Sarmiento and Kusch: for the Spanish-Speakers

For those who read Spanish, about a couple of Argentinean philosophers.
 
(Un ensayo que convertí a una presentación).

Hoy quiero hablar con ustedes sobre un filósofo Argentino, llamado Rodolfo Kusch. Específicamente, voy a elaborar unas estrategias para traducir sus conceptos fundamentales al inglés.

Pero por primero,  tenemos que saber algo del contexto de la obra de Kusch. Su libro que vamos a tratar hoy se llama América Profunda – lo escribió en Argentina en 1962. Pero, para comprenderlo tenemos que volver al siglo diecinueve. El proyecto de los pensadores y los luchadores progresivos de esta época en el país fue uno de europeización y modernización. Quisieron traer el progreso y el desarrollo material de Europa oeste a Argentina, y destruir las influencias de la España “medieval” y las culturas indígenas en el pueblo. Entre estos padres fundadores de la Argentina moderna, uno de los más importantes fue Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, que escribió un libro muy muy influyente cuando estuvo exiliado en Chile. Se llamó Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie. La palabra final es en Francés, y bueno, esto revela un poco el eurocentrismo de Sarmiento. Pero la oposición binaria fundamental, que está presente por el libro entero es entre la civilización y el barbarismo.

Entonces, cuando digo estas palabras, civilización y barbarismo, ¿qué otras palabras, objetos, conceptos, vienen a las mentes de ustedes?

Bueno, para Sarmiento, la civilización fue el término privilegiado, lo bueno, y el barbarismo, lo malo. El primero se asoció con las ciudades, la educación, el trabajo duro y las cosas materiales. Y el segundo, barbarismo, con los indígenas, los gauchos, con el campo y todo eso. Quiso traer la civilización al país, y destruir todo lo bárbaro. 

Parece bastante fácil traducir estos dos términos en Facundo al inglés – como civilisation and barbarism – ambas palabras tienen una connotación muy similar a sus equivalentes españoles. Y mejor aún, Sarmiento explica lo que denotan estas palbras en los primeros capítulos de su libro. Eso es uno de los ventajas que los filósofos le dan a sus traductores – las palabras claves siempre se explican en detalle, porque en muchos casos quieren usarlos de una manera diferente de que han sido usados en el pasado.

Estos conceptos persistieron en el pensamiento de los filósofos e intelectuales de Argentina, hasta los años en que Kusch viajó al noroeste de su país para desarrollar una filosofía específicamente latinoamericana. En el primer capítulo de América Profunda, entra en un diálogo bastante antagonista  con Sarmiento, y crea sus propias categorías – el hedor y la pulcritud.

Con estos conceptos, quiso mostrar la relatividad de las categorías de Sarmiento, que no fueron absolutas, sino que existieron solamente en las mentes de los burgueses argentinos. Tenemos el hedor del “barbarismo” y la pulcritud de la civilización. Pero mejor lo explica Kusch:

“El hedor es un signo que no logramos entender, pero que expresa, de nuestra parte, un sentimiento especial, un estado emocional de aversión irremediable, que en vano tratamos de disimular. Más aún, se trata de una emoción que sentimos no sólo en el Cuzco sino frente a América, hasta el punto de que nos atrevemos a hablar de un hedor de América. Y el hedor de América es todo lo que se da más allá de nuestra populosa y cómoda ciudad natal.”

Es un poco más difícil traducir estos términos al inglés – literalmente tenemos “tidiness and stink”, que no nos traen los mismos conceptos e imágenes en la mente que “hedor y pulcritud” dentro de la lengua española. Aunque podamos dejar que Kusch nos explica cómo va a adueñarse de estos términos, sería mejor empezar con equivalentes ingleses que suenan bien para los lectores inglés hablantes, y que tienen un significado que alinea lo mejor posible con su desarrollo de estos conceptos que va a seguir.  Por eso es clave conocer muy bien la obra del filósofo particular antes de traducirlo, y también tener un conocimiento general de la filosofía. Porque en este caso, yo sugeriría tomar un término prestado de otro filósofo, o mejor, otra filósofa.

En su libro, Poderes del Horror: sobre la abyección, Julia Kristeva desarrolla la idea del “abyecto”. Dejamos que la filósofa francesa nos lo explica:

“lo que es abyecto, por el contrario, el objeto echado, está excluido radicalmente y me atrae hacia el lugar donde el significado se derrumba.”

