Measure, or Hegel’s theory of destruction

There is a justly famous subsection in Hegel’s Logic where he describes “the sudden conversion into a change of quality of a change which was apparently merely quantitative” (p. 335). This subsection, as far as I know, contains the clearest expression in his writings of the famous dialectical leap (or Umschlag) from quantity into quality. Below I'd like to offer a few reflections on the relevance of this idea for some present-day discussions, e.g. climate change and the idea of emergence.

The relevant passages occur in the context of Hegel's discussion of what he calls “measure”. According to Hegel, everything that exists is determined by the magnitudes, or quantities, of the things that constitute it. When a particular magnitude becomes defining for the entity in question, it is called measure. For example: a dwarf that grows above a certain size is no longer a dwarf. A piece of sandy land needs to exceed a certain size before we call it a desert. Hot days need to continue with a certain regularity before we can speak of climate change, and so on. The size or magnitude (a quantity) is thus part of what defines the thing (a quality). As Hegel writes, the specific quantity (or quantum) “is now the determination of the thing, which is destroyed if it is increased or diminished beyond this quantum” (p. 333f). 

According to Hegel, measure is a paradoxical. This is because we usually can’t find anything in the concept of a thing that pinpoints the exact quantitative limit where a qualitative change must occur. This makes us think that we can vary the quantity without affecting the quality. A forest needs to have a certain size in order to be a forest, but it will surely remain a forest even if we cut down one tree. A heap remains a heap even if we remove a grain of sand from it, and a hair pulled from a person’s head doesn’t make the person bald. Yet, obviously, if we keep cutting, removing and pulling we will eventually arrive at a point where the forest and heap will disappear and the person will be bald. What Hegel describes here is the so-called sorites paradox (from the Greek word for heap).    

Hegel concludes that:

... the destruction of anything which has a measure takes place through the alteration of its quantum. On the one hand, this destruction appears as unexpected, in so far as the quantum can be changed without altering the measure and the quality of the thing; but on the other hand, it is made into something quite easy to understand through the idea of gradualness. (p. 334f)

This passage is remarkable for two reasons. The first is the range of Hegel’s claim. He claims that anything can be destroyed through quantitative alterations (this is the only possible interpretation since “everything that exists has a measure”, p. 333). Hegel is clearly aware of the gravity this lends his statement. He goes out of his way to argue that the examples he has given about heaps and baldness “are not a pointless or pedantic joke” (p. 336). Instead, they point to a paradoxical quality that adheres to everything that exists. There’s a brittleness to things which we cannot grasp if we focus only on their quality, on the way we understand them through concepts. The destruction of the State or of great fortunes are two further examples:

Quantum... is the aspect of an existence which leaves it open to unsuspected attack and destruction. It is the cunning of the Notion to seize on this aspect of a reality where its quality does not seem to come into play and such is its cunning that the aggrandizement of a State or of a fortune, etc., which leads finally to disaster for the State or for the owner, even appear at first to be their good fortune. (p.336)

This is a magnificent passage. That it comes like a bolt out of the blue in the midst of Hegel’s long, notoriously abstruse and seemingly apolitical discussions about quantity and quality only makes it more impressive. No wonder his idea of the transformation from quantity to quality later came to inspire hosts of revolutionaries!

Secondly, Hegel points to an interesting curiosity. The destruction is always unexpected, he claims, and this despite the fact that it is quite easy to understand what causes it. Strangely, it’s not because of ignorance that we are surprised by the destruction of a State or a fortune. On the contrary, we are surprised because the concepts we use tell us that small quantitative changes in things won’t affect their quality. We know that removing one grain of sand from a heap won’t make the heap disappear, because that’s part of the concept of a heap. That’s why politicians and capitalists, and others too, are justified in thinking that a little more aggrandizement won’t hurt.

Who can avoid thinking here of global warming? We all know that releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is bound to cause global catastrophe, yet we go on thinking that “a little more won’t hurt”. And we are quite correct in thinking so. Surely, it can’t possibly make any difference to the global climate whether I choose to walk to my job today or to take the car. Similarly, it doesn't make any sense to claim that any particular molecule of CO2 is decisive in causing global warming. It’s precisely because we are so irrefutably correct that we’re in for a surprise when we realize that the catastrophe is here. To put it differently, we can’t stand with a measurement instrument in hand and say: now the catastrophe begins. What happens is rather that, when the dialectical Umschlag finally occurs, we realize that the catastrophe has been going on all the time, and that we were living in its midst even when we still thought that things were fine. The Umschlag brings with it a shift of perspective from which it becomes possible to project the origins of the catastrophic process far back into the distant past. To awaken to the catastrophe of global warming is thus to realize not only that the catastrophe is here, but that it has been unfolding ever since the industrial revolution first brought steam engines into the world. It's not just that quantitative changes give rise to qualitative ones; there is also an opposite process, through which the qualitative shift produces a certain version of the past which tells us which quantitative processes should be deemed relevant and important. That's why the awareness of catastrophe often seems to include the realization that the catastrophe isn’t new. The catastrophe started already when we cut the first tree, removed the first grain of sand, and plucked the first hair.

The economy is perhaps an even better example of how changes both surprise us and don’t surprise us. I’m not thinking here of the constantly recurring speculation bubbles, which certainly surprise us so often that they no longer surprise us, so much as of the ideology of endless exponential growth. Mainstream economics has so far failed to make sense of such growth, which clearly leads to absurd consequences if extrapolated far enough into the future. What seems to be missing in the models used in economic theory is that they fail to acknowledge that their concepts are defined by a “measure” which sets limits to the magnitudes that they can comprehend. If we think that two per cent annual growth every year is good, but that endless exponential growth is an absurdity, then we clearly have a problem in how to relate quantity to quality. To be more precise: our entire economy is built around the sorites paradox.

At this point, I think it’s not far-fetched to link Hegel’s ideas to present-day discussions about emergence. Emergence is what occurs when it is possible to discover a quality in the whole that doesn’t exist in the parts. In many well-known examples used to illustrate emergence in the field of complexity theory, the emergent quality hinges on quantitative change. Crowd behaviour, for instance, arises from a quantitative increase in the number of people. Mobilization processes in social movements, the diffusion and establishment of new technologies, or the way size impacts organizations are other examples. 

Yet when we look closer at the idea of emergence we discover an ambiguity related to how it brings together qualitative and quantitative change. On the one hand, emergence is a causal process, in which a macro-level phenomenon results from complex, interlocking processes originating on the micro-level. On the other hand, emergence is also the result of a conceptual Gestalt shift, or shift in perspective, which in itself says nothing about causality. As an example, we can return to the heap of sand. The heap isn’t “caused” by the grains of sand in any ordinary sense of the word. For instance, there is no temporal sequence such that we first have grains and then a heap. If we dump a load of sand from a bucket, the heap exists from the start. In many discussions about emergence, it seems to me that a clearer distinction between the causal and the conceptual is needed. Exclusively focusing on the causal aspect of emergence easily leads to debates about directions of causality – whether it can only be from micro to macro, or the other way round or between macro-entities as well. While these discussions are important enough, they shouldn’t obscure the fact that causality alone can never explain emergence. Emergence also depends on our ability to capture changes in quality. Without that ability, a dwarf that grows in size would simply be a big dwarf, not something qualitatively different. Nothing would be surprising to such thinking, since nothing qualitatively new would ever happen. On the other hand, exclusively focusing on the conceptual aspect would be equally bad, since it would make us blind to the forces that undermine our concepts, to the way they are “open to unsuspected attack and destruction”, to quote Hegel. Without understanding those forces, we’d deprive ourselves of means for understanding change. All we would have would be one surprising change after the other.

