Acceptance: The Cause Regained
Three events in 1968, 1989, and in 2005 can be viewed as a progressive petering out of mostly failed revolution. In May 1968 students and trade unions demonstrated, occupied, and went on strike essentially bringing the French economy to a standstill. Wages were raised and a general election called. The result was a social revolution but not a political one. In 1989 the world experienced many prodemocracy revolutions in Poland, Hungary, E Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and China. Later and through to 1992 dictatorships fell in the USSR, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mongolia, S Yemen. Many of these countries also broke apart later. The West’s narrative that communism was defeated was not true: dictatorship was defeated by parliamentary democracy but what people wanted, socialism with a human face, was also removed making 1989 a political revolution that undid the social revolution of 1968. In 2005, in France rampaging riots in the suburbs of Paris gave us the start of a programless violent protest a lashing out that spread to and culminated in the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. “One can say that 1968, 1989 and 2005 form a kind of Hegelian triad: the revolt of May ’68 failed politically (capitalism returned triumphant) but, in a way, won socially (by thoroughly overhauling the substance of social mores through sexual liberation, new individual freedoms, stronger positions for women, post-patriarchal forms of authority, and so on); the anti-Communist revolt in 1989 won politically (Communism did indeed disintegrate), but lost socially (the new post-Communist society with its combination of wild capitalism and nationalism is not what the dissidents were fighting for)….The third moment, then, is the events of 2005, the burning of cars in Paris suburbs, a kind of moment of truth of the entire movement: the revolt of ’68 was quickly appropriated by the ruling ideology, so that its ultimate after-effect was the overturning, not of capitalism, but of the enemy of the capitalist Free World: Really-Existing Socialism. In 2005, we got what remains of ’68 once we subtract ’89 from it, the realization of its actual political potential—pure irrational revolt without any program.”
The reason that there is no program to the revolt is because a program has proven to be beyond the imagination of nearly everyone because capitalism “is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: there is no global ‘capitalist world view,’ no ‘capitalist civilization’ proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East….the task is no longer just to replace the old one with a new one, but …what? The first indications are given in art.”
Franz Kafka’s last story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” is Žižek’s first “look for traces of the new communist collective in already existing social or even artistic movements.” The story is a fairytale about a mouse singer, Josephine, who “pipes” rather than sings to assemble the mice in “Kafka’s socio-political utopia, his vision of a radically egalitarian communist society”. “[T]he mouse community is not a hierarchic community with a Master, but rather a radically egalitarian ‘communist’ community: Josephine is not venerated as a charismatic Mistress of Genius, her public is fully aware that she is just one of them. So the logic is not even that of the Leader who, with her exceptional position, establishes and guarantees the equality of her subjects…—Josephine herself has to dissolve her special position into this equality…. Josephine is treated as a celebrity, but not fetishized—her admirers are well aware that there is nothing special about her, that she is just one of them….she thinks people admire her because she is an artist, but in reality she is an artist only because people treat her as such….Josephine’s belief in herself is perceived by the people as harmless and rather ridiculous narcissism which should be gently, but ironically, tolerated and sustained. This is how artists should be treated in a communist society—they should be praised and flattered, but they should not be given any material privileges like exemption from work or special food rations.”
“[A]nother key feature of communist culture: the properly communist form of collective intimacy, epitomized by Eric Satie’s piano pieces.” Satie, during the early 1920s, was a member of the French Communist Party and served on its Central Committee. Žižek claims four musical innovations from Satie’s works that make his music communist. First, “[I]n order to get the most elementary idea of communism, we need to forget all about Romantic explosions of passion and imagine instead the clarity of a minimalist order sustained by a gentle form of freely imposed discipline…in a very Satiean mood: soft, gentle, and intimate, with no pomposity….Satie used the term ‘furniture music…’ by way of implying that some of his pieces should function as mood-setting background music….what Satie was aiming at was… a music which subverts the gap separating the figure from the background. When one truly listens to Satie, one ‘hears the background.’ This is egalitarian communism in music: a music which shifts the listener’s attention from the great Theme to its inaudible background, in the same way that communist theory and politics refocus our attention away from the heroic individuals to the immense work and suffering of the invisible ordinary people.” A second innovation was identified by John Cage, whom Žižek quotes: “‘With Beethoven the parts of a composition were defined by means of harmony. With Satie and Webern they were defined by means of time lengths’” John Cage went on to say that Beethoven was wrong to the “lamentable” and “deadening [of] the art of music.’” A third innovation in Satie’s work was identified by Constant Lambert. Žižek quoting him writes: “By [Sate’s] abstention from the usual forms of development and by his unusual employment of what might be called interrupted and overlapping recapitulations, which causes the pieces to fold in on itself…he completely abolishes the element of rhetorical argument and even succeeds in abolishing as far as possible our time sense.’” And finally the fourth innovation: “‘Satie’s habit of writing his pieces in groups of three was not just a mannerism. It took place in his art of dramatic development, and was part of his peculiarly sculpturesque views of music. When we pass from the first to the second Gymnopédie…we do not feel that we are passing from one object to another. It is as though we were moving slowly around a piece of sculpture and examining it from a different point of view…It does not matter which way you walk around a statue and it does not matter in which order you play the three Gymnopédie.’”
So in concluding the book Žižek asks what should we do given that we really only have three options: 1) do nothing, 2) prepare for a radically violent act or revolution, or 3) “engage in local pragmatic interventions”. The simple answer is all three because we never know what a simple act can do. In the first case: “Power … is not an objective state of things which persists even if we ignore it, it is something that persists only with the participation of its subjects, only if actively assisted by them….We do not fear and obey power because it is in itself so powerful; on the contrary, power appears powerful because we treat it as such.” Therefore the simple withholding of support could be revolutionary. In the second case, Žižek hints that only radical violence can save us. Therefore we need to be ready. And in the third case he gives examples of simple decisions whose unintended consequences lead to world changing events. For example when Gorbachev spoke of perestroika and glasnost, he did not mean the breakup of the Soviet Union.