Se refiere a las cosas que producen un sentido de repugnancia en los seres humanos – las cosas sucias, la tierra, la mierda, et cetera, et cetera. La traducción inglesa del termino es “the abject”.

La gran ventaja que nos da esta palabra es que se refiere a algo fenomenológico, o mejor, que es un término que describe un estado mental de los seres humanos – como el “hedor” de Kusch, describe una reacción a algo -  ambos términos describen una reacción de repugnancia.

Desafortunadamente, Kristeva no nos ha dado un equivalente a “pulcritud” en su ensayo. Pero está bien – Kusch trata el hedor y la pulcritud como opuestos binarios, y debemos hacer lo mismo cuando traducimos América Profunda al inglés. Entonces, solamente tenemos que encontrar algo que opone a “the abject” en inglés – yo diría “cleanliness”.

Pero hay un gran problema con esta estrategia de préstamo – si el lector no conoce la obra de esta filósofa, el traductor se arriesga alienarlo completamente. Por favor, levantan la mano los que conocieron algo de Julia Kristeva antes de esta presentación.  Ya vemos, muy pocos.

Para solucionarlo, podemos poner una nota del traductor al final de la primera página, en que mencionamos el libro de Kristeva y explicamos brevemente su término y la definición Kristevana de “the abject”. Las notas del traductor, y las notas que se refieren a otros libros, son muy comunes en la filosofía traducida del francés y alemán al inglés, y por eso no parecería muy raro al lector que sabe algo del género.

América Profunda presenta muchas dificultades para los traductores más allá del hedor y la pulcritud – quizás lo más interesante es la oposición entre “ser” y “estar” que Kusch desarrolla después de la introducción. Pero tendremos que hablar de estos otro día. Gracias.

(Anti-)humanism: the paradox of theory in Marx

A father is told by God that he must sacrifice his own son. Abraham climbs Mount Moriah with Isaac in tow, binds him, and prepares himself for the deed.
A relatively brief biblical story, yet one which inspired philosophical examination, or better, elaboration, or even abstraction (what is philosophy but an elaborate abstraction from concrete phenomena?) for many thousands of years. Even in the 1800s, one of the foremost continental philosophers explored a number of theoretical categories using this ancient tale as a starting point - Soren Kierkegaard describes the paradoxical nature of Abraham's predicament in Fear and Trembling (2006: Cambridge University Press).
He starts from the common opposition between the particular (the needs of the individual) and the universal (the needs of society), and notes that taking a "moral" path usually involves supressing the particular in favour of the universal; for instance, I sacrifice my wish to gain a new car easily through theft and thereby help to uphold the (ethical rules of the) society in which I live. But Abraham's commitment presents a fundamental challenge to this dialectical opposition - he breaches the universal moral code through his willingness to kill his own son, but does not thereby assert the particular; he is prepared to lose his own heir, he does not fulfil his individual needs/wishes.
And so we have the paradox of faith - Abraham appeals beyond the universal for ethical approval, to the absolute, to God. "That is the paradox by which he remains at the apex and which he cannot make clear to anyone else [because to make it clear to anyone else he would have to re-enter the universal (i.e. a shared system of meaning)], for the paradox is that he as the single individual places himself in an absolute relation to the absolute (ibid, p. 54)".

Marx: humanist or not? Most people, especially his followers, would answer with the former - this great philosopher, especially towards the end of his life, fought for the reclaiming of man by man, of humanity by humanity, through socialism.
Yes indeed, the evidence is in his more political works, such as The Communist Manifesto, and his practical interventions, including his involvement with the First International.
But what about on a theoretical level? After all, Marx was primarily a philosopher - so was he theoretically humanist or anti-humanist? Did he, in the words of Althusser, (Philosophy and the Spontaneous philosophy of the Scientists, 1990: Verso) adopt "a concept of man as an originating subject, one in whom originate his needs...his thoughts...and his acts and struggles (p. 239)"? Or did he radically negate this concept?
In Capital (1976: Penguin), the most detailed, practical, applied, manifestation of Marx's philosophy, there is a sort of struggle between these opposing tendencies - surely appropriate for this dialectician, who believed that antagonism was at the heart of everything. Here, he presents a "science of society", the premise of which must be a negation of the idea of "(wo)man" in favour of a series of abstract categories. Althusser (ibid) puts it better: "Marx therefore starts out from the structural cause producing the bourgeois ideology which maintains the illusion that you should start with man: Marx starts from the given economic formation...and the relations which it determines in the last instance in the superstructure. And each time he shows that these relations determine and brand men... (p. 239)".

