Demanding the Impossible (6 page)

SŽ:
There are obvious things: we all know that North Korea is a total
fiasco
– I just don’t like Western scholars uttering platitudes about them. Some leftists like to say that South Korea is not totally innocent either. Yes, that is right, but we already know all this: before the Korean War in 1948, the South was also being provocative.

I read an interesting thing in the book of a Western historian that for many years in the 1950s, until even the mid-’60s, the standard of living of the average person was higher in North Korea. Because they did have success until the mid-’60s, then it gradually broke down. This is, I think, the
tragedy
of communism – that it reached a certain level of primitive industrialization, but when the moment (postmodernism, digital technology, or whatever we like to call it) that we are now passing arrived, it didn’t work anymore. The irony is that traditional Marxist dogma – the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production – is absolutely the best way to explain
the fall of communism
. You can also see this very nicely in the book on the communist economy of East Germany.

I know a guy who was a dissident and who worked for one of the top Western journals, whose problem was how to adapt to the digital revolution. He told me that their approach was totally wrong. They didn’t see the social dimension of the digital revolution: the local interaction. But their idea was the traditional one. They thought they would be able to make centralized planning more efficient with perfect mega computers. You know, even if bureaucrats have a good plan, when it cannot react fast enough, then it doesn’t function. It simply didn’t work. This is the irony of the failure, literally, of
totalitarian communism
in the twentieth-century sense.

East Germany was also doing relatively well in the 1950s and the early ’60s. Mostly, they were working in a ruined country where reconstruction had to happen fast. In the same way, after 1953, North Korea reconstructed, but in a much more efficient totalitarian way. But then after a certain point, it simply doesn’t work any more.

What I’d like to do about North Korea is work out how to interpret this in a way that is
not
racist, because a typical European answer would have been: “Ha ha, you Koreans are primitive. Here is my answer.” No, I don’t think so. I think that this has to do with the specificity of the communist way of doing things, which can make us arrive implicitly at the true dimension. And this kind of religious dimension has already been seen with Mao and Stalin.

Also, late communist regimes have a tendency to become monarchic. It even happened in Europe, with Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. Far from being a result of the radical break occurring now in Eastern Europe, the obsessive adherence to the national Cause is precisely what remains the same throughout this process. And this attachment was all the more exclusive the more the power structure was “totalitarian.” So, why this unexpected disappointment? Why does authoritarian nationalism overshadow democratic pluralism? The leftist thesis was that ethnic tensions were instigated and manipulated by the ruling party bureaucracy as a means of legitimizing the party’s hold on power. In Romania, for example, the nationalist obsession, the dream of Great Romania, the forceful assimilation of Hungarian and other minorities, created a constant tension which legitimized Ceaus¸escu’s hold on power

Nonetheless, whatever you say about classical communist regimes, at one point they were honest and good. They never allowed direct family succession. For example, what about Stalin’s children? Did they have any power? No. This was an absolute prohibition. Succession should not be a family matter. Even Mao: of course they took care of their children, but were they privileged? They sent their children to study abroad and gave them the right to travel, but these were just small corruptions. There was never a question of Mao’s son becoming his successor.

This tendency, I claim, has something to do with how communism reacted to its decay. It happened in Europe. And in a non-communist way, it also happened in all those crazy countries like Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. You know who became the father of the nation? Heydar Aliyev, who was the chief of the KGB in the Brezhnev years, a total communist apparatchik. He reinvented himself as the father of the nation [Azerbaijan]. He died about a couple of years ago, and now his son is the president, which is total madness. Again, I really don’t want to go into this false racist explanation.

The other thing that interests me is the fact that, even with all its problems, South Korea now has a relatively stable democracy and has already become a successful developed country. South Korea is nothing special, I mean, in a good sense. The point is what critical intellectuals like you can make out of this predicament in which we find ourselves.

Again, here, we should not follow the path of Japan or China. Their models are pretty much the same: to combine traditional wisdom with modernity. I think we need more. The soft fascist solution, which for me is the Chinese solution, simply will not work. My hope is that we will find a new model, not just to retain capitalism and have control through some harmonious corporate means, but to confront the deadlock of modernity in a more intelligent way.

Under the so-called Bologna Process, the link between the humanities and theoretical thinking has been questioned, and the colonization of the logic of the market and of capitalist values over the educational field is now crucial. How do you see your educational commitment?

SŽ:
This may surprise you: I don’t have students. I work all the time as a researcher. This is why I’m eternally grateful to communist oppression. When I finished my studies in the early 1970s, it was during the final moments of hardline communism. So they didn’t allow me to teach. I was unemployed for five years, then I got a job at a small research institute. I’m still there. Because it is perfect. I don’t have any obligations. Well, I teach here and there a little bit, but I hate students more and more. I like universities
without
students, seriously.

Well, this is – as I would put it – a difficult question. Because it’s too easy to say, “Don’t think about your career and do whatever you want to do.” But, my God, the majority of people have to survive. I think what we should offer them is a way to have some kind of career. Still, the problem for me is how to combine a career with a purpose in life. I mean, you can be a researcher or scientist or whatever, but how can you do something
good
there?

What I want to tell you is that I don’t want a society where we are divided into a majority, who are just stupid workers looking for career, and then a minority, who play the morally elevated role. I don’t know how it is in your country, but here in Slovenia, Germany, France, or England, what is happening now with education – the so-called
Bologna reform of higher education
– is just horrible.

What they really want is simply the “
private use of reason
,” as I call it, following Kant, so that universities basically produce experts who will solve problems – problems, defined by society, of state and corporate business. But, for me, this is not
thinking
. What is “true” thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: “Is this really a problem?” “Is this the right way to formulate the problem?” “How did we arrive at this?” This is the ability we need in thinking.

