers’ quarrel: Bolsheviks wanted to help the homeless others, to civilize them, and the others (depicted by Platonov) sincerely endorsed the communist ideals and fought for them, but everything went wrong: “Others in Platonov’s novels are always manipulated by ‘more conscious’ comrades, party leaders and intellectuals, but always unsuccessfully – it is almost impossible to integrate others into the collective body of the workers and to establish a normalized sociality based on the collectivization of labor and industrial production.”
However, Platonov subtly noted that this gap is not just the gap between self-conscious revolutionary force and the inertia of the crowds: while Bolsheviks focused on the operational aspect of social transformation, the core of the communist utopia was directly present in the dreams of Others who expected something radically new to arise. Communism was nowhere closer than in the immobility of the Others, in their resistance to get caught in concrete operative measures: “the special status of the poor and declassed elements, which unlike the organized workers, the party representatives and the intellectuals, are ready to stay where they are in order to do something radically new. In a way theirs is a life that remains in a state of waiting, and the question is what kind of politics will be established here.” Platonov’s famous inflections of language also located in this context of the tension between official Party language and the “primitive” speech of the others:
Platonov reflected the historical development of a new Soviet language made of revolutionary slogans, the vocabulary of Marxian political economy, the jargon of the Bolsheviks and party bureaucrats and its absorption by the illiterate peasants and workers. Historical research shows that for most of the post-revolutionary population, especially in the provinces, the language of the party was foreign and unintelligible, so that “they themselves perforce began to absorb the new vocabulary … often garbled its unfamiliar, bookish terms or reconfigured them as something more comprehensible, however absurd.” Thus, “deistvyushchaya armia” – “acting army” – became “devstvyushchaya armia” – “virginal army” – because “acting” and “virginity” sound identical in Russian; “militsioner” (“militiaman”) became “litsimer” (“hypocrite”).
Is this unique bastard mixture, with all its “senseless” mobilization of sound resemblances that can engender sparks of unexpected truth (in an oppressive regime, policemen are hypocrites; revolutionaries are supposed to act virginally, in a kind of innocence, freed of all egotist motives), not an exemplary case of what Lacan called lalangue, language traversed by all social and sexual antagonisms which distort it beyond its linguistic structure? This lalangue emerges through Platonov’s use of two (almost) symmetrically opposed devices:
[First,] he interprets an abstract ideological definition through the use of the common man, the person from the people, and secondly, he makes an inverse operation, when he overloads the simplest and clearest everyday words and expressions … with a set of ideological associations, to such an extent that these words become “so terribly improbable and confusing that, finally, they lose their initial meaning.”
What is the political implication of this loss of meaning? Although interpenetrating, the two levels – official Bolshevik speech and the everyday speech of the Others – remain forever antagonistic: the more the revolutionary activity tried to combine them, the more their antagonism becomes palpable. This failure is not empirical and contingent; the two levels simply belong to radically heterogeneous spaces. For this reason, one should also avoid the trap of celebrating the “undercurrent” of Soviet Marxism, the other line suppressed by official Soviet Marxism-Leninism, the line that rejected the controlling role “from above” of the Party and counted on the workers’ direct self-organization “from below” (as was the case with Bogdanov), indicating a hope for a different, less oppressive, development of the Soviet Union, in contrast to Lenin’s approach, which laid the foundations for Stalinism. True, this other line was a kind of “symptom” of official Leninist Marxism; it registered what was “repressed” from official Soviet ideology, but precisely as such it remained parasitical on official Marxism – i.e., it didn’t stand on its own. In short, the trap to be avoided here is to elevate the “poor life” of the Others into some kind of authentic communal life out of which an alternative to our ill-fated capitalist modernity can emerge. There is nothing “authentic” in the poor life of the Others; its function is purely negative, it registers (and even gives body to) the failure of social projects, including the communist one.
And, sadly, the same failure, which is necessary for structural reasons, also characterizes a homologous project of fusion of today’s working class and today’s “less-than-proletarians” (refugees, immigrants) – i.e., the idea that the “nomadic proletarian” is the potential source of revolutionary change. Here also, one has to fully assume Platonov’s lesson: the tension is not only between the local conservative racist lower classes and the immigrants; the difference in the entire “way of life” is so strong that one cannot count on an easy solidarity of all the exploited. Perhaps the antagonism between proletarians and less-than-proletarian “others” is an antagonism that is in some sense even more unsurpassable than the class antagonism within the same ethnic community. Precisely at this point when the “subsumption” (of Others into “our” proletarians) seems the most obvious, and the universality of all oppressed seems at hand, it slips out of our grasp. In other words, the “less-than-proletarian” Others cannot be subsumed, integrated, not because they are too different, too heterogeneous with regard to our life world, but because they are absolutely inherent in it, the result of its own tensions.
This, of course, in no way implies that the Marxian proletarian position is only possible in the developed West. During a visit to India, I met representatives of the movement of the lowest part of the lowest cast (the “untouchables”), the dry-toilets cleaners, and they gave me a wonderfully concise answer to what they want to achieve: “We don’t want to be what we are.” So there is no identity politics, no search for recognition and respect for the unique job they are doing, just the demand for social change that will render their identity superfluous and impossible.
One is thus tempted to propose a radical reformulation here: in today’s global capitalism the problematic elements are not the nomadic “less-than-nothings” who resist being subsumed into the proletarian “nothing” as the eventual site of a possible radical social change; the problematic elements are, more and more, (local) proletarians themselves who, when confronted with the nomadic “less-than-nothings,” all of a sudden realize that their “nothing” (the zero-level, the “place of no-place” in the existing social order) is nonetheless a determinate nothing, a position within the existing social order with all the privileges (education, healthcare, etc.) that this implies. No wonder, then, that when “local” proletarians encounter the nomadic “less-than-nothings,” their reaction is the rediscovery of their own cultural identity. To put it in speculative Hegelian terms, the “local” proletarians discover that their “nothing” is nonetheless sustained by a series of particular privileges, and this discovery, of course, makes them much less prone to engage in radical emancipatory acts – they discover that they have much more to lose than their chains.
There is a well-known joke about Jews gathered in a synagogue to publicly declare their failures. First, a mighty rabbi says: “Forgive me, god, I am nothing, not worthy of your attention!” After him, a rich merchant says: “Forgive me, god, I am a worthless nothing!” Then a poor ordinary Jew steps forward and says: “Forgive me, god, I am also nothing.” The rich merchant whispers to the rabbi: “Who does he think he is, this miserable guy, that he can also say he is nothing?” There is a deep insight in this joke: to “become nothing” requires the supreme effort of negativity, of tearing oneself away from immersion in a cobweb of particular determinations. Such a Sartrean elevation of the subject into a void, a nothingness, is not a true Lacanian (or Hegelian) position: Lacan