Let's jump to Marx's chapter on The Working Day to illustrate the Frenchman's point:

"What is a working day?... We have seen that capital's reply to these questions is this: the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing its services. Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital (p. 375)."

He paints a bleak picture: "the worker is nothing other than labour-power" - that is, the human being is simply treated as an abstract category, a force which is ripe for exploitation, by capital. But is this the way it should be, according to Marx?
I give you an anecdote:

"In London three railwaymen - a guard, and engine-driver, and a signalman - are up before a coroner's jury. A tremendous railway accident has dispatched hundreds of passengers into the next world. The negligence of the railway workers is the cause of the misfortune [note the sarcasm]. They declare with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before their labour lasted only 8 hours a day. During the last five or six years, they say, it has been screwed up to 14, 18 and 20 hours, and when the pressure of holiday travellers is especially severe, when excursion trains are put on, their labour often lasts for 40 or 50 hours without a break. They are ordinary men, not Cyclops (p. 363)."

The last sentence of the passage reveals Marx's acute sympathy for the workers, for the individuals exploited by capital. This makes sense - the sympathy, the humanism, which drove him to political action could not help but seep through his theoretical writings.
But this is not one of many unsystematic "slips of the tongue", in which the stoic, scientific character of his work is revealed as a mere façade for the idealistic humanism within. He uses this particular case, and many others, as examples of the voracity of capital for labour-power, as examples of the tendency of capital towards an unlimited working day - that is, we must understand this anecdote within the context of the first passage quoted. So once Marx has established his (anti-humanist) theoretical principles, he allows himself to riff a little, to relax into sympathetic sentences about the exploitation of "ordinary men".
So then, do have an answer to our question: Marx, humanist or not?

At this point, we return to Kierkegaard  - the work of Marx confronts us with a certain paradox of theory, which cannot be subsumed under the binary opposition of humanism/anti-humanism. Marx's fundamental theoretical practice, his theory itself, negates humanism on a higher plane than simple anti-humanism - it "places [itself] in an absolute relation to the absolute".

"But if the ethical is indeed teleologically suspended in this manner, how then does the single individual in whom it is suspended exist? He exists as the particular in contrast to the universal. Does he then sin? For this is the form of sin, viewed ideally...If one denies that this form can be repeated in such a way that it is not sin, then judgment has fallen upon Abraham. How then did Abraham exist? He believed."

I hope I'm not completely dropping my materialist rigour when I employ the idea of "belief" - because it appears that Marx's theory exists in so far as it believes in the possibility of a truly humanist, post-capitalist, socialist society. This is the "absolute" which it appeals to, the absolute which allows it to avoid the sin of bourgeois humanism. It looks to a reality beyond the dehumanising reality of capitalism.

Introduction to a critique of Adorno's philosophy

The work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most important German philosophers (and cultural critics) of the 20th Century, is most obviously critiqueable from a political or practical perspective - "yes, what you're saying might be true, might be untouchable in the realm of theory, but how are we supposed to enact, to live out, your philosophy?" A precis of his thoughts on human agency: devoting ourselves to the "bad social totality" is wrong, but  so is rebelling against it to the extent that the latter action helps this totality to reproduce itself, to change but persist, while also allowing the rebels to slip back into it seamlessly at a later stage.
A good example to apply this idea to is the Occupy movement.
Where are the protesters now? Working in jobs, I assume.
What has happened to global capitalism? Nothing, it continues to function as normal.
So what do we do then Adorno?
The progression of his own life provides a number of fragments that we can rearrange into a broad thesis about the politics of this intellectual giant - or better, about his non-politics of withdrawal. Towards the end of his life Adorno was stationed in Frankfurt; it was here that during the 1968 student protests the philosopher became the subject of much ire from the young radicals. During one of his lectures on dialectical thinking, a student chalked on the blackboard: "if Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease", following which three ladies strolled up to their lecturer and threw petals on his head as they pulled up their shirts and bared their breasts.
Left weary of confrontation after a number of similar incidents, he withdrew to the small town of Zermatt, at the bottom of the Matterhorn, deep in the Swiss alps. He died some months later.
This final relocation (after so many throughout his lifetime, within and from Germany to America and back) in the face of mass insurrectionary action is somewhat telling - Adorno eschewed revolutionary measures and instead withdrew from the "bad social totality" (his term, not mine).
This is what I mean when I describe his "non-politics of withdrawal"; on a concrete-political level, a critique can be made very easily: while revolt may be a type of opposition which is inscribed in the totality, an Adornoian personal withdrawal allows the totality to function untouched, undisrupted. Insurrection may only lead to reform which allows the totality to persist (as occurred after 1968) but withdrawal negates the possibility of a true revolution, no matter how slim it might be. Also, such reform might make this totality "less bad".
However, our intervention here remains on a purely practical/political level. The mere fact that we had to extract a solid political argument from Adorno's life events (couple with his theoretical writings), the fact that this great philosopher, musician, essayist rarely wrote about what should be done in the political sphere, instead focusing on what shouldn't, shows that such an intervention will be inadequate if we wish to thoroughly critique his thought - Adorno must be attacked on his own plane, philosophy must be refuted on the level of philosophy.

