Reclaiming "a Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, and to the French and October revolutions"

Capitalism and the assault on reason

By Slavoj Zizek

ABC Religion and Ethics | 8 Nov 2010

In May 2010, large demonstrations exploded in Greece after the government announced the austerity measures that had to be adopted in order to meet the conditions of the European Union for the bailout money to avoid the state's financial collapse. One often hears that the true message of the Greek crisis - and that of the more recent protests in France - is that not only the Euro, but the entire project of the European Union itself is dead.

But before endorsing this general statement, one should ask, "Europe is dead, OK - but which Europe?" The only answer is the post-political Europe of accommodation to the world market, the Europe which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels-shaped technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe, in other words, which presents itself as standing for cold European reason over against Greek passion and corruption - for mathematics against pathos.

But, as utopian as this may seem, the possibility remains open for another Europe, a re-politicized Europe, a Europe founded on a shared emancipatory project, a Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, and to the French and October revolutions.

This is why one should resist the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis, especially in Europe, with a retreat to protectionism, localism and the supposed safety of sovereign nation-states, which themselves are easy prey for freely-floating international capital.

More than ever, the reply to every such financial crisis should be that we need to be even more internationalist and universalist than the illusory universality of global capital. Indeed, the idea of resisting global capital by retreating to the protection of particular ethnic identities is more suicidal than ever.

Let me suggest that the first front for the struggle against the destructiveness of global capital should be those threats to trans-national open space, such as the ongoing reforms of higher education through the Bologna Process, which represents a massive and concerted attack on what Immanuel Kant called the "public use of reason."

The underlying idea of these spurious reforms is the urge to subordinate higher education to the needs of society, to make it useful for the solution of concrete problems we are facing, to produce expert opinions meant to answer problems posed by social agents.

What disappears here is the true task of thinking: not only to offer solutions to problems posed by "society" (which is defined by the conjunction of state and capital), but to reflect on the very form of these "problems" in the first place, to re-formulate them, to discern the problem in the very way we perceive such problems.

The reduction of higher education to the task of producing socially-useful expert knowledge is the paradigmatic form of the "private use of reason" in today's global capitalism.

It is crucial to link the ongoing push towards streamlining higher education - not only in the guise of overt privatization and links with business, but also in the more general sense of orienting the education towards its so-called "social use," the production of expert knowledge which will help to solve practical problems - to the process of enclosing the commons of intellectual products, the privatizing of the general intellect.

If in the Middle Ages, the key state apparatus through which people are formed, are made subjects of the state, was the Church (religion as institution), then in capitalist modernity the Church has been replaced by twin hegemony of legal ideology and education (in the form of the state school system).

So the self-identities of subjects are formed as patriotic free citizens, subjects of the legal order, while individuals are formed into legal subjects through compulsory universal education. In this way, the gap is maintained between bourgeois and citizen, between the egotistical, utilitarian individual concerned with his private interests, and the citizen dedicated to the more general well-being of the state.

To revert for a moment to Marxist jargon, insofar as ideology is limited to the public or universal sphere of citizenship, while the private sphere of egotistical self-interests is considered 'pre-ideological', the very gap between ideology and non-ideology itself has been transposed into the dominant ideology.

Consequently, what has happened in the latest stage of post-1968 "postmodern" capitalism is that economy itself (the logic of market and competition) has been elevated to the rank of the hegemonic ideology.

So, for instance, in education, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the classical bourgeois school apparatus: the school system is becoming less and less the compulsory network elevated above the market and organized directly by state, the bearer of enlightened values (of liberty, equality and solidarity). At the behest of the sacred formula of "lower costs, higher efficiency," it is progressively being penetrated by various forms of public-private partnership.

In the organization and legitimization of power, the electoral system is increasingly understood on the model of market competition. Elections are themselves like a supermarket where the voters "buy" the option that offers to do the most efficient the job of maintaining social order, prosecuting crime, and so on. Guided by the same formula of "lower costs, higher efficiency," even some functions which should be the exclusive domain of state power (such as the running of prisons) can be privatized - and armies need no longer be based on universal conscription, but can be composed of hired mercenaries.

Even the process of forming emotional relationships is more and more organized along the lines of a market-relationship. Alain Badiou has observed the parallel between today's search for a sexual (or marital) partner through appropriate dating agencies and the ancient procedure of marriages prearranged by parents.

In both cases, the proper risk of "falling in love" is suspended - there is no contingent "fall" proper - as the risk of the real called "love encounter" is minimized by preceding arrangements which take into account all material and psychological interests of the concerned parties.

Robert Epstein brought this idea to its logical conclusion, providing its missing counterpart: once you choose your appropriate partner, how do you arrange it so that you will both love each other? Based on the study of arranged marriages, Epstein developed "procedures of affection-building" - one can "build love deliberately and choose whom to do it with."

Such a procedure relies on self-commodification - on internet dating or in marriage agencies, each prospective partner presents itself as a commodity, listing his qualities and photos.

In her book Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Eva Illouz perceptively explains the usual disappointment when internet partners decide to meet in reality. The reason is not that we idealize ourselves in our self-presentation, but that this self-representation necessarily limits the enumeration of abstract features (your age, hobbies, and so on). What is missing is what Freud called der einzige Zug, the "unary feature," that je ne sais quoi which instantly makes me like or dislike the other.

What I would argue is that this state of affairs demonstrates why we need an alternative to the current system of global capitalism, and that communism remains the best name for that alternative. For communism begins with the "public use of reason," with thinking, with the egalitarian universality of thought.

When St Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, "there are Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free, no male nor female," he was thereby claiming that ethnic roots, national identity, gender and so on are not a category of truth.

Or, to put it in precise Kantian terms, when we retreat to the comforts of ethnicity, localism, or even the indulgences of commodity capitalism, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions.

We behave, in other words, as "immature" individuals, not as free human beings who occupy the dimension of the universality of reason.

Slavoj Zizek is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and one of the world's most influential public intellectuals. His most recent books are Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010), and, co-edited with Costas Douzinas, The Idea of Communism (Verso, 2010).