Zizek on PKs

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

As I was paging through the freshly arrived New Left Review #225 last
night, I came across this passage from Slavoj Zizek's article,
"Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism":

"To work, the ruling ideology has to incoporate a series of features in
which the exploited majority will be able to recognize its authentic
longings. In other words, each hegemonic universality has to incorporate at
least two particular contents, the authentic popular content as well as its
distortion by the relations of domination and exploitation. Of course,
fascist ideology 'manipulates' authentic popular longing for true community
and social solidarity against fierce competition and exploitation; of
course, it 'distorts' the expression of this longing in order to legitimize
the continuation of the relations of social domination and exploitation.
However, in order to be able to achieve this distortion of authentic
longing it has first to incorporate it.... Etienne Balibar was fully
justified in reversing Marx's classic formula: the ruling ideas are
precisely *not* directly the ideas of those who rule. How did Christianity
become the ruling ideology? By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and
aspiration of the oppressed - truth is on the side of the suffering and
humiliated, power corrupts, and so on - and rearticulating them in such a
way that they became compatible with the existing relations of domination.
   One is tempted to refer here to the Freudian distinction between the
latent dream-thought and the unconscious desire expressed in a dream. The
two are not the same: the unconscious desire articulates itself, inscribes
itself, through the very 'perlaboration,' translation, of the latent
dream-thought into the explicit text of the dream. In a homologous way,
there is nothing 'fascist' or ('reactionary' and so forth) in the 'latent
dream-thought' of fascist ideology (the longing for authentic community and
social solidarity); what accounts for the properly fascist chraracter of
fascist ideology is the way this 'latent dream-thought' is transformed and
elaborated by the ideological 'dream-work' into the explicit ideological
text which continues to legitimize social relations of exploitation and
domiantion. And is it not the same with today's right-wing populism? Are
liberal critics not too quick in dismissing the very values populism refers
to as inherently 'fundamentalist' or 'proto-fascist'?"

The issue also has a fine piece by Linda Weiss on that old bugaboo,
"globalization," and "the myth of the powerless state."

Doug