Philosophy is a battlefield, the Kantian "Kampfplatz", where a war rages between materialism and idealism - we have Louis Althusser to thank for this insight (Lenin & Philosophy, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, Verso: 1990). This is because any kind of philosophy has no concrete object "it is impossible to prove the ultimate principles of materialism just as it is impossible to prove...the principles of idealism. [This is] because they cannot be the object of a knowledge, meaning by that a knowledge comparable with that of a science that does prove the properties of objects (Ibid, p. 193)."
 And because philosophy has no object, essentially nothing can happen in it - "Philosophy merely re-examines and ruminates over arguments which represent the basic conflict of these tendencies in the form of categories (p. 193)".
This argument is quite familiar to those who readily dismiss philosophy - "it's all bullshit" - but it's quite astounding that Althusser was able to think this idea within its lofty realm.
Anyways, every philosopher falls on either side of the fence: "There is no third way, no bastard position, anymore than there is in politics (p. 192/3)". This materialism/idealism opposition complements the opposition between science and ideology - in the latter, we have provable/proven hypotheses about the properties of objects conterposed with the spontaneous understandings of the world which allow people to function in their social roles and obscure the contradictions constitutive of the societies in which they live. Materialism, a concept, a position, which has been the subject of innumerable elaborations, essentially holds "that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena (from the American Dictionary of the English Language, 2000; on thefreedictionary.com). Those in the idealist camp argue the inverse, that "the real is of the nature of thought or that the object of external perception consists of ideas (Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, 2010; on thefreedictionary.com)". In this way, materialism is profoundly linked to science, while the two ide's - idealism and ideology - make a cosy couple. This thesis is fortified by the history of "dialectical materialism", better known as "Marxist philosophy". Interestingly enough, this philosophy was never fully outlined by Marx; he provided some initial sketches in a number of his early writings (e.g. The German Ideology), then wrote his groundbreaking historico-sociological work of analysis, Capital, and died. It was up to his followers; Engels, Lenin and later Althusser (among others); to elaborate the principles of this philosophy.
So why didn't the main man do it himself? His successors elaborated the principles from Capital; his philosophy was at work, in its practical state, in its three volumes, in which he founded "historical materialism" and thus (in the words of Althusser) opened up the content of history to science. There is no doubt - Capital was a scientific work, with human social formations as its object, which was written from the side of materialism. That's why it was so revolutionary; it overturned the previous idealist conceptions of society and history and revealed the idealism veiled in the work of some so-called materialists which obscured the domination inscribed in capitalism.
There you have it - science and materialism versus ideology and idealism - the former two representing "truth" and thus being a just and necessary guide for revolutionary practice, and the latter two being obfuscatory and instrumental to prolonging domination.

So at the end of this long divergence, we arrive at the beginning - which side did Adorno fight for?

My instinct is that he was an idealist wolf in a materialist sheep's costume, purely because of the political consequences of his philosophy.
As Marx said, philosophy and revolutionary practice are inseparable, they both inform each other. So if the practical advice which can be extracted from Adorno's philosophy is essentially "withdraw", "do not rebel", then it must be assumed that his philosophy is, on a deeper level, a malign and underhanded praise of the current state of the world, and hence idealist.
But again, we are dabbling too close to the political plane here - like I wrote earlier, his philosophy must be critiqued on a purely theoretical level if we are to slay the beast dead, if we are to prevent it from striking out from the ground with philosophical arguments to counter our (currently political) attacks.