To capture both the causal and the conceptual side, I think it is worthwhile to return to Hegel and to how he describes the transformation of quantity into quality as a process that paradoxically leaves us both surprised and not surprised at the same time. What Hegel seems to be saying is that quantitative processes – that may well involves causal mechanisms, such as the greenhouse effect – compel us to conceptual shifts that allow things to appear in a qualitatively new way. The compulsion here, however, is not of a causal nature in the sense of a law-like regularity or automatic reflection. The compulsion arises as a response to surprise, just as when we suddenly realize that the heap of sand has disappeared. This is significant, because it shows that Hegel is not an idealist in the sense that we can disregard experience. As I’ve argued elsewhere, his idealism consists in his belief in the ability of thought to retrospectively endow experience with meaning by shaping it into a conceptual totality. 

The question with which I would like to end my reflections today is this: doesn’t Hegel’s remarks on the subversive nature of quantitative change also provide an opening for idealist self-criticism? Even if Hegel opens up thought to experience, his understanding remains conceptual and organized around qualitites. But an important lesson from his discussion about measure is that quantitative changes are radically subversive. No matter how correct and justified we are in clinging to the quality of the world as we comprehend it, quantitative changes continually undermine and destabilize it - precisely because they takes place “below the radar” of conceptual thinking.


Reference:

Hegel, G. W. F. (1969) Science of Logic (tr. A. V. Miller), Oxon: Routledge. 

To explain dialectics, I tell people about a friend

To Hegel, dialectics is a retrospective presentation of the various moments that constitute the meaning of a concept. The meaning of the concept – der Begriff, which is also translated as the “Notion” – only emerges from the totality of the constitutive moments. In isolation, each moment is abstract, i.e. one-sided. When they come together, they allow for a concrete grasp of the concept. To Hegel, dialectics always involves a movement from the abstract towards the concrete. 

This procedure is hardly difficult to understand. In fact, we use it all the time when we try to explain something to somebody. Say that I want to tell you about a friend of mine. His name is George. I know him well and believe myself to have a clear grasp, or concept, of who he is. But how am I to transmit my concept of George to you? Well, I could start by saying that he is a writer, that he lives in Copenhagen and that he has a dog. But these determinations are necessarily abstract. They’re also all insufficient, since they don’t really capture what I think is essential in George. No matter what starting point I use, I’m bound to feel, sooner or later, that lots of important things are left out. And so I’m forced to add more determinations – telling stories about his life, describing his relations to other people, and so on – until I feel that the picture I’ve given is concrete and captures George’s essence. 

But why would this kind of explanation be dialectical? Thought is dialectical if it involves negation. I can try to understand George’s life solely from the vantage-point of him being a writer, but I already know how silly that would be since there's so much of his life that can't be explained from that vantage-point. These things “negate” the vantage-point, which is revealed to be limited and partial. I face a contradiction between the abstract vantage-point and its negation. The only way to escape it is to find another vantage-point, from which the contradiction can be redefined into part of what constitutes George (this shift of vantage-point is what Hegel refers to as Aufhebung, or “sublation”). Yes, he is a writer but he is also a violinist and dreams of being an astronaut. Yes, he hates travelling but next month he is moving to Australia to marry. That’s how people are! People are full of contradictions, and yet, importantly, we can still know them and feel that there is a unity in their lives which to no small extent is defined precisely by these contradictions. Instead of preventing me from understanding my friend, the contradictions help me know him better and become part of what defines him for me. They become a necessary part of the higher unity or totality that defines his essence. 

Perhaps you’re thinking that George is a misleading example since Hegel was interested in wholes on a much grander scale – such as the spirit or the logic of thought. I admit that this objection has truth in it: Hegel’s wholes are defined by the fact that they are so all-encompassing that we ourselves are part of them and that it is usually hard to discern any form of outside to them. Nevertheless, I still find it useful to refer to George – or some other fictitiously named friend – whenever I'm asked what Hegel meant by dialectics. Like all people, George is a contradictory person, and in that sense he is similar to entities such as spirit or (the Hegelian) logic. And just like Hegel finds it necessary to explain the concept by reconstructing the totality of moments that constitute its meaning, the only way I can explain the essence of George is by a complex exposition of all the various moments that together, as a whole, define him for me. 

A good thing about an everyday example, such as George, is that it makes it plain how much in a dialectical procedure that hinges on retrospectivity. Dialectics is not about deducing the concept from a handful of premises, as if it were a logical conclusion. In fact, there is nothing in the abstract beginnings per se that compels thought to develop further. That George is a writer doesn’t allow me to conclude that he dreams of travelling in space or that he likes ketchup on his fries. Instead, dialectics is all about making sense of, or explicating, a concept constituted by a totality that we already know. It is when I already assume the standpoint of this totality that I can see that being a writer and wanting to be an astronomer are both conceptually necessary parts of what defines George to me. When Hegel stresses the importance of “internal” rather than “external” relations, “internal” means internal to the concept of the whole, not internal to the abstract starting points. One might object, of course, that if the meaning of the abstract starting points is mediated by the relation to totality, then relations internal to the totality must in some sense also be internal to the abstract starting points. This is completely correct, but my point is that we cannot see this, unless we first adopt the standpoint of totality. It’s only then that I can claim that George’s being a writer is defined in relation to his unfulfilled childhood wish to fly to the stars or that his visceral dislike of travelling can only be properly understood if viewed in the light of the fact that he nevertheless decided to travel to the other side of the world for the sake of love, and so on. Similarly, the only way in which Being, used as Hegel’s starting point in the Logic, can be seen to imply Nothingness is from the vantage-point of a higher unity or totality that must already be assumed and in which both moments are already part. In both cases, to quote Hegel, the starting-point is the goal. We do not deduce the goal from the premise, but explain how the starting-points can only be understood when viewed in relation to the goal. To use a Hegelian term, the goal "posits" the starting-point.

Retrospectivity, then, is central. Retrospectivity also helps us understand the “necessity” that defines the relations between the moments and that drives thought onwards from the simple and abstract towards the complex and concrete. I’ve already pointed out that this isn’t the necessity of logical deduction. It’s also not causal necessity (not even in works, such as the Phenomenology, in which Hegel employs a historical dialectic that unfolds over time rather than a systematic one looking at interrelations in a given whole, as in the Logic or the Philosophy of Right). Rather, it is a conceptual necessity. Some moments have to be part of the whole in order for the concept to have the meaning that it has. Such necessity can only be retrospectively reconstructed, when I already know what the concept means. There is thus nothing in this necessity that can be used to predict the future or to deduce a more rational order than the one defined by the concepts that we hold to be valid today.

But if dialectics can only operate retrospectively, does that mean that it cannot generate new knowledge? If so, what is the point of it? My answer would be that even a dialectic that only operates retrospectively can generate new knowledge, in two ways: one that employs the dialectic more or less like Hegel does it, and another that takes the dialectic beyond Hegel, in the direction of Adorno’s negative dialectics (thus generating a knowledge that is critical and undermines idealist systems like Hegel's). 

