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some pertinent clips from the article:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite
We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the
early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale
ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we
had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace
that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen
in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent
action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the
riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the
riots presented.
society which celebrates choice but in which the only available
alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out.
Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a
realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the
shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom
of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and
(self-)destructive violence?
fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate
itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West
to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist
civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth
without meaning.
desperate social situation pushing young people towards violent
outbursts
unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised,
bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic
instincts’. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of
‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives
could be desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist
control – viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what
we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the
‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.
Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor, racially
mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only
unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication
is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable
that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though,
is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to
make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s
objective conditions.
one should reject the demand to take sides. The truth is that the
conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have
succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too
frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively
directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in
rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between
different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between
society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing,
to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose
stakes are the highest.
they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when
unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they
also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response
to consumerist ideology:
. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not
the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly
self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of
force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.
riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that
the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life:
terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and
counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the
forces it tries to combat.
in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are
carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.
Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of
revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its
gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact
between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were
marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground)
are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material
privileges and in