I will read more and then pick up the sword - this topic needs more thought.

The ideological function of performance: Adorno and Goethe

Goethe's Faust (Penguin Classics: 2005) is a tragedy about a reticent, tortured scholar who makes a wager with the devil, Mephistopheles. Mephisto will make Dr. Faust's earthly wishes come true, and elevate him to a moment of utter glory; however, if the great doctor grasps this moment too tightly, if he bids for it to stay, he will be damned to serve the devil in hell after death - for the rest of eternity.

Adorno is clearly a fan of Goethe in general and Faust in particular - he paints an interesting picture of the play's author in Minima Moralia (Verso: 2005):

"Goethe, acutely aware of the threatening impossibility of all human relationships in emergent industrial society, tried in the Novellen of Wilhelm Meister's Years of Travel to present tact as the saving accommodation between alienated human beings...But what has happened since makes the Goethean renunciation look like fulfilment. Tact and Humanity - for him the same thing - have in the meantime gone exactly the way from which, as he believed, they were to save us."

Here, we have an interesting sort of irony - the author of a great tragedy was himself ensnared by tragic circumstances; he tried valiantly to restore humanity to industrial society but was destined to fail, fated to be crushed under the weight of the objective social reality.

More specifically, in relation to Faust, the reader can feel the resonances between this play and Adorno's philosophy - indeed, the prologue to Goethe's great work is a scene in heaven, where God and the devil are negotiating over the fate of Dr. Faust. Here, we have a sort of dialectical unity between good and evil - they may seem like two completely opposed concepts, but to Goethe they are involved in the same overall process. This concept forms the foundation for the series of dialectical reversals in relation to ethics that we find in Adorno, expressed most simply as "good is the mode of appearance of evil".

One can see a lot of Adorno in the character of Dr. Faust himself - the disillusioned scholar locked away in his room, annoyed by all other people and railing against the evils of the world.

However, we find an even more interesting Adornoian resonance right at the beginning of the play, in the prelude, where the director, the resident poet and a comic argue about the role of theatre in relation to the audience:

"Above all else have plenty happening.
They come to watch, they want to see something.
If lots is going on before their eyes
And they're astounded while they stare
Then right away first prize
And popularity are yours for sure (lines 89-94),"

Says the director.

But the poet vehemently disagrees - "you have no sense how poor such labour is (104)" - he argues that this approach of pandering to the masses causes the artist "to criminally throw away his highest right/ And natures gift, the right of his humanity (136/137)". Adorno, the insatiable critic of mass culture, would clearly agree with the poet.

The comic has a more nuanced perspective - he notes that buried in any low-brow cultural product, there will always be (to use an exhausted Zizekian expression) a kernel of truth:

"All live this life, by most unrealised,
And always interesting wherever seized.
In motley images not much that's clear,
A little light of truth (my emphasis) in plenteous error,
That way we brew the best drink of them all
That quickens everyone and edifies them as well (168-173)."

But the comic reaches the somewhat Adornoian truth of theatre and performance art in general just a few lines later:

"They admire panache, still love the world of seeming (181)."

This is the ideological function of performance: we focus on the quality, the believability, of the acting, instead of penetrating the political content of the work, instead of trying to the decipher the way in which it is constructed. By doing this, we are reinforcing the importance of the fetishised appearances of phenomena instead of attempting to demask these appearances and to understand the contradictions which underlie them. For audiences, for citizens, to "love the world of seeming" is essential to upholding the obfuscations which are necessary for the functioning of capitalism.

Agamben's language fetishism

Early in Capital (Penguin, 1990 edition), Marx describes Aristotle's valiant attempt to discover the secret of the commodity: "'there can be no exchange,' he says, 'without equality, and no equality without commensurability'. Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. 'It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable,' i.e. qualitatively equal (pg. 151)".

The common element in "such unlike things" that facilitates the process of exchange is, of course, the human labour expended in their production - Marx discovered this, why could a genius like Aristotle not?
The German philosopher is kind to the great Greek, not attributing this failing to any intellectual deficiency, but rather to "the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived" - "the secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion (pg. 151)". In so far as slavery and a rigid, hierarchical social structure were entrenched in Ancient Greek society, "the concept of human equality" had certainly not acquired widespread recognition in this setting - in truly historical materialist fashion, Marx is arguing that Aristotle was unable to think outside the limits of his historical context.