To start with the first of these options, the retrospective procedure involves a clarification of the concept. That I already at the start possess the concept of a thing doesn’t mean that I possess it clearly. For instance, I can know George very well without having clarified to myself exactly what constitutes this knowledge. The same, obviously, applies to self-knowledge. Who hasn't had moments of shock or revelation when encountering memories of past events that we then retrospectively recognize as defining moments in our lives, as constitutive of what we are today? Hegel himself recognizes that we can have the concept of a thing without possessing it clearly. That is why, for instance, he can set it up as a task for philosophy to comprehend its age in thought, a task of self-clarification that is not so different from the self-clarification carried out on an individual scale in psychoanalysis. But not even successful self-clarification results in a concept that can be directly put in words. The concept can ultimately only be expressed through the totality of its moments and that in turn means that it’s impossible to express it in a unitary, simple way that is free from contradiction. The riddle-like reference to the rose in the cross in the preface to the Philosophy of Right is an example of this. 

To illustrate the second way, that of taking the dialectic beyond Hegel, let me return to George. What Hegel ultimately misses in his insistence on dialectics as a retrospective reconstruction of meaning is the problem of how to account for the things that have to be suppressed or forgotten for this meaning to arise. Let us imagine that George totally unexpectedly walks into the room, after I’ve finished telling you my stories and anecdotes about him. Frankly, I feel a bit disturbed by this appearance of the real object of my stories. Anxiously I look at your faces, searching for reactions. I know that you are all busy judging for yourselves whether I have been right or wrong. Suddenly I’m made aware of what Adorno calls the non-identify of concept and object, and this awareness triggers another kind of logic than the Hegelian one, a logic of disintegration that threatens the integrity of the concept. I’m no longer sure who George is.

Žižek's Hegel (3): Why should we tarry with the negative? (and other important questions)

Zizek (by Luca del Baldo)

In my previous post, I showed how Žižek avoids ending up in a conservative reading of Hegel's injunction to recognize "the rose in the cross of the present". The task of reason, according to this reading, is not to overcome present suffering (the negative, the cross), but to tarry with it and finding wisdom (the rose) in the suffering, and thereby to reconcile itself with it.

Žižek demolishes the assumptions on which this conservative reading rests, firstly, by stressing that dialectics only works retrospectively, from the standpoint of an already achieved reconciliation. There is thus no "logic" in dialectics that compels us to submit to the suffering of the present, to the "negative". It is only once reconciliation is achieved that we become able to recognize the negative as a condition of possibility and affirm it - but as long as we are still caught in the midst of an unreconciled present, there is nothing at all in Hegel's dialectics that says that we must affirm the negative.

This means that the distance separating Hegel from Marx isn't as big as is sometimes thought. It is, for example, impossible to use Hegel to argue that the proletariat should put up with capitalism instead of fighting against it. As long as capitalism is experienced as a "negative", Hegel would agree with Marx that the task is to change the world, rather than just interpreting it.

There is also a second way in which Žižek attacks the conservative reading. He shows that even when reconciliation occurs, it doesn't need to imply any submission to the status quo - it can be a reconciliation with the world that includes one's efforts to change it. The reconciliation doesn't neutralize the contradictions, which continue to be operative in propelling history onwards even as they are "sublated". Again, this can be made easily comprehensible if we use the example of the struggle against capitalism. Might we not say that, to militant activists, the only way to make the existence of capitalism tolerable is to actively struggle against it? In other words, the struggle against capitalism is the very form into which its contradictions are sublated. Reconciliation is achieved in a way that doesn't neutralize the suffering brought about by the "negative", but it does sublate this suffering into a new form, namely that of the anti-capitalist struggle.

Both of these arguments demonstrate that, from a Hegelian perspective, there's never any need to put up with what we experience as "negative". To be sure, once reconciliation is achieved we will be able to see the constructive, enabling role of this negative, but not even such insights imply that we must seek to preserve the negative. The negative is constructive precisely in the sense that it invites us to overcome it.

But Žižek's interpretation in turn raises new questions. One question is why he urges us to "tarry with the negative". If there is no need to put up with the negative, what is the point of tarrying with it? Why should we bother to tarry if history always keeps changing anyway? Žižek clearly agrees with Hegel that it is only through the negative that we arrive at reconciliation. It is only by facing up to the negative that reconciliation - including reconciliation in the midst of change - becomes possible. But how is it possible for Žižek to argue this when he has already denied that there is any logical or historical necessity driving reason towards reconciliation? If there is no such necessity, then wouldn't it be possible to have reconciliation without affirming suffering?

Žižek does provide a simple answer to these questions, but in providing this answer he takes leave of Hegel in important respects and relies rather heavily on Lacan instead. His point appears to be that tarrying with the negative, in the sense of facing up to it, has a liberating psychological effect. The process leading to this liberation - which is one aspect of the wisdom symbolized by the "rose" - is not a logical one, but it isn't enitrely contingent either. There is an unconscious, psychological logic or mechanism at work behind it. Rather than miring us down in the status quo, it is what enables us to move forward and paradoxically "opens up the space for real change" by removing blockages (ibid. 322).

Tarrying with the "negative" is thus, paradoxically, not for the sake of putting up with it, but in order to lessen its grip on us and liberate possibilities for action. In emphasizing this, Žižek emphatically parts ways with interpretations such as Waszek's and reveals himself as being with Marx after all: the point really is to change the world rather than just interpreting it, although, more than Marx, he seems to be thinking that the road to change is only opened by constantly reinterpreting the world - by constantly performing new acts of re-totalization in relation to the present. Or even more explicitly:

To avoid a fatal misunderstanding: this crucial dialectical move from epistemological obstacle to ontological impossibility in no way implies that all we can do is reconcile ourselves to this impossibility, i.e., accept reality itself as imperfect. The premise of psychoanalysis is that one can intervene with the symbolic into the Real, because the Real is not external reality-in-itself, but a crack in the symbolic, so one can intervene with an act which re-configures the field and thus transforms its immanent point of impossibility. ‘Traversing the fantasy’ does not mean accepting the misery of our lives – on the contrary, it means that only after we ‘traverse’ the fantasies obfuscating this misery can we effectively change it. (ibid. 477)

If this sounds abstract, Žižek also provides an illustrative example: 

Take the role of the wife in a marriage in which patriarchal values continue to have a subterranean existence: the wife has to serve her husband, but in the context of a free and equal relationship; this is why the first act of rebellion is to openly proclaim one’s servitude, to refuse to act as free where one is de facto not free. The effects of such refusal are shattering, since in modern conditions, servitude can only reproduce itself as disavaowed. (ibid. 995 n60)

This idea that an ostensible affirmation of the negative can serve as a kind of shock that liberates us explains much that appears provocative in Žižek's writings. Take, for instance, his excursus on the political equivocality of the Slovenian post-punk group Laibach in The Metastases of Enjoyment, which "staged an aggressive inconsistence mixture of Stalinism, Nazism and Blut und Boden ideology".

The first reaction of enlightened Leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as the ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals; however, their support of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling: ‘What if they really mean it?... (ibid. 1994:71)

Žižek then argues that Laibach frustrates this totalitarian fantasy “precisely in so far as it is not its ironic imitation, but overidentification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, overidentification suspends its efficiency” (ibid. 72). By appealing directly to the disavowed "illegal enjoyment" holding together the community, the group succeeded better in weakening the hold on people of the "racist fantasy" on people than rational argumentation of the Habermasian kind.

