Slavoj ZIZEK

The Spectre Is Still
Roaming Around!

An introduction to the 150th anniversary edition of The Communist Manifesto

(excerpts): [2].[of 4].[of 10].[Chapter 03]:

It is crucial to take into account how this "second modernization" transforms the very fundamental structure of social domination and thus compels us to reformulate the targets of progressive struggle, from the struggle against patriarchal sexism to economic struggle. Judith Butler recently developed a powerful argument against the abstract and politically regressive opposition between economic struggle and the "merely cultural" queer struggle for recognition 4: far from being "merely cultural", the social form of sexual reproduction inhabits the very core of the social relations of production, i.e. the nuclear heterosexual family is a key component and condition of the capitalist relations of ownership, exchange, etc. For that reason, the way queer political practice questions and undermines normative heterosexuality poses a potential threat to the very capitalist mode of production. However, is it not that, in the course of the ongoing transformation into the "postpolitical" tolerant multiculturalist regime, today's capitalist system is able to neutralize queer demands, i.e. to absorb them as a specific "way of life"? Is the history of capitalism not a long history of how the predominant ideologico-political framework was able to accommodate (and soften the subversive edge of) the movements and demands that seemed to threaten its very survival? For a long time, sexual libertarians thought that monogamic sexual repression is necessary for the survival of capitalism; now we know that capitalism can not only tolerate but even actively incite and exploit forms of "perverse" sexuality, not to mention promiscuous indulgence in sexual pleasures. What if the same destiny awaits queer demands? Far from posing a threat to the present regime of bio-power (to use the Foucauldian terms), the recent proliferation of different sexual practices and identities (from sadomasochism to bisexuality and drag performances), is precisely the form of sexuality that is generated by the present conditions of global capitalism, which clearly favour the mode of subjectivity characterized by the multiple shifting identifications.

The key point is thus that the figure of domination we are facing today is no longer that of the good old patriarchal Oedipal Master. The public image of Bill Gates is here worthy of some comment; what matters is not factual accuracy (is Gates really like that?), but the very fact that a certain figure started to function as an icon, filling some fantasmatic slot; if the features do not correspond to the "true" Gates, they are all the more indicative of the underlying fantasmatic structure. Gates is not only no longer the patriarchal Father-Master, he is also no longer the corporate Big Brother running a stiff bureaucratic empire, dwelling in the inaccessible top floor, guarded by a host of secretaries and deputees. He is rather a kind of little brother: his very ordinariness functions as the indication of its opposite, of some monstrous dimension so uncanny that it can no longer be rendered public in the guise of some symbolic title. What we encounter here in a most violent way is the deadlock of the Double who is simultaneously like ourselves and the harbinger of an uncanny, properly monstrous dimension. Indicative of this is the way title-pages, drawings or photomontages present Gates: as an ordinary guy, whose devious smile nonetheless points towards a wholly different underlying dimension of monstrosity beyond representation which threatens to shatter his common guy image. In the 60s and 70s, it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards with a girl clad in bikini or wearing a proper gown; however, when one tilted the postcard a little bit, looked at it from a slightly different perspective, the dress magically disappeared and one was able to see the naked body of the girl. Is it not something similar with the image of Bill Gates, whose benevolent features magically acquire a sinister and threatening dimension when viewed from a slightly different perspective? In this respect, it is also a crucial feature of Gates as icon that he is (perceived as) the ex-hacker who made it - not forgetting that the term "hacker" carries a subversive /marginal/anti-establishment connotation, i.e. those who wanted to disturb the smooth functioning of large bureaucratic corporations. At the fantasmatic level, the underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan who has taken over and dresses himself up as a respectable chairman In Bill Gates, the Little Brother, the average ugly guy, thus coincides with and contains the figure of Evil Genius who aims for total control of our lives. In old James Bond movies, this Evil Genius was still an eccentric figure, dressed up extravagantly or in a proto-Communist Maoist grey uniform - in the case of Gates, this ridiculous charade is no longer needed, the Evil Genius turns out to be the obverse of the common guy next door.

There is an old European fairy-tale motif of diligent dwarves (usually controlled by an evil magician) who emerge from their hiding-place during the night, while people are asleep, and accomplish their work (set the house in order, cook the meals), so that when people wake up in the morning, they find their work magically done. This motif is found from Richard Wagner's Rhinegold (the Nibelungs who work in their underground caves, driven by their cruel master, the dwarf Alberich) to Fritz Lang's Metropolis in which the enslaved industrial workers live and work deep beneath the earth's surface to produce wealth for the ruling capitalists. This dispositif of "underground" slaves dominated by a manipulative evil Master brings us back to the old duality of the two modes of the Master, the public symbolic Master and the secret Evil Magician who effectively pulls the strings and does his work during the night. Are the two Bills who now run the usa, Clinton and Gates, not the ultimate exemplification of this duality? When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he acts as an appendix to his symbolic title, i.e. it is the big Other, the symbolic institution, who acts through him. Suffice it to recall that a judge may be a miserable and corrupted person, but the moment he puts on his robe and other insignia, his words are the words of Law itself. On the other hand, the "invisible" Master (whose exemplary case is the anti-Semitic figure of the "Jew" who, invisible to the public eye, pulls the strings of social life) is a kind of uncanny double of public authority: he has to act in the shadows, irradiating a phantom-like, spectral omnipotence. This, then, is the conclusion to be drawn from the Bill Gates icon: how the disintegration of the patriarchal symbolic authority, of the Name of the Father, gives rise to a new figure of the Master who is simultaneously our common peer, our fellow-semblant, our imaginary double, and for this very reason fantasmatically endowed with another dimension of the Evil Genius. In Lacanian terms: the suspension of the Ego Ideal, of the feature of symbolic identification, i.e. the reduction of the Master to an imaginary ideal, necessarily gives rise to its monstrous obverse, to the superego figure of the omnipotent Evil Genius who controls our lives. In this figure, the imaginary (semblance) and the real (of paranoia) overlap, due to the suspension of the proper symbolic efficiency.

Chapter 4 >>