We must treat Giorgio Agamben's attempted synthesis of the differing arguments on the origins of language - internal or external? nature or culture? - with the same sympathy (in Infancy and History, 2007: Verso). Indeed, at first sight, he appears to have resolved this debate with ease:

"What marks human language is not its belonging to either the esosomatic or endosomatic sphere, but its situation, so to speak, on the cusp of the two, and its consequent articulation in both their difference and their resonance...We can likewise conceive of endosomatic and esosomatic, nature and culture, as two distinct systems which, resonating in language, produce a single new system (pg. 66)." He notes, however, that "there must be a mediating element which enables the two systems to resonate (pg. 66)" - this is Chomsky's universal generative grammar.

The idea of language transgressing the popularly conceived boundary between nature and culture, between internal and external, was definitely a new one when Agamben wrote this essay in 1978. So how is it that he can think outside the limits of popular opinion, of his historical context?
The question is a false one - in reality he does not, he cannot. Instead, he deflects the struggle between conceptions of the origin of language in nature or culture onto an opposition within the concept of language itself - the semiotic versus the semantic.

The fact that this is a symptom of his inability to surpass the situation of his enunciation is cleverly concealed - he describes the difference between the semiotic and the semantic before his apparent synthesis of the natural and cultural origins of language:

"The semiotic is nothing other than the pure pre-babble language of nature, in which man shares in order to speak, but from with the Babel of infancy perpetually withdraws him. The semantic does not exist except in its momentary emergence from the semiotic in the instance of discourse, whose elements, once uttered, fall back into pure language, which reassembles them in its mute dictionary of signs. Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature."

We have the semiotic - a concrete, silent system of signs - representing the unalterable conditions of "nature" into which we are born, and the semantic - the supple system employed in discourse - aligning with the less concrete, external (what is speech but an externalisation of language?) cultural conditions of our existence.
This is the nature of Agamben's "language fetishism" - a conceptual contortion, a symptom, produced by "the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived".

Zizek: The function of unattainable utopia

What is a utopian ideal? What do we do with it?
The logical answers appear to be: a vision for a better future that we should strive to actualise.
But what about utopias that simply cannot be brought into reality? What is their function?

In September last year, Benjamin Kunkel of the New Statesman wrote a brief review of Slavoj Zizek's (Verso, 2012) book The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. The political leaning of the article's publisher suggests that we would encounter a celebratory espousal of the brilliance of its object's author; however, the title indicated otherwise - The unbearable lightness of Slavoj Žižek’s communism. The author is basically frustrated by the fact that, despite the Slovenian's furious and brilliant critique of advanced capitalism, he proposes no concrete alternative. His visions of a communist utopia are obscure and undefined. To Kunkel's credit, he does propose a few somewhat-solid ideas for the future -

"Imagine, in any case, a society whose productive assets are, in one way or another, the property, as Marx said, of “the associated producers”. Such a society might also entail, let’s say, strict depletion quotas for both renewable and non-renewable natural resources; welfare guarantees not only for workers but for people too young, old or ill to work; and democratic bodies, from the level of the enterprise and locality up to that of the state, wherever it hadn’t withered away."

- which make his critique of Zizek's "unbearable lightness" more credible. Indeed, he is only able to criticise this philosopher's work on the basis of these solid alternatives - his thesis is founded on the assumption that some concrete proposals for a communist utopia actually exist. Without this assumption, the article in its actual form couldn't exist. Kunkel's proposals are the condition of possibility of the critique he builds.

In this way, I would argue that Kunkel and Zizek are actually very similar - my thesis here is that the latter's "unattainable utopia" is the condition of possibility of his furious criticism of advanced capitalism.

I came across this phenomena in Zizek's Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010). After some hundreds of pages of pure rage directed at reality, the author draws his attention to the possibility of a better future. In true Zizekian style, his supposedly concrete ideas of utopia come from literature - Kafka, Platonov and others - and the reader gets the impression of a vague world beyond the world, an obscure, unattainable dreamscape. For example, he introduces Kafka's short story about Josephine, a performer in a community of mice who, despite her beautiful voice and huge, captive crowd, is not a celebrity. While she is up on stage, all the worker-mice listen - when she is finished, they practically ignore her, she is accorded no special status. While this post-celebrity, egalitarian world is no doubt a beautiful idea, we are left asking: how? How would this actually work on a societal level? And how would we get there?
 