The translation of the racist fantasy into the universal medium of symbolic intersubjectivity (the Habermasian ethos of dialogue) in no way weakens the hold of the racist fantasy upon us. If we are to undermine this power of fantasy, a different political strategy is needed, a strategy that is able to incorporate what Lacan called 'la traversée du fantasme', a strategy of overidentification, which takes into account the fact that the obscene superego qua basis and support of the public Law is operative only in so far as it remains unacknowledged, hidden from the public eye. What if, instead of critical dissection and irony which reveal their impotence in the face of racism’s phantasmic kernel, we proceed a contrario and identify publicly with the obscene superego? (ibid. 71)

To take just one more example of how Žižek tries to deliver liberating shocks to the reader: in the early part of Less than Nothing, he explains that Hegelian dialectics means "opting for the bad". Whereas Hegel is usually understood as having criticized the abstract freedom of the revolutionary terror in France in favour of the concrete freedom of the modern rational state, Žižek states that the proper dialectical choice would be to opt for the "bad choice" of revolutionary terror. There was simply no way to choose the "rational state" directly in France, without first passing through the abstract freedom of the terror, which was needed to do away with the falseness of the ancient régime, clearing the ground for a reestablishment of concrete freedom on a higher level. Taken at face value, this is a dubious statement, which is inconsistent with what Žižek elsewhere says about dialectics being purely retroactive and non-teleological. The point of this argument, however, is hardly to make a serious statement about either Hegel or the revolution. Rather, I suspect that it must be found in his wish to deliver a liberating shock that will reconfigure the symbolic field. Žižek's seemingly radical and provokative endorsement of Lenin and the terror of the October Revolution (ibid. 2004a) can perhaps be interpreted in the same way - as a détour, a way of opening up the road to the good by endorsing the bad.

So why should we "tarry" with the negative? Because it liberates us. By affirming it we break its hold on us and become more able to participate in change. Reconciliation is the name of that kind of freedom. Hegel was right that reconciliation can only be reached through tarrying with the negative, but the process whereby this happens is not logical but rather psychological.


Objet a and the limitations of Hegel

Žižek, then, is clearly not a defender of the status quo. Instead, it is precisely for the sake of challenging this status quo that he urges us to tarry with the negative. Dialectics itself cannot lead us beyond the present, but that doesn't mean that there is no room for praxis, for trying to bring about social change. The point to which dialectics delivers us - the Aufhebung or negation of the negation - is also the "shocking" point at which we confront the fact of our freedom, the point where dialectics can no longer guide us.

What are the political implications of this stance? While Žižek avoids the conservative identification with the “rose in the cross”, at the same time he says that the meaning of our acts will never be apparent until in retrospect. If successful, the radical act will transform all yardsticks whereby to judge it anyway. Žižek himself raises the question what this means for the possibility of emancipatory political interventions: "Does it mean that we are condemned to acting blindly?". His answer is to emphasize freedom: “what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility of factoring in the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of freedom?” (ibid. 263).

The problem with this answer seems to me to be two-fold. Firstly, it leaves the more basic question why we should change reality at all in the dark. Nothing in Žižek's argument about Aufhebung, the retrospectivity of dialectics or its compatibility with a certain form of contingent political action says anything about why the negative arises in the first place - yet this is where we find the source of the suffering and discontent that drives history onwards. Secondly, the use of the word "freedom" in the answer is, I feel, slightly misleading. It suggest an element of decisionism or arbitrariness in his philosophy, which gainsays the fact that, to him, the choice of a radical political stance is determined by something that isn't arbitrary at all. Badiou calls it fidelity to the truth-event. For Žižek, it is rather fidelity to desire, to jouissance, to what gives him enjoyment. Here his language becomes Lacanian rather then Hegelian.

Žižek's answer to what drives history onwards is that, ultimately, what irks us and drives us to act is the Lacanian objet a, the fantasy object through which the subject stages its desire and which arises because of the constitutive lack or void in the symbolic order, as a means to fill this lack and give it body where the word fails. Resisting integration in the symbolic order, it cannot be exposed to public view or acknowledged by the subject. All we can do is to close in on it through a variety of interventions in the symbolic order. 

To Žižek, the limitation of Hegel is shown by his inability to think this object (as well as related concepts such as the death drive; ibid. 2012: 455ff, 480, 492f, 500, 600). This is a crucial point in Žižek's argument because it marks the point where dialectics itself seems to fail. By resorting to Lacan and the notion of the objet a, he appears to acknowledge that there are certain things that cannot be mediatized properly, that fall outside the order of dialectics and that both negate and sustain it from the outside. On the one hand, this object serves as his explanation for why history moves at all, but on the other the "structure" necessitating this object must also constitute an obstacle to dialectics, a hard element resisting that persists across history and resists dialectical totalization.

This results in an uneasy tension in Žižek (which to some extent mirrors that between Hegel and Lacan). On the one hand, he is a Hegelian, which should mean that he should seek to grasp things "concretely" by searching out the way all things are mediated through the whole. On the other, he emphasizes the “reality of the mask”, the fact that fiction often counts for more than reality and that this happens when the fiction is built into or constitutive of the wider social order (just as for Marx commodity fetishism persists even after its illusory character has been revealed) (e.g. ibid. 44ff, 516ff). The primary model for this latter strand in his thought is Lacan and his stress that some fictions are needed to hold the symbolic edifice together, in particular the fiction of the objet a which stands in for and covers up the lack or inconsistency in that edifice. This in turn is reminiscent of the Kantian operation resorted to in order to construct a free, moral subject or to a public sphere of equal citizens - namely the bracketing of the wider social and natural context in which we are entangled. In order for me to act as a free subject or equal citizen, I need to disregard entanglements of causality. To function as an equal citizen, I need to disregard things like social embeddedness - in other words, I need to grasp myself as an abstract entity. Grasping myself "concretely" by paying attention to all aspects of my social being - personal affairs and loyalties, the real inequality of status and power that separates me from others, emotions and psychological problems etc. - would have made it impossible for me to participate in these fictions. It is this tension in Žižek that explains why he so often, in a way that is unusual for a Hegelian, states his support for fictions (for the “positive’power of ‘blindness’” etc.; ibid. 279). In this support for fictions, bracketing and the "mask", Žižek comes surprisingly close to Karatani Kôjin, a Kantian Marxist whom Žižek once criticized from a Hegelian standpoint (ibid. 2004b). It's quite interesting to see that they actually have quite a lot of things in common, and that both point to the unconscious (trauma in Karatani's case and objet a in Žižek's) as a phenomenon that escapes Hegel and functions as limitation to Hegelian dialectics.


Critical comments: Žižek and Adorno

I have stressed two elements in Žižek's reading of Hegel (see the first part of my review). First, that reconciliation is just the negative from another angle, and, secondly, that dialectics only works retrospectively, the appearance of logical necessity only being imposed after the fact, in moments when reconciliation is already achieved. How do these two elements hang together? They work together best in moments when the subject achieves a form of reconciliation with the past - when, looking back at past suffering and obstacles, it realizes that they were conditions of possibility.