Let’s look at the problem with the ideas of those in power. You have, for example, a car-burning incident in the suburbs of Paris. So you call up a psychologist and a sociologist who will tell you, according to their analysis, what to do and how to contain it. No! Thinking is much more than that. It is about asking
fundamental
questions. And this is disappearing. They really want to make universities into schools for experts. It’s actually already happening – they’ve even said it openly – and I’m horrified.

A couple of months ago, the [then] Minister of State for Universities and Science in the UK, David Willetts, openly said that, from then on, “the arts, humanities and social sciences” taught in universities should have nothing to do with the state, meaning that it should be a matter between the university and the individual – the citizen – as an agent of the market. It is a total commercialization of higher education. I think this is pretty much a catastrophe. Because just as in more confused times, like today, we don’t just need experts. We also need people who will think more radically to arrive at the real root of problems.

So the first thing to fight for, I think, is simply to make people, the experts in certain domains, be aware of not just accepting that there are problems, but of thinking more deeply. It is an attempt to make them
see
more. I think it can be done. I believe this may be the main task for today: to prevent the narrow production of experts. This tendency, as I see it, is just horrible. We need, more than ever, those who, in a general way of thinking, see the problems from a global perspective and even from a philosophical perspective.

Let’s look at another example from ecology. When the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico unfortunately happened in the summer of 2010, people quickly needed experts to deal with the animals and other sea creatures. No, that’s not what we need. Indeed, what should be raised here is a much more fundamental question about such problems, problems for all of us which potentially shatter our commons: “What are the risks if we have to keep the oil drill?” “What kind of industry can replace it?”

Therefore, we should not have only these two extremes: on the one hand, people who are conscious of these issues and, on the other, the majority who just follow their careers and are indifferent to these socio-ecological problems. We should build
bridges between the two
. It was a most beautiful moment, for me, when those really important scientists, from Einstein to Oppenheimer, started to raise more general, fundamental questions about the atomic bomb and other such political issues. So, again, I think it is more important than ever that people become aware that much more is at stake, especially with biogenetics and other scientific development, than just technological problems.

The problem being raised when one is to respond to “the private use of reason” is the fact that this cannot be achieved. We all are aware that there should be certain socio-political responses to this, but still the question of “who?” remains. Who is the subject/agent of revolution? Who is going to make the new world possible?

SŽ:
I don’t think there is only one agent. There will
not
be a new working class, or whatever. I think they are the people who find themselves in what I call a
proletarian position
: they are sometimes poor, sometimes well-off. What I would like to say about this notion of the proletarian position is that when you are reduced to some kind of zero level, then
another
subject emerges who is no longer the same
self
. I’d like to refer to the book
The New Wounded (Les nouveaux blessés)
, written by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, who claimed that even now we have a new form of psychic illness. If the twentieth century was defined by hysterical neurosis, now, increasingly, we have a “post-traumatic personality.” This is the new order, which means we were submitted to some kind of trauma. It can be rape, public disorder, illness, or whatever. Well, we will survive, but as the living dead, deprived of all our social existence and substance.

When Malabou develops her notion of “destructive plasticity,” of the subject who continues to live after its psychic death, she touches the key point: the reflexive reversal of the destruction of form into the form acquired by destruction itself. Quite simply, you are so shocked that, even if you are still alive, yourself, your ego is destroyed. Overdoing it a bit, perhaps, one is tempted to say that the subject deprived of its libidinal substance is the “libidinal proletariat.” This is a position of desperation.

In the same way, in ecological terms, we are becoming proletarians. By this I mean that we are deprived of our natural basis. In biogenetics, if it’s possible to manipulate even our genetic base, the same things happen.

So my point is that we have to look for
possible proletarian positions
. By proletarian positions, I mean in the sense that we are reduced to the zero level and all objective conditions of our work are taken away from us. This is why I agree with those who claim that the first
Matrix
movie is, in a way, a proletarian film. There is a wonderful scene, which the director didn’t exploit further in the movie, where, if you remember, they lie down as if they are dead and the energy is sucked from them. Aren’t we, again, reduced to some kind of proletarian position?

Of course, some people are
excluded
– and this is crucial for me. I think what is sad about what we are witnessing now is that Marx was too optimistic. For Marx, capitalist exploitation has to take place in conditions of legal freedom and equality. That is to say, we all have the same rights formally and legally and we are free, but then, in effect, if you don’t have money, you have to sell yourself and you are
exploited
. But now, I claim that worldwide capitalism can no longer sustain or tolerate this
global equality
. It’s just too much. I think that, more and more, illegal immigrants or refugees are
in
this problem of what Giorgio Agamben called “
Homo Sacer
.” They are in or out, and reduced to a bare existence outside the polis. We are all potentially
homo sacer
, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to take preventative measures. This, I think, will be another proletarian position in our time.

And again, look at the proletarian position on the internet. It’s clear who will control the internet. What is really worrying, with so-called cloud computing, is a massive
reprivatization
of global spaces. Instead of having big computers with all the data, we will just have our individual machines – PCs, iPhones, etc. – to be connected with limited access; all effective power will be out there. Of course, in a way this is nice. We will have instant access to all the movies, etc. Everything thus becomes accessible, but only when mediated through a company that owns it all: software and hardware, content and computers. The question is, what is this
everything
? Everything will be censored. So cloud computing offers individual users an unprecedented wealth of choice – but isn’t this freedom of choice sustained by the initial choice of a provider, in respect to which we have less and less freedom?