Zizek doesn't care to answer. Well, that isn't exactly true - the non-answer is on some level intentional, or at least functional. Rather, he cares not to answer. So then what is the function of this impossible utopia and the unexplained transition? The gap between the real world and Zizek's ideal one is essentially the genesis of his furious, brilliant criticism.

Indeed, every critique of concrete reality is enunciated from the position of a different, ideal world. For example, those of us who criticise US foreign policy are essentially taunting the state's leaders with the gap between the reality of this policy (brutal, violent self-interest) and its articulated ideals (freedom, peace, justice, etc). The argument is conducted from the world of the ideals - we are angry precisely because reality doesn't align with the way we believe it should be. (At this point, I should mention in passing Etienne Balibar's assertion [from Politics and the Other Scene - Verso, 2002]: the best way to reinforce a dominant ideology is to criticise the reality which it supports on the basis of its ideals - so by whingeing about the injustice of US foreign policy we are actually supporting this country's hegemony). We are effectively positioned on this ideal world, directing our anger at the real one - we must be in this position in order to criticise actual reality.

Very few of us on the left deny that Zizek makes many good points about the deficiencies of capitalism. But very few of us are impressed by the alternatives he proposes. Our frustration at the latter comes from a very linear idea - that good criticism should naturally lead to good, concrete proposals. But it doesn't actually work like that - the fact that Zizek's mind dwells in a perfect, undefined, impossible utopia means that he will be enraged by pretty much anything which falls short of this utopia in the real world - and that includes pretty much everything in existence. He converts this anger into a logical argument with lucid brilliance. This is the structural function of his stupid utopianism - if he enunciated a practical, attainable, vision for the future, he could not make the heavy critiques that he does, he would not be so enraged by capitalism (the question of which comes first - the ideal or the anger - is irrelevant for this discussion). The very impossibility of Zizek's utopia, which Kunkel criticises, is the condition of possibility of his belligerent work.

The next question is: so what?
If Zizek doesn't provide practical answers to the problems that he uncovers, the criticisms that he makes seem ultimately pointless. 

At this point, we must remember that his writings don't exist in isolation - there are other authors, other people, out there. And Zizek's pertinent criticisms of capitalism pave the way for others to propose concrete solutions - someone might read his work and say, for instance, "hey, the way that multinational corporations are implicated in the disintegration of the Congolese state is pretty messed up - we should lobby for these corporations to stop promoting the exploitation of workers by warlords". Someone will read the criticism, interpret the problem, and create a practical answer.
So we arrive at a paradoxical conclusion: Zizek's impossible utopianism is the condition of possibility of a concrete, attainable one.

Kunkel's review, in a way, is testament to this - his thesis about the Slovenian philosopher's vagueness allows him to enunciate some ideas for concrete communism.

A gap in Adorno? The kernel of truth

In his Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2005), Adorno makes a strong argument about how psychoanalysis thoroughly objectifies its patients:

 "Thanks to the diminished responsibility that lies in its severance from reflection, from rational control, speculation is itself handed over as an object to science, whose subjectivity is extinguished with it. Thought, in allowing itself to be reminded of its unconscious origins by the administrative structure of analysis, forgets to be thought. From true judgment it becomes neutral stuff. Instead of mastering itself by performing the task of conceptualisation, it entrusts itself impotently to processing by the doctor, who in any case knows everything beforehand. Thus speculation is defensively crushed, becoming itself a fact to be included in one of the departments of classification as proof that nothing changes."

 Although written just after the second world war, It's an argument that could be extended to psychological practice today.

Adorno, for instance, would most likely be classified by a psychologist as someone with anxiety, depression, anger issues perhaps - regardless of the truths of his ruthless, agitated arguments. Working through these "disorders" would involve nullifying his capacity for critical thought - it would be a process of thorough objectification - and would result in his full and willing submission to the system.