Žižek's interpretation is in a way self-evident and straightforward. It is clear that to Hegel, totality is not a harmonious stage arriving at the end of history, when all contradictions have been resolved, but this very history itself. It is with this history, with all its contradictions, that reconciliation has to be sought. There is thus no question of overcoming and leaving behind the contradictions. On the contrary, they are essential moments in the whole that needs to be affirmed. This can be illustrated by Hegel's own explanation of the dialectic: 

The higher dialectic of the concept consists not merely in producing and apprehending the determination as an opposite and limiting factor, but in producing and apprehending the positive content and result which it contains; and it is this alone which makes it a development and immanent progression. (Hegel 1991:60)

To point out that Aufhebung leaves the contradiction in place, that it resolves nothing, is thus not new. Adorno too says in a lecture on Hegel that "the so-called synthesis is nothing but the expression of the non-identity of thesis and antithesis" (Adorno 2008: 30).

Retrospectivity is also not a new theme in the interpretation of dialectics. Robert Fine (2001), for instance, reminds us that Hegel's dialectics serves only the purpose of comprehending the present, having nothing to do with historical prediction. In Marx's Capital too, dialectics is not so much a tool for predicting change as for comprehending capitalism (as fact that has led some commentators to argue that change must take a form of breaking with the dialectic; e.g. Postone 1993).

What, then, is new in Žižek's interpretation, and why does it provoke?

To begin with retrospectivity, the provocative novelty seems to be Žižek's stress on the fact that "necessity" is nothing but a retrospective construct that is imposed on history in moments of achieved reconciliation and which has nothing to do with the real historical processes, which are open and contingent. History thus appears in a kind of unstable double exposure - as necessary or contingent or both at once. This seems to distinguish him quite clearly from both Hegel himself and from Marx, who both tended to view history from a standpoint of an assumed (future) reconciliation which led the contingent side of the process to fall out of view.

From the point of view of how to interpret dialectics, the interesting point here would be that Žižek delimits the validity of dialectics. If dialectics is the motion whereby thought creates "necessity", then the open and contingent processes of history seem to fall outside dialectics. Change happens unrelated to the latter. Foucault knew that, although he tended to focus on the contingent side of history, neglecting the process whereby a retrospective necessity is created. Perhaps there is more of a similarity between Žižek and thinkers like Adorno and Jameson, who both move very much inside the created dialectical totality, trying to break out of it by criticizing it immanently. To both of the latter thinkers, history exists as a force that breaks in on the dialectic, disrupting it from the outside. Although it cannot be captured through our concepts, it can be known through its indirect effects, namely in the way it "shocks" and wrecks havoc with our concepts. The difference between Žižek and Adorno would seem to lie in the value they accord to moments of reconciliation. While Žižek tends to simply assume the desirability of reconciliation, Adorno is much more skeptical, tending to be concerned above all with what is suppressed or forgotten in such moments of reconciliation (the non-identical).

This difference can be clearly brought into view if we turn to the second major element of Žižek's Hegel-interpretation, namely the idea that Aufhebung is nothing but the negative from another angle. While a stimulating thought and undoubtedly useful to capture important aspects of Aufhebung, doubts can be raised that this was what Hegel meant. It is telling that Žižek usually illustrates the idea with his own examples - such as the Rabinovitch joke or Adorno's antagonistic definition of society - rather than with Hegel himself. The one Hegelian example that he discusses at length, that of the abstract freedom of Jacobin terror being sublated into the concrete freedom of the modern, rational state, doesn't fit this interpretation of Aufhebung very well. The modern, rational state wasn't just Jacobin terror "from another angle".

What, then, is the point of this idea? One, surely, is to prop up Hegel's 'critical' credentials by showing how his dialectics never absorbs what he called the "tremendous power of the negative" into any higher synthesis. If the synthesis is simply the negative itself, then it follows that dialectics never impairs or diminishes its force.

But does this attempt to rescue dialectics succeed? I think one way to measure this is to look closer at Žižek's criticism of Adorno. What Adorno says is, in nuce, that although Hegel pays attention to the negative, he ultimately sacrifices it by reincorporating it into a positive dialectics. According to Žižek, however, Adorno's criticism presupposes a wrong image of Hegel:

What if, in its innermost core, Hegel’s dialectics is not a machine for appropriating or mediating all otherness, for sublating all contingency into a subordinated ideal moment of the notional necessity? What if Hegelian ‘reconciliation’already is the acceptance of an irreducible contingency at the very heart of notional necessity? (Žižek 2012:262)

Žižek's rebuttal of Adorno may seem ingenious, but I question its cogency. Even granted that to Hegel necessity is only imposed on history retrospectively in moments of reconciliation, it is imposed, and when it is the contingent elements are sublated, incorporated as meaningful moments in a bigger totality in which, to speak with Žižek, the “obstacles”are affirmed as positive presuppositions. This means that in such moments, whatever remains meaningless or disruptive of meaning - in other words, what Adorno called the non-identical - is screened out. Recognizing the contingency of this process is not at all sufficient to do justice to non-identity, since this contingency falls out of view as soon as reconciliation is achieved.

Žižek, to be sure, might reply that any moment of reconciliation is only temporary, and that each such moment is bound to be disrupted by history, by things that are "non-identical" to it. There is nevertheless in Žižek a tendency to try to look at the present from the vantage-point of reconciliation, priviliging it as the standpoint which we "should" try to reach. His interpretation works best in those moments of reconciliation in which we retrospectively affirm past obstacles, but this retrospective affirmation is possible only to the extent that we are happy with the present. What is missing is an awareness that any reconciliation that remains partial - that overlooks the continuing presence of the non-identical - is ideological. In contrast to Žižek, Adorno never affirms the present. Since he deliberately chooses to look at the present as un-redeemed, it follows that he never justifies the negative either. "'I have seen the world spirit'", he writes about Hitler's robot-bombs, "but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel's philosophy of history" (Adorno 1978: 55).

It would be unfair, of course, to reject Žižek's attempt to find critical inspiration in Hegel simply because he fails to do justice to non-identity. Adorno is notoriously unclear about how his "negative dialectics" can be wedded to any meaningful political action. In the absence of such action, doesn't his philosophy amount to a de facto acquiescence to the status quo? Žižek at least manages to enlist Hegel for radical social change by showing how we can reconcile ourselves to the negative by struggling against it. In such moments of reconciliation, we affirm the present, like Hegel, but this present is itself not static. It too is riven by contradictions and longings (“adventurous”, as Bloch called it). This is why being part of the present, being reconciled with it, also means participating in change, being part of the movement through which change happens.

I will let the last shot go to Adorno, however. Moments when we feel reconciled with ourselves and the world in the midst of struggle may feel wonderful, but there is also a danger to them. Even such moments can be ideological to the extent that they disregard or suppress non-identity. Happiness can be brutal. What is needed is not just to change society, but also to avoid replicating the badness we are fighting. Avoiding brutality and insensitivity doesn't have to imply quietism or withdrawal from political action. There are also other options. Maybe there are forms of reconciliation that are so angelic or playful or so close to the condition of peaceful death that they oppress no one. Adorno, in some of his most memorable passages, spoke of such a utopian condition - which he described as one in which we could be different without fear and in which powerlessness would not invite violence - but at the same time portrayed it as so distant and hard to realize that it could only function critically, as a painful dream spurring us to relentlessly criticize the present. But isn't play - a mode of relating to reality that Benjamin was more appreciative of than Adorno - one possible way to at least at times and in part approach that utopian condition? Isn't this perhaps also the kind of reconciliation that Žižek has in mind, and that would fit in with his appreciation of fiction and his portrayal of dialectics as a kind of parallax view that constantly oscillates between necessity and contingency? If nothing else works, isn't there also the stoic option, of which even Adorno might approve, of trying to change the world to the best of our abilities even as we renounce the moments of reconciliation, at least until the time comes when play will again become possible?


References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1978) Minima Moralia, London: Verso.

Adorno, Theodor W. (2008) Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966 (ed. Rolf Tiedemann), Cambridge: Polity Press.

Fine, Robert (2001) Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, London: Routledge.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. Allen W. Wood, tr. H. B. Nisbet), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Postone, Moishe (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2004a) “What Is To be Done (with Lenin)?”, In These Times, January 21, http://www.lacan.com/zizeklenin34.htm (accessed 2011-10-07).

Žižek, Slavoj (2004b) “The Parallax View”, New Left Review 25 (Jan – Feb): 121-134.

Žižek, Slavoj (2012) Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso.

Žižek's Hegel (2): Should we stop trying to change the world then?

Here are some more reflections on Zizek's reading of Hegel in Less than Nothing. I discuss how Zizek tries to escape the conservative implications of "finding the rose in the cross" and why he thinks we can go on trying to change society despite reconciling ourselves to the present.

I ended the first part of my review about Žižek's by throwing out an objection. What happens if his reading of Hegel's Aufhebung is applied to the Marxist problem of the revolution? If Aufhebung is not a reconciliation of opposites, but the negative (the obstacle, the "bad") itself from another angle, doesn't it imply subjection to the status quo, learning to accept present suffering by viewing it from another angle? If reconciliation consists in the recognition that the negative is itself the solution, does that mean that we should stop trying to change society?

This might certainly be one, very conservative way of reading Hegel. As I mentioned in a previous post, Norbert Waszek seems to favour such a reading. Based on Hegel's statements about "tarrying with the negative" and finding "the rose in the cross of the present", he argues that to Hegel the task of reason consists in staying with suffering, tarrying with it, and finding its freedom in it.

There are passages where Žižek seems to endorse this reading of Hegel. If the only obstacle to reconciliation is our perspective on the world, then of course there is no need to "change the world" as Marx put it - all we need to do is to change our interpretation of the world.

Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms – his formula from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should ‘recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present': or, to put it in Marx’s terms: in reconciliation one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner ‘truth’ of the miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel merely proposes a new interpretation of it, thus in a way misses the point – it is knocking on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation we do not have to change reality, but rather the way we perceive and relate to it. (Žižek 2012: 201f)

Furthermore, against the Marxist reproach that the present is itself split and run through with contradiction and that “the only way to grasp it as a rational totality is from the standpoint of the revolutionary agent which will resolve those antagonisms” (ibid. 260), Žižek points out that Hegel rejects such a totalization from the future: “the only totality accessible to us is the flawed totality of the present, and the task of Though is to ‘recognize the Heart in the Cross of the present’, to grasp how the Totality of the Present is complete in its very incompleteness, how this Totality is sustained by those very features which appear as its obstacles or fatal flaws” (ibid. 260). Reconciliation, in other words, doesn't mean that we do away with the contradictions but that we reconcile ourselves with them.

However, despite formulations like these, Žižek avoids the conclusion that we should bow to the status quo. Instead he appears to construct an intricate argument about how we must in fact always keep on trying to change the world, without any guidance from dialectics, and that moments of reconciliation in fact play a crucial role in helping us do this.

His argument is not clearly stated and needs to be reconstructed by collecting bits and pieces from different passages and interpreting them in the light of each other. Below I present what I believe are the first two steps, and the most important ones, in his argument.


History is not a cross, because we are not nailed to it

Let us start by scrutinizing the conservative reading of Hegel's statements about tarrying with the negative and finding the rose in the cross a bit closer. Put simply this reading says that we need to put up with suffering and recognize its rationality in order to reach the higher wisdom symbolized by the "rose in the cross". This reading rests on two problematic assumptions. The first is that reconciliation will bring about a lasting pacification of suffering, a taming of the contradiction so that it will no longer spur us to try to change society. Once reason recognizes the rationality of the present, the suffering will have lost its propulsive force, its ability to drive history onwards.

Against this, one should carefully search out the ways in which the present itself is always on the move. It is simply not possible to affirm the status quo, resting in it and feeling reconciled with the world. Žižek is thus careful to point out that the Aufhebung doesn’t result in a harmonious state, in any lasting reconciliation. Hegel does not strive “to locate every phenomenon within a harmonious global edifice; on the contrary, the point of dialectical analysis is to demonstrate how every phenomenon, everything that happens, fails in its own way, implies a crack, antagonism, imbalance, in its very heart. Hegel’s gaze upon reality is that of a Roentgen apparatus which sees in everything that is alive the traces of its future death” (ibid. 8). Thus, there will always be contradictions and antagonisms that continue to spur us to action, but that action is open and contingent. Against, the conservatives, one may reply eppur si muove - "still, it moves". What? History, of course.

That history never comes to a rest means that there isn't really any stable, unchanging "cross" to which we can subject ourselves lastingly. If affirming the rose in the cross of the present is interpreted in a conservative fashion, as an injunction to affirm the status quo rather than change it, then it in fact has an enormous weakness: namely that reality never stands still. It keeps changing. The present isn't really a cross at all, at least not one to which we are nailed.

The question then arises how we can reconcile ourselves to this changing, moving reality, and the only way to do that is by abandoning the conservative attachment to the status quo. Instead, peace must somehow be found in acting itself, in praxis. As Lukács pointed out, that means that praxis is more “concrete” than mere interpretation or contemplation, which remains “abstract” since it is divorced from the movement of history.

This, perhaps, explains why Hegel so often returns to the example of the French Revolution. This revolution may very well be his prime model of the cross in which the rose must be found – not in the suffering of the status quo, but in the suffering accompanying one of the most preeminent moment in history when people were trying to change the world. Unlike what Lukács thought, however, action to change society cannot be guided by dialectics. To repeat: Žižek is clear about the fact that the course of future history can never be predicted. “Of course, thought is immanent to reality and changes it, but not as fully self-transparent self-consciousness, not as an Act aware of its own impact” (ibid. 220).


Moments of reconciliation

The conservative reading according to which we should acquiesce to the status quo also rests on a second presupposition, namely that there is a logical compulsion in Hegel's dialectics that would rationally lead us to seek reconciliation with the negative.

This is also denied by Žižek. Here the importance of his insistence that dialectics only works retrospectively becomes clear. The fact that necessity only arises in retrospect, in moments of reconciliation, means that there is never any injunction in dialectics to accept any unreconciled status quo. Nothing in dialectics says that we "must" reconcile ourselves to the present. To believe in such a "must" is to misconstrue the appearance of logical necessity arising after the fact of reconciliation with the real process whereby the latter comes about.

This means that one cannot persuade a person to reconcile herself with the status quo using dialectical logic; there is simply no such logical coercion at work in it. The point of dialectics is not to logically demonstrate the rationality of reconciliation. In Žižek's interpretation it is reconciliation that comes first. Only after the fact do the "moments" leading up to reconciliation aquire the status of necessary, "logical" steps.