But the argument can easily be reversed. Adorno himself sets up some categories, the main ones being objectifying/non-objectifying practice. Critical thought (and implicitly, revolutionary struggle) fall into the latter, while pretty much all other manifestations of modern society are subsumed under the former. These categories also nullify the subjectivity embodied in such practices - for example, escaping reality through watching movies may be a way of removing any last thought of resisting that reality (paraphrased from Dialectic of Enlightenment), but there is still a conscious choice involved in doing this. There is still an "I" who enjoys the movie.

In fact, Adorno objectifies the entire practice of psychology by describing it as merely a reproductive instrument of the system.

More than anything else, this seems to point to the fact that any kind of broad theoretical framework (medicine, physics, chemistry, critical theory, etc...) is able to collect all phenomena in a broad sweeping gesture. It is voracious - it consumes everything. But the important point about psychoanalysis in particular, and instrumental reason is general, is that such a theoretical framework has been actualised in "bad reality", whereas critical theory has not.

It must be remembered that the world had seen the murder of six million Jews and large parts of Europe reduced to rubble only a few years previous to when Adorno put Minima Moralia to paper - this is part of the reason why he uses such strong terms as "bad reality" to describe modern life. However, before we dismiss his arguments by contextualising them ("they were just a product of the times, like grandma's racism etc..."), two things must be said:
- It's debatable whether "bad reality" has improved since then. In the last 60 years, there have been multiple genocides, horrific wars, and other inhuman atrocities perpetrated. Large-scale economic oppression continues to this day. If anything, this is proof of Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment that these phenomena are not aberrations of the project of modernity, but that they are endemic to it. That they necessarily arise from it. That "reason is its own sickness".
- To make a very Adornoesque point, if we relativise all arguments in the history if mankind on the basis of their historical context, all we are left with is a blind, objective and, most importantly, unalterable, reality.

Instead, we must locate the "kernel of truth" (as Zizek would say) in each one that helps us progress towards a better reality.

Freud's adventure-story teleology

It's a very simple formula.
The hero embarks on a journey, completing a series of challenges, surpassing a series of obstacles, on the way to his final goal.
Let's take The Lord of the Rings as an example - Frodo, our beloved Hobbit, makes the long journey from the Shire to Mordor in order to destroy the One Ring. On the way, he is attacked by undead swordsmen, the barrow wights, wolves, goblins, trolls, orcs, a giant spider, flying monsters, gollum, etc... and somehow manages to avoid getting killed. With the help of Sam, the fellowship, and countless others, he is able to accomplish his goal.
This basic structure - hero, challenges, goal - is shared by countless fables, films, novels, etc... From Homer's Odyssey to Jurassic Park.

When referring to the sexual progression of human beings from childhood to puberty to adulthood, Freud wrote:

"Each step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every joint in this complex assemblage can bring about a dissociation in the sexual drive (2006, pg. 213)."

Before that, in his "Three Essays on Sexual Theory" (in The Psychology of Love) Freud has outlined the three stages of sexual development of children: the oral, where sexual pleasure is gained through the sucking, chewing, etc; the anal, where, as an example, some children will intentionally "hold it in" in order to feel an odd combination of pain and pleasure at the eventual evacuation of their bowels; and the phallic, where their sexual energies are finally devoted to the genitals.

Adolescence, according to Freud, is a process of surpassing the Oedipus complex and directing one's attention to a goal - "the emission of sexual products (212)".

Finally, if the person's family life, experiences, etc allow them avoid developing fixations or making deviations in these intermediate stages, they will emerge as a person who is "sexually healthy". In Freud's universe, this means not neurotic, not perverted, and suitably interested in sexual intercourse with a significant other.

This is Freud's adventure-story teleology - The ultimate goal is (his conception of) sexual health, and the person must pass through a series of challenges (the three stages, puberty) in order to reach this goal.

The relationship between Freud's theory and the basic structure of adventure stories throws up some interesting questions, the main one being "which was first, the chicken or the egg?"

Either Freud had read/consumed many stories with this kind of structure, leaving a firm imprint on his mind, and then conditioning his theory...
...Or Stories with this structure are a reflection, a kind of "return of the repressed", of the basic structure of human sexual development.
I guess it depends on the extent to which one trusts Freud.

The other possibility, outside of the chicken/egg binary, is that Freud is simply using this idea of a journey towards sexual health as a kind of rhetorical advice for condensing his complex theories and explaining them to the uneducated reader. Indeed he does tend to deviate from this linear conception at times, and writes about multiple "mental currents" - an entirely different metaphor.