The fact that necessity only arises retrospectively, in the course of an open and contingent process, means that dialectics loses its justificatory function. The conventional interpretation of Hegel stresses how he justifies the status quo by showing how it reconciles opposing forces. But if Žižek is right that Hegel’s procedure is essentially retrospective, then it’s the other way round. It’s the contradictions that are justified as soon as we affirm the present. This, however, doesn't amount to a defence of the status quo since the present we affirm can very well be one of struggle.

To illustrate this, let us look at two quotes that provide a glimpse of moments when “all is reconciled”. The first is a famous fragment from Nietzsche's later writings:

If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event – and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed. (Nietzsche 1968:532f)

The second is by Yabu Shirô, a Japanese activist and autonomist writer. In a grim report from an anti-war demonstrations at the time of the inva­sion in Iraq in 2003, he describes a clash with the riot police in which he is hit, his glasses fly away and he tumbles to the asphalt, a for­est of arms and legs barring his sight:

There, through a tiny opening was the gorgeous blue sky. My thoughts leapt out of my scull, merging with the things around me. Fused with my skin, the cold and distant materials pulsated as if they were alive. I was the asphalt in front of the station, I was the arrested safety boots, I was the anti-war blue sky – and I could have affirmed the whole world! (Yabu 2003:47)

The quotes suggests a form of reconciliation that is not arrived at through any specified logical or conceptual development. The "whole world" or "all eternity" are justified in retrospect in such moments. The quotes also illustrate moments when reconciliation does not arrest change, but occurs in the midst of it. The "whole world" is affirmed, including the struggle to change it. The struggle may in fact be an essential moment in making us feel reconciled with the world. Often, struggling against the negative is the only way to make its existence tolerable. The only way that I can put up with the continuing existence of hunger, oppression and suffering in the world is by doing what I can to extinguish them. Reconciliation doesn't presuppose any end to history, any arrival of a stable state after all change is exhausted.

Perhaps an example can help us understand this better. It is easy to recognize the constitutive role of, say, Hitler, Japanese aggression or “Hiroshima”, for the postwar order. By affirming this order, trying to protect it against the return of Nazism or war, we also in a sense affirm and redeem the "negative" experiences that made this order possible. This isn't as outrageous as it sounds. Affirming the constitutive role of these things does not make us Nazis or supporters of war and genocide. What is affirmed is rather the experience of Hitler, aggression and the atomic bomb - in effect, our abhorrence of them. In fact, it is activists against Nazism or against war that most actively keep Hitler and “Hiroshima” alive by invoking them and the need to “never again” repeat them or their acts. When they do this they do not just simply prop up the existing order, in which abhorrent things certainly still abound. They also attempt to change it into a better world in which war and genocide will not exist. They reconcile themselves to the past by struggling against it and by striving for a better future. 

This means that it is wrong to claim that Hegel’s philosophy ends up in justifying the status quo, in merely “interpreting” the world instead of changing it. As Žižek points out, Hegel’s position is quite compatible with struggling to change the world, since the moment of affirmation can very well arrive in the midst of such struggle. Unlike most Marxists, however, Žižek insists that the outcome of the struggle is unpredictable. All historical development is contingent; only retrospectively is "necessity" imposed.

So, to conclude, how does Žižek position himself in regard to what I have called the conservative reading of Hegel? As we have seen, he is not entirely clear here and sometimes he sounds as if reconciliation indeed simply means recognizing the futility of the struggle, “changing the perspective”, seeing that the obstacle is in fact a precondition and so on.

However, a closer reading reveals that Žižek in fact demolishes the two assumptions on which the conservative reading of Hegel rests. Firstly, there is nothing in dialectics that says that we must reconcile ourselves to just any present. Secondly, even when reconciliation occurs, it doesn't need to imply any submission to the status quo - it can be a reconciliation with the world that, as a crucial ingredient, includes one's efforts to change it.

But Žižek's interpretation in turn raises several new questions. Why, if history keeps changing anyway, does he continue to exhort us to tarry with the negative and try to find the "rose in the cross of the present"? What's the point of such an operation? And if dialectics is only useful retrospectively and cannot say anything about real causes behind historical change, what is it then, according to Žižek, that drives history onwards?

To be continued (in the next post)!

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will to Power (tr. W. Kaufman & R. J. Hollingdale), New York: Vintage.

Yabu, Shirō (2003) “Rojō de torikaese” (Take it back on the street), pp 46-47, in Noda Tsutomu et al (eds), No!! War, Tokyo: Kawadeshobō shinsha.

Žižek, Slavoj (2012) Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso.

Žižek's Hegel (1): the obstacle is the solution

Žižek's Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso 2012) is a long read. Here I'd like to make a few remarks on his interpretation of Hegel, especially two ideas that are central to it and which I find remarkably simple and interesting. The first is that dialectics only works retrospectively. The other is that Aufhebung or sublation doesn't consist in changing the negative; instead, it comes about through a change in the subject that enables it to view the negative from another angle and thus to reconcile itself to it. Both of these ideas seem to put Žižek on a collision course with Marxism, at least at first sight. I will therefore also discuss briefly how I think Žižek can be placed in relation to the Marxian tradition. The crucial point remains, as Marx put it, whether we should change the world or merely interpret it. My argument in brief will be that Žižek holds on to the goal of social change, but that the impetus of this seems to derive less from dialectics than from Lacan. I will divide my comments into a series of posts, beginning with the two main points of Žižek's Hegel interpretation here and saving the rest of the discussion for later.

Dialectics only works retrospectively

Žižek repeatedly points out that dialectics only works retrospectively, by “positing its own presuppositions”. Of course, the element of retrospectivity is stressed by Hegel himself, in his statement about the owl of Minerva that only flies at dusk, but what Žižek brings out much more clearly is that what Hegel refers to as "necessity" is also nothing but a retrospective effect. To Žižek, the fundamental reason that dialectics cannot serve as a tool for logically deriving or predicting the course of history is that history is an open and contingent process, the appearance of necessity only arising retrospectively. Rather than each category succeeding the other with logical necessity, “each passage in Hegel is a moment of creative invention”. The thing “forms itself in an open contingent process – the eternally past essence is a retroactive result of the dialectical process” (Žižek 2012: 468).

By stressing retrospectivity, Žižek is able to reject the common portrayal of Hegel's dialectic as a grand teleological narrative with no room for contingency. However, what is striking about this interpretation is that it doesn't dispense altogether with necessity. As Žižek points out, Hegel's dialectics operates through a “reversal of contingency into necessity” whereby “the outcome of a contingent process takes on the appearance of necessity: things retroactively ‘will have been’ necessary” (ibid. 213). History does not follow a necessary course, but consists in a series of "successive re-totalizations, each of them creating (‘positing’) its own past" (ibid. 272f). The process of becoming thus retroactively engenders its necessity: “the process of becoming is not in itself necessary, but is the becoming (the gradual contingent emergence) of necessity itself” (ibid. 231).

This relationship between contingency and necessity may at first appear curious, but it is not hard to think of examples that illustrate it. Think for instance of person who has experienced a tragic accident that changes his life for ever. Although the accident may well have occurred totally out of the blue, it is easy to imagine such a man saying in retrospect that without it he wouldn't have been the man he is now - that it was "necessary" for him to be the man he is. It is also easy to find examples in social theory. Take Michael Heinrich according to whose interpretation of Marx the “socially necessary labor” needed for a commodity to acquire a certain value can only be determined retrospectively, in the act of exchange. It seems quite possible to discern a dialectical "positing of presuppositions" in how Heinrich sees the constitution of value: rather than deriving value directly from the amount of labour put down in producing a commodity, as has often been done in readings of Marx's theory of value, this labour is only posited in retrospect as the "cause" of the commodity's value. To a certain extent we also find a similar operation in Foucault - might not the inversion described by him whereby discourse produces the subject supposed to express itself in language be seen as yet another case of this retrospective positing of presuppositions? The difference between Foucault and the dialectical approach described by Žižek is that to the latter there is no way to simply step out of the retrospective illusion of necessity, as it appears that Foucault tries to do. Thus the tragic event will continue to be consitutive of the man in our example - as a necessary part of my idea of him - even if I fully recognize its contingency. Similarly, in Marx the idea of value as an independent (discursive) entitity generating labour as a mere illusion would be senseless since it would undermine the very concept of value. So according to Žižek, rather than dispensing with necessity, we need to view history as both contingent and necessary at once, in a kind of parallax view.

If dialectics only works retrospectively, it cannot point the way forward to a communist revolution. Žižek makes the provocative claim that by stressing retroactivity, Hegel was in a sense a better materialist than Marx, who carried out an “idealist reversal of Hegel”:

[I]n contrast to Hegel, who was well aware that the owl of Minerva takes wing only at dusk, after the fact – that Thought follows Being (which is why, for Hegel, there can be no scientific insight into the future of society) – Marx reasserts the primacy of Thought: the owl of Minerva (German contemplative philosophy) should be replaced by the singing of the Gaelic rooster (French revolutionary thought) announcing the proletarian revolution – in the proletarian revolutionary act, Thought will precede Being. (ibid. 220)

Žižek in fact in several passages seems to suggest that a properly dialectical understanding of our situation requires us not to try to break out of the status quo, but instead to "tarry" with it, recognizing the negative as the very goal or solution we are looking for, and thus to reconcile ourselves to it. This is the second major element in his Hegel-interpretation and I will now turn to discuss it a bit more in detail.


The negative isn't an obstacle

A point which Žižek makes again and again throughout the book - and also in several previous books, like The Sublime Object of Ideology or Tarrying with the Negative - is that the Hegelian Aufhebung (or sublation) is not a reconciliation of opposites, a reappropriation of alienated content in a higher "synthesis", but merely the negative itself from another angle. Two favorite examples which he often uses to illustrate this operation are the Rabinovitch joke and Adorno's antagonistic definition of society (below I quote them from The Sublime Object of Ideology for convenience):

Rabinovitch [is] a Jew who wants to migrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why; Rabinovitch answers: 'There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the Communists will lose power, there will be a counter-revolution and the new power will put all the blame for the Communist crimes on us Jews – there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms...' 'But', interrupts the bureaucrat, 'this is pure nonsense, nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last forever!' 'Well', responds Rabinovitch calmly, 'that’s my second reason'. (Žižek's 1989:176)

Adorno starts from the fact that today it is not possible to formulate one appropriate definition of Society: as soon as we set to work, a number of opposing, mutually excluding determinations present themselves: on the one hand those which lay stress upon Society as an organic whole encompassing individuals; on the other those which conceive Society as a bond, a kind of contract between atomized individuals... In a first approach, this opposition presents itself as an epistemological obstace, as a hindrance preventing us from grasping Society as it is in itself - making out of Society a kind of Kantian Thing-in-itself which can be approached only through partial, distorted insights: its real nature escapes us forever. But in a dialectical approach, this contradiction which appears at first as an unresolved question is already in itself a solution: far from barring our access to the real essence of Society, the opposition between 'organicism' and 'indivicualism' is not only epistemological but is already at work in the 'Thing-in-itself'. In other words, the antagonism between Society as a corporate Whole transcending its members and Society as an external, 'mechanical' net connecting atomized individuals is the fundamental antagonism of contemporary society; it is in a way its very definition. (ibid. 177)

In both cases, the resolution leaves the negative as it is, showing that what at first presents itself as an objection or obstacle is the very solution one is looking for. Rabinovitch unexpectedly turns the official's objection into a support for his decision and Adorno uses the obstacles to a definition as the basis for the very definition itself. In the Hegelian reversal, Žižek writes, "there is no real reversal of defeat into triumph but only a purely formal shift, a change of perspective, which tries to present defeat itself as a triumph” (ibid. 2012:197). The resisting element, the obstacle, is in each case turned into "a positive condition of possibility” (ibid. 471). To add a further example used by Žižek, to Christians the distance from God can be recast as God's distance from himself, so that the distance paradoxically becomes what unites me with him. Just as in the case of the definition of society, here a dialectical reversal or reconciliation is brought about since "by way of transposing what appears as an epistemological limit into the Thing itself, Hegel shows how the problem is its own solution” (ibid. 477). This shift of perspective always comes about retrospectively. Thus: "we never directly realize a goal – we pass from striving to realize a goal to a sudden recognition that it is already achieved" (ibid. 203). Or: “This is how Hegelian reconciliation works – not as a positive gesture of resolving or overcoming the conflict, but as a retroactive insight into how there never really was a serious conflict” (ibid. 204).

This idea of the obstacle revealing itself as a condition of possibility is repeated again and again in the book, and rendered in a variety of similar-sounding formulas. With each repetition, Žižek takes the opportunity to develop a particular aspect of corollary of this interpretation of Aufhebung. One of these corollaries is that the basic number of Hegelian dialectics is not three, as usually thought, but two. Hegel’s dialectics lacks a “Third” that unites, reconciles and stabilizes the opposites (ibid. 112, 303, 473f). What is usually regarded as the "Third" is just the second moment, or the negation, from another perspective. Objectively, nothing changes. The only change that takes place is in the subject - in the form of the realization that there never really was a conflict, that the obstacle was in fact a condition of possibility, that the goal is already achieved.

This also means that the Aufhebung (or reconciliation or "negation of negation") can no longer be seen an overcoming of alienation in the sense of a reappropriation of the lost “positive” content of the original starting point or “thesis”. The negation of negation is thus not an overcoming of a splitting or externalization. It is also not an overcoming of suffering:

Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by the alienating labor of renunciation is an intermediary moment that must be patiently endured while we wait for our reward at the end of the tunnel – there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission; suffering and renunciation are their own reward... (ibid. 198)

Psychologically, the negation of the negation happens as one realizes that the enemy or obstacle one is struggling against is constitutive of one's goal, that the goal would in fact lose meaning without the obstacle - when "the struggling subject" realizes that it "needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency":

So, far from celebrating engaged struggle, Hegel’s point is rather that every embattled position, every taking of sides, has to rely on a necessary illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being). This brings us to what would have been a properly Hegelian notion of ideology: the misapprehension of the condition of possibility... as the condition of impossibility (as an obstacle which prevents your full realization) – the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. (ibid. 200)

So far so fine. But let us venture a first objection.What happens if this reading of Aufhebung is applied to the classic Marxist problem of the revolution? Doesn’t it result in an advocacy of subjection to the status quo, to the negative suffering of the present (referred to by Hegel as "the rose in the cross")? If we translate the formula to more quotidian language: wouldn’t it mean that, for instance, workers should recognize exploitation as their true "condition of possibility", that they should just learn to view capitalism "from another angle"? For Žižek, it doesn't. But the explanation for that will have to wait until the next post.


References

Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2012) Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso.